My Views On Gun Control: An Argument For Stronger Gun Control *And* Stronger Gun Rights

American gun violence is a big problem, but I think we should be more concerned with our obesity problem (which kills an estimated 200,000 Americans each year), or our car safety problem (cars accidents kill around 40,000 Americans each year). By comparison, guns kill around 9,000 Americans each year. So yes, the amount of gun violence and death in America is disgusting, but we have bigger fish to fry!

That being said, I do understand the need to gun control policies for an immature, selfish, and compulsively violent country like America. When the most popular movies, video games, and sports here are gratuitously violent, how can we expect anything good to come from freely available firearms?

While the ability to legally purchase/acquire, and possess firearms should be protected, for the interests of self-defense and of ensuring a free society, to treat firearm trade and possession as a "God given, inalienable right" is just plain absurd.

For Americans who care about defending themselves and preserving their civil liberties (if necessary), tight gun controls are a small price to pay for the right to gun ownership, so why not maintain strict gun controls to ensure that only those mentally competent, certifiably sane, and proficient in the handling and use of guns- can purchase and possess guns? Robust and comprehensive gun control measures are necessary to minimize gun violence and reinforce the accountability gun ownership entails.

Spirituality vs. Religion: The Difference is Bigger Than You Think

I criticize religion in general, because it is a system of servitude, either willful (conversion), through family upbringing (indoctrination), or cultural (brainwashing). Moral values and spiritual pathways/beliefs are a wonderful thing, religion is a hateful system that turns wonderful truths into terrible perversions of those truths, exploited by those in power to control the masses.

That being said, even though I might find religion to be an awful, disgusting thing, I respect the opinions of those that adhere to it, and seek to achieve an understanding with them despite any barriers of belief there might be between us.

I think it is good for one to be convicted in their spiritual beliefs/values/etc., what I am against (and thus criticize) is the forced consolidation of beliefs in the form of religion, which is at the core the statism of spirituality. Those who are supportive of libertarian values should understand my disgust of religious institutions on that basis alone.

I understand peoples' choice to consolidate their beliefs into a larger body of like-minded individuals; so long as they don't mind the dogma, doctrine, and patriarchy it comes with. But I believe that one should not have to conform to a religion to benefit from the spirituality/relationships/etc. it entails, not any more than one should have to go to college to gain the recognition of being well-educated. 

However, such an idealistic way of thinking isn't particularly practical in an institution-driven world, so I can understand why conformance to religion is natural for so many people.

Religion vs. Personal Beliefs

Religion is distinguished from personal beliefs in that:
 
a. It is dogmatic (is closed-minded)
b. It is political (exploits belief to control people)
c. It is statist (prioritizes the collective over the individual)
d. It is dualistic (believes in black/white conceptions of morality), making religion inherently intolerant.
e. It is hierarchical (views God/the church/etc. as structured in a hierarchy of power, the authority of a member of the given religion being determined by their position in the proverbial pyramid).

While the word "religion" can be applied to virtually anything, all recognized world religions contain all of the above characteristics, and IMO, all of the above characteristics are ultimately hateful in nature.

Obstacles To The Construction Of A Utopia, And Proposed Solutions: In Defense of Voluntaryism

The essential problem with the utopia is "according to whom?" While a government that provides a means and infrastructure to foster an objectively-validated improvement of the quality of life (such as the HDI, PQLI, Gini, and OECD rankings), there will never be a universally accepted understanding of "happiness", "freedom", "equality", or any of the characteristics that constitute a utopia, much less agreement on the proper implementation of such. 

While it's optimal for the government and society to be working together to improve the character and quality of life for humanity in mother-father fashion, No one should be forced into the system. Regardless of how great or "rational" a system may appear to be to its adherents, forcing the people to conform to it is nothing short of tyranny, albeit a benevolent dictatorship (to borrow the open-source term). 

For this reason, I assert that in the interests of ensuring that said values of socio-economic liberation, equality, interdependence, societal integration, and environmental stewardship do not jeopardize the individual right to free will and the unabated autonomy it compasses (so long as it does not infringe on the freedoms of others), we should permit an opting-out of the system(s) for individuals who find it counter to their interests, or better yet- a modular approach in which people are only required to conform to the aspects of the system to which they contractually agree. Now that would be a truly workable (and universally beneficial) social contract!

On The Virtues of Individuality And The Irrationality of Conformity

Considering that the diversity of values and opinions is in great measure what makes humanity the evolutionarily superior race, what is the merit of solidarity, standardization, consensus, and other forms of conformity? 

As neither communication nor collaboration requires compatibility of opinions (so long as the ends are held in common, the difference in motivations is essentially irrelevant), why do people (and more broadly, why does society) manufacture consensus, promote standardization, and all but require solidarity?

Why is conformity indoctrinated from childhood as the greater good, if it has no intrinsic function besides preserving the illusion of societal unity, and endangers the diverse plethora of individual opinions that has made humanity so innovative, creative, and richly cultured? Conformity seems to me to be backwards thinking, and reeks of an ignorance not so different than that of the dark ages.

Why Collectivism Is A Bad Thing, Even In Times Of Crisis

The vast majority of war, conflict, and killing in the world is caused by collectivism, of a religious (crusades, jihads, etc.), political (conquest, wars on terror, nationalism) ideological (revolutionary communism, ethnic cleansing, "spreading democracy"), or cultural (apartheid resistance, antisemitism, etc.) nature.

I am confident in my opinion that collectivism causes more problems and crises than it solves, and see no evidence for the claim that individuals could not congregate as effectively, if not more, effectively, than the collective.

There are of course exceptions, such as Japan, but even that only applies to natural disasters. They still have been able to do almost nothing about their four most pressing issues: their high suicide rate, their obscenely high debt-to-GDP ratio, their rapidly aging mean population, & their lazy and rebellious younger generation.

Seeing as how Japan is considered the most collectivist society in the world, it demonstrates quite effectively how ill-equipped collectivist cultures are for handing most crises.

On The Obstacles To a Voluntaryist Society

The world is going towards global government, and there are almost no countries where Voluntaryism is widespread. More than likely, we're going towards a global welfare state. Here's the essential problem: overall societies prosper more with a welfare state. People are too selfish to provide for those in need willingly, so a welfare state is necessary to promote the efficiency necessary for societal prosperity.  

The welfare state isn't a matter of right or wrong, it's a matter of efficiency. Even if the welfare state is wrong, it's the only rational choice for society. Unfortunate, this is the logical choice. Society doesn't care about equality or freedom, Society only cares about efficiency. Society doesn't care the individual, it only cares about the collective interests. the individual and the collective will always be inherently opposed

The only way to get rid of the welfare state, is to supplant society is the dominating model. That would require complete decentralization (aka self-managed anarchy)...However that kind of system requires active participation of at least a majority of the population, and currently, the majority of this generation is so irresponsible that they would prefer to have their decisions made for them by society, by culture, by government, by corporations, by advertisements on TV and the Internet

We live in a generation that is far too lazy to make any decisions for themselves, and this is why a collectivist society and government is inevitable. When people are unwilling to make decisions for themselves, a government and society to step in and control them in their own absence of willingness for self-control becomes a necessity.

Parents are currently so irresponsible they want the government to provide for their kid's education, their food, their jobs, their safety, their retirement, their insurance, their health, their lives. Everyone is depending on the government to take care of their kids for them. The government is so powerful because the majority of the people willingly gave the government that power because they are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives.