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I didn't spell it out, but it should be obvious. If it is appropriate to ban a class of weapons because they are the weapons with which "[m]ost crimes and accidents happen", then a successful ban on that class will result in another class becoming the weapons with which most crimes and accidents happen and are therefore OK to ban. Thus such a principle leads to banning all weapons.
The second part is not empirically true. As for the rest, no weapon that you don't have with you is much good for defense, and walking around with an AR-15 all the time is simply inconvenient. And even if you have it, presumably slung, the difficulty of bringing it to bear means a pistol-armed (yeah, you banned them, but they didn't listen) or even knife-armed attacker can far more easily get the drop on you.
If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't. Because anyone who isn't a rabid partisan understands that it makes sense to ban particularly harmful types of weapons while allowing particularly useful kinds of weapons to remain in their owner's hands. My argument isn't fundamentally about banning weapons-- it's about rethinking which harms and uses are statistically greater.
Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary." In the latter case, I want to see it. To pre-register, videos of good samaritans with guns won't convince me of anything, but some sort of statistical analysis pointing to a lower aggregate death rates for robbery + rape + murder victims would convince me. An analysis that only considers people who avoid getting murdered by having a gun wouldn't; due to the base rates of robberies + rapes vs murders, I suspect the reduced likelyhood of getting murdered in a murder would be far outweighed by an increased likelyhood to get murdered in a robbery or rape.
Yes, that's part of what would overall reduce gun crimes. Sure, some criminals would still have pistols-- but far fewer, compared to now, because so much of the demand would be absorbed by other kinds of weapons. In a country that bans guns, if you're going to buy a guy anyway, it might as well be the best fit for the job, so black market suppliers have plenty of incentive to exist and offer the right kinds of weapons. In a country that only bans small, concealable weapons, most would-be robbers still have access to larger weapons and would go for those over the hassle of finding a black market and buying a perfect pistol. That would in turn shrink the size of the black market and make pistols even harder to acquire.
They're still working on it. Maryland banned semi-automatic AR-15s, for instance, and many other states (including New Jersey of course) keep banning classes of guns.
There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.
Or, this simply isn't true; it's a gun-banner just-so story. Or, worse, they cut down the long guns so they're concealable enough, and now you've got would-be robbers with more lethal weapons.
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