@vikorr,
vikorr wrote:Your way shuts down your understanding of what the other is actually trying to say, because of your need for words to be black & white.
Not at all. I understand exactly what they are saying.
What I am shutting down are the left's malicious (I accuse the left of deliberate bad intent) attempts to use their fraudulent definitions as weapons to win arguments that they cannot win using facts and logic.
For example, if a leftist is allowed to arbitrarily characterize a weapon as an assault weapon, all leftists then consider that arbitrary label as justification for outlawing the weapon in question regardless of the weapon's actual characteristics.
It doesn't matter if it is a harmless butter knife that has been arbitrarily labeled as an assault weapon. The mere fact that that arbitrary label has been applied to butter knives is considered justification for outlawing butter knives. Once the arbitrary label has been accepted, the facts that butter knives are harmless and there is no actual justification for outlawing them are irrelevant to leftists.
The only way to derail a mindless attempt to outlaw butter knives is to point out the fact that butter knives do not meet the definition of assault weapon. If leftists are denied the ability to mislabel butter knives as assault weapons, then if they want to argue that butter knives should be outlawed they will have to come up with an actual argument why butter knives are dangerous to society.
Leftists of course cannot come up with any such argument. Their only hope of ever being able to outlaw butter knives is if they can get away with arbitrarily giving butter knives a scary name and then use that scary name as justification for outlawing them.
vikorr wrote:Fact is - 'freedom' is a concept. It is an idea. It has many facets. It has a balancing act that must be carried out (between freedom and restrictions), it requires structure (to ensure the balance between freedom & restrictions). Because of every bit of the above paragraphs & preceding posts - what it is and how it works inevitably means different things to different people. It simply cannot help but mean different things to different people.
It is a fact that for well more than a thousand years, freedom in the UK has included the right to keep and bear arms.
It is a fact that the UK brought these values to many other parts of the world including the US and Australia.
It is entirely reasonable to state that the official definition of freedom in the US, UK, and Australia includes the right to keep and bear arms.
At the very least, since you are striving to understand what people mean when they use certain words, you should understand that when
I use the term freedom, I will always count the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental and necessary pillar of that freedom.
