Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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1) Sandwiches are one of the most expensive foods possible.
2) What oatmeal & sandwiches cost is time. A single parent, working full-time or more, may not have those fifteen minutes every day. Not without driving herself to exhaustion, and I don't mean "missing a few minutes' sleep;" I mean "drove the car into a tree because she's been living on 5 hours sleep/night for six months."
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But she often has sufficient time (and energy) to get pregnant again & again.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by HarryT
A quote from the article I linked to in post #94 would seem to suggest that the answer is "yes":
Quote:
Reducing access to firearms in Switzerland would lead to fewer suicides, said Barbara Weil, from the Initiative for the Prevention of Suicide in Switzerland.
"We can prove that in other countries which have tightened their laws concerning the availability of guns, it also changed suicide rates considerably, such as in Canada, Australia and Britain," said Weil.
In Australia, the number of households with guns was halved from 20 to ten per cent during the 1980s and the percentage rate of gun suicides fell from 30 to 19 per cent.
Opponents say people wanting to kill themselves simply turn to other methods, but this is not true, said Irminger.
He pointed to Austria where the introduction of restrictive firearms legislation significantly decreased the rate and percentage of firearm suicides without leading to an increase in other suicide methods.
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Perhaps it might be because shooting yourself is a pretty irrevocable act, whereas if you take a drug overdose, you generally have time to change your mind - and many people do. |
Just to keep you honest, Harry, note that your quote references only "gun suicides" or "firearm suicides" not suicides in general. Of course reducing the number of guns will decrease the "gun suicides" and "gun crimes". However that does not address suicides, murders, crimes overall.
And finally, my opinion on what our "rights" are (notwithstanding an authority's opinions or what has been bandied about concerning rights, or even what our US constitution says about rights.
There is a difference between privileges and rights. We have social privileges and social responsibilities. We have physical rights and physical consequences. E.g. if we refuse to eat, we have the right to starve. If we jump off a cliff, we have the right to fall. If we stick our head under water and try to breath, we have the right to drown. Education, health care, etc. are privileges for which someone pays.
What I gather from DG's and Ricky's posts ( and fully agree with) is that the "someone" who pays should be the same someone who benefits. I.e. in the US (at least in our past) the individual is the primary one responsible. Yes this assumes a functional adult and those functional adults also end up paying for the someones who are children, very elderly (at least some of them), the very sick, etc. What we in the US don't want to do is to assume responsibility for other fully functional adults. They must (in our society) be responsible for themselves.
We expect a
baby to gain sustenance from a mother's teat. We do not expect an individual to continue
sucking at the Government teat for their entire life. They must be responsible for themselves.
Someone mentioned the
survival of the fitest. This is often stated as the "law of the jungle". It seems to me that the "law of (socialist) civilization" is the
survival of the fitless.
Again, just one man's opinion. And before you ask, when I can no longer take care of myself, I prefer to die and make room for the children of all those
breeders, since my children will be vanishingly small in number.