Of course I do support free speech.
However there is no such thing as unlimited free speech.
Free speech is limited by the criminal law and civil law.
And our Courts and yours are asked periodically to decide what the limits are.
And one limit is what the ordinary person would consider obscene.
For instance you are not free to express sexual obscenity on this site, but you are free to promote the private ownership of weapons designed for violence. And which are used regularly in your country to commit mass murder against your own people.
This seems to be anomalous.
We read about it in our newspapers, and see it on our television. But we have stopped mass murder here, and we wonder why you haven't done the same there.
But the answer lies in this very site - you openly promote weapons of mass murder.
No, the limits aren't typically based on obscenity. The limits aren't imposed arbitrarily; they're imposed based on whether the free speech compromises some other right to an unacceptable level.
In my country, for instance, you can't advocate the violent overthrow of the government or openly threaten the President. These are reasonable national security concerns. You can't yell "FIRE!" in a theater when there is no fire, because you are jeopardizing that theater's right to conduct business, for no good reason. You can't make unsubstantiated negative claims about someone if such claims stand to jeopardize that person's career--note that the reasoning here is not, "Slander is obscene"; it's "Slander threatens a person's right to make a living." The key here is that the statements must be threatening to the person's career--that's an overriding concern and it's unrelated to arbitrary conceptions of obscenity.
But obscenity laws, by and large, are struck down in the United States. There's a reason Antonin Scalia's "I know it when I see it" obscenity test is often cited as a joke in order to illustrate the absurdly arbitrary nature of such laws.
And guns are only weapons of mass murder in the hands of unbalanced individuals. I'm sure you've heard the following argument, but I am interested in hearing your response to it:
Premise 1) The black market is an inevitable consequence of free society. There is no way to prevent black market gun sales without vastly restricting civil rights to the point of total impracticality, a la
1984.
Premise 2) People who don't care about laws saying you can't kill people obviously don't care about laws saying that you can't own a gun.
Conclusion 1) People who are determined to commit violent crimes with guns will obtain guns illegally no matter what the law says about them.
Premise 3) Laws against guns do prevent normal, law-abiding citizens from having guns.
Premise 4) Guns can be used for a positive purpose, personal protection, by mentally stable, healthy, law-abiding citizens. They also provide a deterrent for crime because criminals can never really be sure which potential victims have guns and which ones don't.
Conclusion 2) Gun prohibition laws do more harm to normal, law-abiding citizens than to violent criminals.
I mean, I'm appalled when I hear about violent crime too, but you must understand that occasional violent crime is an inevitable consequence of free society. There will always be a small percentage of people who are mentally unstable, and removing guns doesn't stop them from taking out that mental instability in the form of violence against others. In the wrong hands, a box cutter is a weapon of mass murder. That doesn't make it reasonable to outlaw all box cutters for everyone.
We must draw the line somewhere based on
how much damage that mentally unstable person can do before being stopped. We don't allow the average citizen to own nuclear arms, because in the hands of an unstable person, they could annihilate half the world's population.
Similarly, I don't believe we should allow the average citizen to own tanks or rocket launchers or assault weapons with much greater capacity for destruction than is necessary for personal protection. But I do think that ownership of small, non-automatic, bullet-firing personal firearms is both a constitutional right and a necessity in order to allow citizens to protect themselves and their families from violent crime.
The sad fact of the matter is, within the framework of an essentially unsupervised democratic society, guns are never, ever going away, no matter how much legislation you place on them. That's life.
And furthermore, suggesting that even
images of guns are somehow obscene/should be legally prohibited is absolutely ludicrous. Regardless of your position on gun control, that's taking it way too far.
