txmatt wrote:For a bunch of pro-2A people I find it surprising how readily y'all embrace a police state when it doesn't concern your firearms.
This I pretty much agree with, but . . .
txmatt wrote:(yes, driving without insurance is a victimless crime.) This is exactly what the antigunners want to do with their burdensome legislation that does little to deter or prevent gun violence.
This I disagree with. Driving without insurance, without financial responsibility, is only victimless until the wreck, then not only are the people who are involved in that wreck victims of that crime, but all of us get to suffer some for it too, not quite the same as what anti gunners do. You are always free to drive without insurance, just don't do it on the highways that our tax dollars funded.
This is a corrolary to the often repeated anti-gun mantra "We license drivers and register cars to prevent auto crime don't we?" Actually, licensing and registration are ways to fund highways (as long as the government puts the money in the right pocket) and has little to do with crime prevention, they just sneak that one in there hoping nobody will notice. You don't need a license to own a car, nor do you need a license to drive one, as long as you don't do it on the public highways, nor do you need insurance, and that applies even on the public higways, as long as you can prove financial responsibility adequate to pay for damage that you cause. If you owned enough land, located properly, you could establish your own highway and drive wherever you wanted, on that highway, without a license or registration, or insurance.
Big companies with fleets of vehicles used to "self insure" all the time, but it might be a little tough for a middle class person to keep that money in escrow against the day when they are in that wreck and need it, not to mention the lower income people, so we have insurance and the companies providing it make a pretty penny by betting against us that we won't have a wreck.
Yes, by all means enforce the laws we have now, but going after someone without insurance "with a vengance" would be pretty much a pyrrhic effort in cases like my stepson's, he had no money, we had no responsibility for or control over him since he became an "adult" (a questionable appelation in his case, but he seemed to think he was) so all the police could do was throw him in jail for eight days, which was his second time in the clink, and like I said before, he was right back at it as soon as they let him loose. He has little money, and no sense of responsibility at all, and his sister is discovering that it's not me causing the problem, he's just as bad living with her in IL as he was here in TX.
When his car was repoed after he defaulted on the payments, which he could have afforded if he stopped blowing what little money he made, it didn't change his behavior measureably, he just borrowed his girlfriend's car, his bud' car, his bud's father's car (that one might have been borrowed without permission) and drove on the license that DPS had suspended and then revoked for non-payment of fines, just daring the cops to stop him and tow away someone else's car.
So, enforce those laws, yes, but I am all for finding some method or manner of taking idiots like my stepson off the road pretty much forever, even GPS bracelets or something.
It's a slippery slope.
