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A simple argument against gun control.
For context here, they are playing chess.
I find this reasoning really interesting, because Mr.Terrific points out how selective much of the things that are being banned for killing people actually is.
Here are some other weapons that are banned or restricted in certain states in the US, and some countries:
Switchblades, butterfly knives are banned in places like the UK, and in some states like Minnesota & Massachusetts.
Brass Knuckles are banned in about 20 states, also in the UK and Canada.
The real issue I have with these bans and restrictions on guns, and even brass knuckles or knives, is that, the outrage seems to be selective. You can probably find pocket knives that'll do the job stabbing someone to death fairly easily, you could do it with a hunting knife or a kitchen knife. You could beat someone to death with a baseball bat, (or hell, you could make brass knuckles out of some nuts from Home Depot). And as stated, some of these kill far more people than other things, that are actually meant to harm, per the fbi, a kitchen knife has likely killed more people than brass knuckles have (for this, we'll say brass knuckles would probably fall into the "blunt objects" category). And as stated by Terrific, smoking kills far more than guns.
Perhaps the argument here is just to say: Look, bro, hunting knives - tobacco - cars, etc, aren't meant to kill people, so we aren't as interested in targeting them, but thats not personally how I judge (or others) would judge these situations. If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade. I'm not looking to judge them off the murder weapon in a trial. The dead person before me is what actually matters. Why should we care about the means of death? Its the ends that we are passing judgment for.
I think the whole argument around what should and should not be banned is often overcomplicated. At it's root its about simple tradeoffs: Could you ban kitchen knives? Sure, but the costs would be immense since people actually need kitchen knives (or some other equally dangerous tool) to do productive work. Could you ban tobacco? Sure, Australia is doing it. However many people see that as overreaching since smoking in private only affects one's own health. So many countries ban smoking in public places but allow it in private. Hunting rifles are fairly analogous to kitchen knives, except not everyone needs one since not everyone hunts. But why shouldn't you ban weapons that are easily concealable, much more destructive or have some other bad property that doesn't increase their productive use?
From where I am standing (in Europe) there are two arguments for gun rights in the US. 1. You can't take away all the weapons regardless. A gun ban would just lead to all the most law-abiding people giving up their guns while every single criminal can easily have access. 2. Guns intended to kill people are used as a substitute for inadequate policing, for example in cases of long response times in rural areas. Both arguments make sense to me but neither makes me enthusiastic about living in a country with relaxed gun laws.
Many of these weapons can also be used for self defense. My ex girlfriend has a revolver at home that she actually had to use once to protect herself from sexual assault. I think if one lives in a dangerous area or is particularly vulnerable having a concealed weapon is beneficial.
Absolutely, that makes perfect sense from an individual perspective. From a top-down perspective I would say that "dangerous areas" are a symptom of inadequate policing and/or other societal problems that should be solved. Also would a less concealable weapon be less useful for self defense?
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It's kind of funny that superman's position basically can be used to justify the evil government plots of the Xman series.
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Given how reducto-ed this argument is, here I present the opposite direction reducto:
(That whole exchange replicated here):
I agree. That's why every American should be issued a Minuteman III ICBM at birth. With it's reduced capacity magazine of a single 300ish kiloton warhead; it is a reasonable deterrent against someone wandering over your property line or getting too angry on the road.
Do you not like the idea of every US citizen being able to instantly vaporize 1 square kilometer anywhere on earth? They already have access to knives and heavy rocks and such, why should we care about the means of Death? Its the ends that we are passing judgment for, in this case the ends being every small town in america instantly being vitrified the first time some chud gets fighty in the parking lot of the shitiest of it's three bars.
The argument from general effect just doesn't work for arms control, because it comes packaged with the response "So you think I should be able to buy a Mk19 40mm grenade launcher with the 48 grenade belt and mount it on top of my corolla? No? So much for freedom!"
