From: Bradley Felton (zim@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 10 1998 - 09:38:59 MDT
At 08:00 AM 7/10/98 -0500, Scott Badger wrote:
>Trying to solve the crime problem by arming everyone is treating the
>symptom. A more transcendent approach, it seems to me, would be to do
>everything we can to eliminate Antisocial Personality Disorders (APDs) and
>help would-be criminals to become higher level humans. Get rid of this
>single personality disorder and you will have solved a huge part of the
>problem. Yes there will still be people with impulse control disorders that
>commit violent crimes (this will also hopefully be very treatable in the
>future), but the chronic and pervasive character of the APD is the driving
>force behind a large percentage of crimes of all sorts. The Truth Machine
>was a good read but it seemed to make the same mistake of not addressing the
>underlying problem of mental disorder. Being forced to tell the truth
>doesn't make the APD go away. It's going to take biomedical advances or
>genetic screening or something else to eventually address this more
>fundmental problem. Stamping out the problem means employing what's called
>a primary (preventative) intervention rather than a tertiary one (e.g. gun
>proliferation). You can arm the citizenry if you want, but the APD will
>find a way to express itself. I want society to be polite, not because it's
>armed and scared to be anything but polite, but because it really feels like
>being polite.
I think you've got this backwards. If everyone were armed, your "APD"
types would promptly get removed from the gene pool when they went nuts,
eliminating the problem at its source.
In your Brave New World scenario, where these people are sought out and
kept sociable via happy drugs or what-have-you, they would continue to be
fruitful and multiply.
Still, as individuals, we don't have a choice between these options--we can
neither arm everyone nor initiate the Brave New World. We can only choose
whether to empower ourselves via arms, or not.
-Bradley Felton zim@pobox.com
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