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Originally Posted by Frownland
We're all capable of felonies.
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Yep, that's true, and yet we don't all commit one.
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Restricting the rights of felons assigns them to a lifelong second class citizenry, and recidivism is a symptom of our flawed prison system used to blame felons for being "unfixable". The biggest criticism I see against it is part of a larger discussion about how valuable gun rights are.
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The bold is surely over-stating the "deprivation" of the restrictions I've mentioned: the gun thing, pedofiles kept away from kids, etc.
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Originally Posted by jwb
So fundamentally you don't believe in the possibility of rehabilitation.
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I didn't say that at all. I believe in the possibility of rehabilitation, all I'm suggesting is that balancing out the overall safety of society, against the loss of gun rights for felons, I think it's worth doing. With many safety measures imposed by society, some freedoms are lost and innocent people are inconvenienced. In principal I subscribe to the notion that someone who has paid his debt to society is an innocent person; all that happens is that he carries around one extra inconvenience. Just like me he can't drink and drive or ride a motorbike without a helmet, it's just that when I go into the gun shop, he has to wait in the car.
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in the case of pedophiles and schools etc there's an obvious added risk involved - to a certain extent they are dealing with psychological issues and it's best to avoid triggering a relapse into bad behavior, the same way alcoholics avoid bars.
Felons with legal guns don't pose an obvious enough risk to strip them of a basic right guaranteed in the bill of rights.
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Was the Bill of Rights carved in stone and handed down by God? If the times, the technology and the society of the US have changed in the last 200 years, perhaps a footnote could be added to the Bill of Rights too.
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Originally Posted by OccultHawk
I think if you had experience with released felons in the United States, like working side by side with people on work release programs, or dealing with them as parents of the children you were teaching you really wouldn’t feel like a past conviction is true indicator of future behavior or maybe not even past behavior compared to the general public. The American penal system is wildly unfair and criminalizes both pigmentation and poverty. Leaving them in a permanent disenfranchised second class status is usually what causes people to lash out. I would support intentionally arming them over denying them the right to self defense. Hell, we need people who are willing to put a gun to the head of this capitalist power structure.
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I didn't say that a past conviction is a true indicator of future behaviour. I respect your experience as you know, and am sure you're right about many or most ex-felons keeping out of trouble.
My bold bit: maybe it's a cultural thing, but again I feel that the loss of gun ownership rights is being overstated, in this case especially with the word "disenfranchised" which is normally used in connection with voting rights. Do you really become a second-class citizen in the US if you lose your gun rights?!
Nice touch with the Woody Guthrie quote, OH! Perhaps you guessed correctly that I would be reluctant to contradict him. Absolutely agree with his first verse about white-collar crime, but sadly this couplet isn't entirely true:
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
(* hastily checks the internet for cases of mafia protection-racketeers and drug cartels closing businesses, etc.*)