Magnifisyncopathological

News8Austin: New ordinance prohibits discharge of certain guns

Firing a pellet or paintball gun within the city limits of Hutto is now illegal.

[...]

The ordinance affects anything that can shoot projectiles, including BB guns and paintball guns. It also states that a fake weapon that might be mistaken for a real gun can't be brandished.

"Paintball guns look like real guns. We have to treat them like they are real until we get there and find out otherwise," Thomas said.

Not shooting someone, not hurting another person...just shooting it in general or "brandishing" it or something that appears like it. You don't have to violate the rights of anyone to be a criminal...but that is news far older than I.

The city council passed the ordinance last month giving the police department the power to charge anyone breaking the new law.

By dictating what you can and cannot do with an object in your possession, the city council is attempted to assert control over your property. In line with nearly every law passed around the world, the state is trying to yoke you to their will.

Hutto's new Police Chief Harold Thomas says it's all about safety.

First and foremost: safety is a concept that refers to the well-being of the individual. Only individuals can be wounded, maimed, killed, and be witnesses to an event. Each individual has a different and shifting hierarchy of tolerance, fear, and experience with injury. Some people (such as a group of my friends and I in Wimberley) have little problem shooting each other with pellet guns while wearing regular clothing and a few extra pieces of protective gear. Others (such as everyone else who was with us), wanted absolutely nothing to do with the pellet gun action. The former accommodated the latter...mostly. But that metacontext is also included in the value hierarchy. If the shooters knew a friend was seriously, fiercely opposed to being shot with a pellet gun, we'd avoid it to maintain our friendships. Several friends in fact gave all pellet gun owners notice they would not tolerate getting shot.

Strangers and unsuspecting bystanders also have different values and probably share the same general human dislike of pain and potential permanent wounding. So we took some precautions before beginning our pellet gun war: we picked a spot hundreds of yards away from known homes and in an area dense with trees and brush. Given the relatively low power of our guns, we didn't expect to fire any strays that would escape our playing field and hit other people. Thankfully, that's what happened to the best of our knowledge and no one was hurt.

Suppose, however, that someone was. To a limited extent it would be possible to determine who fired the injuring pellet:

• we had a variety of pellet colors;
  
• not everyone was firing in the same direction all the time;
  
• and the maximum distance of our guns is well within our range of sight, let alone our range of hearing should someone get hit

These are all things we took into consideration as individuals, things we judged according to our reason and environment. The real cruelty imposed by coercive collectivization is the attempt to forcibly substitute someone's reason for your own, to overrule your mind.

Had a wandering child been hit in the eye in this scenario and assuming Wimberley (or whichever municipality or local government rules the area) did not have a Hutto-style prohibition on the use of pellet guns, would the shooter be any less guilty of violating the child's right against the initiation of physical harm? Of course not. That individual would be just as guilty in that case as he (we were all males in this scenario) would be if this happened in Hutto. A person's responsibility cannot be any larger or smaller than the extent of that person's own act and it is absurd to imply, think, or even hope you can increase (or decrease) someone's individual responsibility by government decree.

The shooter has the choice to shirk or accept his responsibility to admit to his act and accept the punishment/restitution his victim or the victim's parents demand. Even if you assume an overwhelming state mandate punishable by dozens of years in jail and tens of thousands of dollars in fines and the immediate fury of the parent of an possibly blinded child...that choice to be honest or to be a liar cannot be made by anyone other than the shooter.

If the shooter cannot be determined, then what? Again, the state cannot make someone responsible because it cannot create reality. Determination is a question of fact-finding and if it becomes impractical or impossible to uncover the truth, it would be unjust to declare everyone in the group responsible. The eye injury was caused by one pellet fired from one gun. While the conditions the lead to the moment of injury could not have been possible without everyone present, the pellet itself could not have impacted on the eye without that one specific person pulling the trigger.

This doesn't mean it would be right or proper to not stop and render aid to the child or to not fess up to playing with pellet guns such that one of the group had to have been the person who fired the shot. It means that unless you can prove an individual is responsible for something, you cannot use retaliatory or retributive force against him. Once you abandon this principle, anything goes.

"Before we'd get complains about paintball guns, BB guns and all we could do was try to talk them into not doing it here and try to steer them away because people were afraid they were going to get their windows broke or someone injured," Thomas said.

Assuming for a moment that the person you are talking to, Mr. Thomas, is not immediately intimidated into obeying you because he knows that police officer are authorize to hurt people at their discretion (a perfectly valid assumption, in my opinion)...

...that's what ought to be done! Unless these shooters are trespassing and therefore violating someone's rights, peaceful conversation with the purpose of changing minds is the proper way to handle this. Furthermore, it really isn't anyone's job but that of the person who is complaining to get out there and explain his or her problem with pellet gun fire nearby. Should the ire of Old Man Willers get raised, it's that guy (or the person he's chosen to act in his name*) who should tell those damn brats that if they keep shooting each other in their backyard, one of their pellets could easily cross into his yard and hit his chained pit bull or his kitchen windows.

*No, I don't consider agents of the state as properly designated representatives. That's a post for another day.

The rule also gives police the right to charge a parent with a misdemeanor and a $500 fine if their child shoots a weapon illegally.

Copyright ©2006TWEAN News Channel of Austin, L.P. d.b.a. News 8 Austin

Adding further absurdity is this; while I'm willing to accept that there is a limit to the liability of a human based on his or her understanding of their actions (translation: some people are too young to be fully responsible for what they do), a blanket penalty for this imposed on all parents of children younger than an arbitrarily-picked age is not just. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say most children who are capable of voluntarily picking up a pellet gun in order to play shoot'em-up with other children who've voluntarily picked up pellet guns are cognizant of their actions enough to merit more than half of the responsibility if they hurt someone.

How to justly restore the victim of a child's action? There is a spectrum of ways agreeable to a variety of individual victims. Some people might just wince with the pain and bear it out, leaving the situation as a pure conceptual learning experience for the child. Some might want to slap the kid immediately afterwards as a delivery of direct responsibility. Some might want to sue to recover medical fees. All of this exposes the essential fallacy of the government's one-size-fits-all approach.

If this kind of local ordinance does anything other than demonstrate that collectivist compulsion is alive and thriving in central Texas, it demonstrates the essential laziness of the people who demanded it be enacted. "It ain't my problem any longer, it's the City's. Slap'em with fines and send in the sheriff!" Talk about shirking responsibility...

The ruling class of Hutto have declared that the people who live there and those who visit or pass through are fundamentally incapable of judging and acting in their best interests. They have asserted their ownership of not only a relatively-speaking trivial set of objects, but the bodies and minds of those who possess them.

Repeated throughout the world on an increasingly regular and common basis, this is taken for granted so deeply that News8Austin didn't even bother asking for a dissenting opinion, a voice of opposition, or even someone who was marginally, minimally concerned about the abolishment of yet another slice of human freedom. Nothing to see here; the new Police Chief Harold Thomas has said his bit and that's all there is to it. You aren't against community safety are you!?

No, you asses, I'm for individual liberty, an institution you've tossed aside in favor of a false and harmful security.

My friends and acquaintances probably wonder sometimes why I can occasionally come off as glum or dejected. This above is a huge reason. It is compounded by the fact that should this regulation be challenged in court, it will almost certainly be challenged upon the very same philosophical grounds it was championed: pragmatism and utilitarianism. The cycle will simply continue.