Thursday, August 20, 2009

Love Your Guns? Support Legalized Marijuana

It occurred to me that those of you who so fear the government coming to take your guns really should get behind the legal marijuana issue. Why? It's a chain reaction from marijuana user imprisonment to a greater call for a gun ban. It' no secret our prisons are overcrowded and huge, constituting over 1% of our population, and 25% of the world's prison population. It's also no secret that every large scale shooting is going to be used to argue that handguns should be banned, where otherwise intelligent people will say idiotic things like this:

Handguns have no uses other than to a) kill and b) be the object of hobbyists collecting fetish. We can ban the handguns without any ill effects and only good effects.

Please, don't tell me their logic is flawed. Of course it is. But it is also politically effective, since many people share the same irrational fear of guns that treats gun deaths as worse than deaths from swimming pools or mop buckets, and makes people blind to the obvious refutations of such erroneous thinking. So the
fewer gun deaths for them to get excited about, the better. Yet every time we lock up a nonviolent offender, and a huge proportion of those are for marijuana possession, the more likely a violent offender (think Willie Horton) will be released, only to commit a crime again, and again the cry to ban guns will be raised. This is a time of limited resources, so picking our battles is key. Keep the violent people in prison, keep your guns, and let the marijuana users go.

I'll not mince words. Those who rabidly defend their 2nd amendment rights while defending the war on drugs are hypocrites at best, and ignoramuses at worst. There is no right to regulate drugs in the constitution. On what philosophy does one defend the one and not the other? We have a right to put bullets into other people's bodies, but not certain substances into our own? Drugs cause criminal behavior you say? You hypocrite! That's the same argument used by those who wish to take away your guns, and its just as baseless.

When you've got 1% of your population in prison, something is amiss. When we spend valuable political time arguing over a tool used to murder 0.004% of our population, or 1 person in 25,000, something again is amiss. Solve both problems. Legalize marijuana.

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