h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Isn't the internet brilliant? I was thinking this the other day as I maintained two conversations at the same time. I don't really know any other medium where you could do this as effectively. Even via text messaging you would surely loose the thread eventually, unless you're the sort of person who keeps a note of text messages conversations, in which case your text message conversations probably aren't very long, oweing to the lack of things you would have to say.
Anyway, as if that weren't enough, one of the two people in my friend in tenerife and the other is my cousin in Canada. There are no buses conneting these places to my knowledge, not even a decent high speed rail link. How they plan to co-host the olympics is beyond me. And yet here I am, talking to both places at once (we're still in the past, here) while checking journals on h2g2, flat searching, e-mailing my mother and... doing something else, probably. Checking the news, or listening to the radio. Or both. Listening to the news on the radio, maybe. I can do that. So as I was (past tense, please note) mulling over the virtues of the net, I find myself mentally making the case against, and getting momentarily stuck on a stumbling block.
The trouble is that the internet is a useful tool for disceminating things that the authorities can't control. Sometimes these are good things, sometimes they are bomb making, pornography and inaccurate wikipedia articles. The counter argument to this is that the internet is like Ricky Gervais, a communication tool with no moral compass. It doesn't say or do these things, it merely enables them to be transmitted. The trouble is that this comes alarmingly close to an argument I really hate. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. That is one of the pro gun arguments offered by America's National Rifle Assocation. I am not going to go on about them at length because I know very little about them. I don't like guns, though. I don't think people in general (and I would happily include myself in this) should be trusted with guns. They are too powerful and too easily used. But that is a seperate argument which I also gon't want to get into. Te question is, can I reasonable argue against guns while at the same time claiming that the same logic doesn't apply to the internet?
Yes.
The difference is a simple one, and it requires me to momentarily address the people I threatened with kidney damage about a week ago. These are people who tell me that I should use the good old fashioned post more often. Well, no. The post is a communication tool, It allows me to engage with other people. The problem is that it is SO SLOW. I can get post after a couple of days but I only need to hold a conversation that takes a couple of minutes, but without the necessity of hearing the person's actual voice or paying a vast fortune for it. And no, by the way, I don't just like the internet because it is faster. Things don't have to be fast. I am, happy to wait for a roast chicken, fore example, to coo properly in the over rather than use the mircrowave, because the result is prferable. Simillarly, conversations are generally more productive and enjoyable is the parties involved can respond with relative immediacy. The post would drag out back-and-forth conversations forever. Eespecially if I wanted to embed video clips and stuff. The internet, basically, can do what the post does, but it can do it faster and better. Much of what msot people send, or sent, via the post, can now be sent faster online. This is what we do- we take stuff and we make it better. Faster, stronger, cheaper, often more effectively lethal, but better. Stuff -and I speak as a history graduate here- is not better just because it is old fashioned. The post office has been replaced, like windows '97 or, arguably, windows full stop. We've moved on.
So what has this got to do with guns?
Well, in the internet is like your hand. It is a communication tool that can be used for good or bad purposes, and cutting it off is a fairly extreme measure. If I deprive you of the internet I am depriving you of all kinds of advantages of communication and that, surely, is what makes the human world tick. And if I deprive you of a gun? I am depriving you of your ability to kill and wound people. Good. I don't want you to have that ability. There is nothing else that a gun can do. The internet, like many things, can be used to do harm, but a gun has one purpose, which is to do harm.
So loose the guns. Sell them all on ebay. Buyer collects. No ammunition. The internet is great for that.