The difference between individual rights and collective responsibility may be illustrated with this example: imagine a group of half-dozen people which includes you. Every person in that group has a basic table utensils, a spoon, a knife and a fork. Everyone except you, unprovoked, tries to stab another person with the fork. Collective responsibility principle would require everyone to be relieved of the utensils. Individual rights approach would punish those who tried to stab others without cause, but would leave you personally unmolested because you’ve done nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter who does what wrong, the punishment should not extend to the innocent.
The collective responsibility side would claim that taking of your property isn’t a punishment but “prevention”. Individual rights perspective disagrees, taking of property is an offense in itself.
What makes this argument even more interesting is that in the case of weapons, the first taking of property also leaves the victim open to all future takings of other property, liberty and life. That raises the stakes sky-high.
A person robbed of property might want to replace it. So such takings not only require banning of trade in a progressively wider list of close substitutes, but also the suppression of knowledge of manufacturing. Since modern weapons may be manufactured with the 1890s technology base, they require a rollback of the society at large that far…or a very pervasive and intrusive police state keeping all modern and primitive production under constant surveillance, along with motivating informants. Something half-way between the current China and current North Korea…is that the model on which we’d want to base the new “safe” America?
