[Vision2020] How Many More . . .

[Gary Crabtree]

Hey it's you and hanson that are suggesting that the compilation of lists would be a swell idea, not I. I assure you I am quite relaxed.

Since you bring up "administrative burden," what kind of burden is it likely to be to locate, record, and keep track of the approximately 270 million privately held firearms currently circulating in the United States, many of which are going to be held by otherwise law abiding private citizens who are likely to be more than a little underwhelmed with your firearms and the IRS scheme?

The next question of course would be should this highly dubious exercise in overreach be achieved, what next? How will it prevent the tragedies we have recently witnessed? As far as the media has been able to ascertain the firearms used were purchased legally, at least from the sellers perspective. (Lying on the 4473 form regarding ones mental health is quite beyond their control) What good would it do for an IRS agent to have been aware of the transaction? Do you believe that a well timed audit would have saved the day?

Your plan would create a great deal more bureaucracy, waste significant amounts of taxpayer dollars, turn many law abiding gun owners into criminals at the stroke of a pen and do next to nothing to solve the perceived problem.

Liberal do something (especially something ineffective) disease run amok.

g


From: Kenneth Marcy 
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 12:09 PM
To: Moscow Vision2020 
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] How Many More . . .


On 8/18/2012 9:31 AM, Gary Crabtree wrote:

  Since you are absolutely convinced that detailed lists are totally benign, let's make available a roster of everyone who has ever sought or been given treatment for any and every mental health condition? After all, it's all for the greater good and what could possibly go wrong? Why track a tool when you can track the potential user?

  Heck this detailed list idea is so good why not expand it to organizations, books, movies, and music. Absolutely anything that might even hint at inspiring violence. I'm sure that a community conscious individual such as your self couldn't possibly object to a little bit of scrutiny in exchange for a small measure of potential safety, right?

Computer science types are watchful that they don't trap themselves into attempting to compute something that would take very long periods of time (longer than a human lifetime, for example) to compute. Sometimes a different algorithm can render a problem more computationally tractable, and sometimes not.

Analogously, making the lists you are suggesting here would be an administrative burden not unlike attempting to calculate every facet of everything. Practically, i.e., within reasonable time frames, not to mention with any sort of logical clarity, it just can not be accomplished.

Let's take, for example, your phrase "absolutely anything that might even hint at inspiring violence." OK, let's consider just a triple of tomes: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur'an, and those who read and adhere to one or more of them in some fashion. The administrative result is a list of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, three groups of people about whom it is true to suggest that some among them have been inspired to violence by what they read in one or more of those volumes.

What are we to do with such a list of people? Declare them all mentally ill, and then refer them for psychiatric treatment? Oh, by the way, how is society's supply of secular humanist psychiatrists and religious cult deprogrammers? Oops. Analogous to the electronically ancient computer with one processor operating at a slow clock speed, the process for accomplishing all that work would take an unacceptably long time, and since we know that in advance of starting such a process, we won't start the process.

These practical considerations, plus the rights of people to pursue the happiness of their own brands of insanity in the privacy of their own homes, or places of worship, such as movie houses screening Disney flicks, opera houses presenting Wagnerian almost anything, or book clubs discussing romance novels with pink covers and numbers on their spines, means that it is highly unlikely that anytime soon anyone is going to attempt to pry a Bible from anyone else's cold dead fingers. So, relax.


Ken



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