Both Cars & Guns Give Liberty:

Which of these listed factors have most helped INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM? ...  antibiotics, automation, broadcast radio, Christianity, colonization, emancipation, factory farming, free education, the Guillotine, gun-powder, journalism, monarchy, nuclear energy, personal mobility, photovoltaics, polymer-technology, representative democracy, slavery, television, trade unionism, transistors ..

My pick - from what I've experienced would be ..

#1/- Cars as personal transport allowed ordinary people the mobility to choose where to work and where to live. (including bicycles, buses, motorbikes etc.) Without the means to travel workers are almost as tied as slaves.

#2/- Gunpowder led to personal 'Equalizer' weapons. An armed "weakling" can free herself from a stronger oppressor just like the peasant archers ended the dominance of armored knights.

#3/- Free Education opens the minds and talents of students irrespective of inherited wealth.

- I do know that cars have now become the 'fall guy' .. as polluting health hazards in big cities - but that surely is more a feature of overcrowded grid-locked roads caused by governments failure to address overpopulation & public transport.

I also understand that cars (like guns) are also used in many criminal adventures like bank robbery and bombings .. but that is not the fault of the tool ..

The misuse of any technology by murderous individuals or groups makes THE PERPETRATORS guilty of crime - not the tools.

This applies to those responsible for the One Million Deaths every year in warfare since the end of WWII - not to the science of the explosive weapons.

There seems to be a trend currently to use simplistic finger pointing & blaming rather than considering a reasoned but complex truth. - This is yet another symptom of corrupt lazy dishonest professionals not doing the jobs that they are payed for .. they take the money and shrug off the responsibility of actually resolving issues.

A real classic example of this is when media & politicians blame amok killings on the availability of civilian guns - rather than on the deliberate under funding of healthcare, education and law enforcement, by corruptly distributing wealth and tax relief upwards.

Marty K.
I just read an article about blaming inanimate objects (guns) for the actions of criminal attackers - which is a common emotional anti-gun argument. However as I read further into this story it too began to 'smell' like an emotional, biased rant. - The first two quotes the writer listed to support his case were inaccurate and the third was wrongly attributed to George Orwell. - I stopped reading right then - disappointed that this writer devalued a strong case with woolly thinking.

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M.K.