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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25802 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't.

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.

Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary."

There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.

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.

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.

There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.

To clarify, I'm defining "worse than useless" as "likely to increase your net chances of death on net." I'm aware that there are situations where brandishing a weapon would de-escalate the situation, but virtually all of those situations also apply to having a visible large weapon. Meanwhile, if you get in a stickup because the robber is under the impression that you're unarmed, trying to pull out a weapon is almost guaranteed to escalate, not de-escalate, the situation. Most probably not in your favor, given who starts with a weapon in their face

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.

just-so stories are explanations; this is a prediction based on assuming rational economic behavior. That's not a perfect assumption, but if you want to attack it, you can attack it on its merits rather than by handwaving.

Anyways, robbers can already get concealable weapons that are plenty lethal. Meanwhile, you can't exactly conceal crew-serve artillery no matter how hard you try. I think it's a very safe prediction that concealability would go down, even if weapon lethality would go up, and also that concealability is a larger factor in death rate than weapon lethality. The only exception to that is people starting a revolution or civil war, which I admit is possible, but the whole point of the second amendment is to let people fuck around and find out if they really want to. Having a world full of concealable, low-lethality weapons is just the worst of all possible worlds-- poor security, and no chance of overthrowing a corrupt government.

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