Stances & Statements
FREEDOM / RIGHTS - Part 2
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Police
Having law and order is essential to societal stability. Having educated and trained police officers is crucial for maintaining order and a high respect for law and those that enforce it. Unfortunately, in the United States currently there is not a federal standard in training police. In many cases officers have little to no understanding of mental illness and human psychology. Some have compared their training to that of preparing soldiers for war. Because of this simplified mindset in training, there have been countless consequences on all sides.
Guns & Gun Control
The USF encourages the responsible use of firearms. It’s evident that some people clearly should not have weapons such as people who are mentally ill, small children, and those who have a history of violence. The commonsense solution would be to have laws that help to prevent guns from getting into the hands of those people. It’s understandable that some people are concerned that the government might overstep its authority into dangerous grounds, but until the government starts taking guns away from everyone, that is merely a paranoid thought, but a legitimate concern still given our history of corrupt governments. It is possible that if the European Jewish people were heavily armed as they are today in Israel, the Holocaust may not have happened. This is not to say that WW2 would not have occurred, but certainly events would have been significantly different.
Another aspect of gun control is regulating and or banning weapons deemed too powerful to possess by a civilian. On one end of the argument, a person might want weapons powerful enough to defend against a powerful enemy. An example might be a Ukrainian citizen needing a weapon that could destroy a Russian tank. However, on the other side of the argument, people are concerned that people who are unwell, can kill many more innocent people with such weapons, as we keep witnessing on a regular basis in the news. The fact is our technology is only getting more and more advanced. There will be a day, when we have weapons that resemble what we see in video games like Halo, where a person could have a gun that incinerates a person instantly, which one might view as too much power in the hands of anyone.
We need to have common-sense gun laws that prevent dangerous practices like the current legally selling of “ghost guns” in many U.S. states. A ghost gun is a kit to build a gun that has no serial number or other markings on it, with no license required. This absurd unregulated situation is putting weapons into the hands of the wrong people.
The USF supports both conceal carry and common-sense open carry but discourages open carry in situations that would be alarming to the surrounding community of people.
Death Penalty
Capital punishment is one of these areas of debate upon which we don’t have an official stance. It is hard to forgive someone who has done something horrible to someone you love; that is understandable. We think this is a personal decision people should make if they feel so compelled to be directly involved. We do think that there is a benefit to learning more about the criminal mind of someone, as opposed to executing them early on. There is a significant benefit with an inmate having life in prison and being studied that entire time to better understand how and why they did what they did to help learn in order to prevent and or minimize similar crimes happening in the future. One argument for a humane death penalty is the logic that we spend a significant amount of money on the housing, feeding, and medical expenses of the prisoner, and the opportunity cost is we could be spending that money to benefit people who are not criminals, people who are struggling, as we have many who have food insecurity as well as numerous other challenges. One could argue that the death penalty might help to prevent a certain level of criminal activity, the fear of such a penalty being on the minds of offenders. Further research into this will provide helpful insight into whether capital punishment should be embraced.
Activism
Activism is inherent in Utopian culture, as that is maybe the most effective way to make improvements in government. We support peaceful protests, and citizens’ involvement in government, as that is the best way to have a healthy democracy.