If the argument is "X amount of rando civilians getting ventilated is the cost of freedom, counting or not counting gang violence?", that is a respectable axiomatic stance that I might hold, given how I got that thang not on me but safely stored unloaded in a floor mount safe with a box of desiccant packets I've collected from various food bags over the years.
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The original was better.
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If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...
In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.
Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.
Anything can be used as a weapon, I agree. But giving civilians the ability to shoot a hundred rounds in a minute simply gives the psycho or terrorist a force multiplier that allows him to kill hundreds before anyone can stop him. I don’t see knives or handguns as a problem in the same way because you cannot kill as many people as fast as you can with a machine gun.
I mean, if you take a look at the evidence, far more people die of handguns than the big bad rifles you see used in those shootings. Even if someone could mow down 100's of people hypothetically, thats not really something that happens statistically. 5 guys killing 2 or 3 with a revolver every now and again happens way more often than one dude mowing down 25 people and you'd be saving far more if you just banned hand guns.
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I generally don't like this argument.
If the 'plan' is to engineer society to carefully balance individual freedoms alongside a high enough bar of entry so that stupid psychos can't do maximal damage when the screws fall out then lets make that the plan and operationalize that. Rather than alluding to that being the plan but not dealing with the nitty gritty of it.
So far the gun toting looneys of the US have managed a sub par result compared to Islamists driving trucks of peace in the EU. The only one that even compares is the Las Vegas shooter, and that shooting is to this day an anomaly. A much easier solution before you ban trucks or high capacity magazine rifles would be to stop importing foreigners from populations that hate you.
But there's our problem. Some people really like importing foreigners. So they're not willing to give that up. Just like some people are not willing to give up their rifles. So when push comes to shove, those who allude to the 'plan' are generally not planning on sacrificing the liberties they hold dear themselves. People can generally smell that, so the 'plan' never goes anywhere.
I'm sure one can easily draw up a politically balanced 'plan' that makes everyone unhappy. I'm less certain for one that anyone actually likes.
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Speaking very generally, as the rate of fire of a firearm increases you quickly hit diminishing returns and then get into negative gains.
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Issue with this type of argument is that it's rare to find people who are actually consistent. The US right now is bombing and killing accused drug traffickers by referring to them as terrorists. For what? For providing a substance that irresponsible people willingly choose to inject into themselves.
Guns at least have the excuse that the user can be killing others. Drug users are only killing themselves! Basically every single drug death are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but at least it was their fault unlike a murder. There's not many cases of someone being held down and injected with drugs against their will, that's not a thing that happens. Although if we wanted to go with that, the Sacklers could be hanged! Now that's the same thing with gun deaths, a pretty substantial portion of them are suicides too but again at least one could pretend that it's only about the murder tool aspect of them.
And what about lesser harms? Why should we not start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. Why should we not be executing the corn and sugar farmers for mass crippling >100million Americans and damaging their health? In total cumulative damage, one could probably argue the sugar farmers and fast food and grocery stores have done more than the entire drug trafficking market just because of the overwhelming amount of people who are overweight now.
Tabacco in raw numbers kills more than 6.5x more Americans a year than fentanyl!
And at least some of those are from second hand smoke so even tobacco has a stronger argument for "it kills other people" then the drugs these traffickers we're calling terrorists often provide. Why not drone strike the tobacco companies and ban cigarettes then?
Marijuana of course is one of the best examples of this, being arguably safer than federally allowed products like tobacco and alcohol. I ain't ever hear of someone dying of marijuana poisoning like what can happen with an alcoholic!
The logic behind calling them terrorists is that the profits generated from selling those drugs (allegedly) go to funding terrorism. Seems like regulated legalization would be more effective at solving that problem but the point is that it doesn't have to do with the voluntary harm to the users.
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I'm not sure we should use the current US government's legal arguments as an example of conventional beliefs! Are European governments calling drug dealers terrorists in order to justify lethal, war-like force?
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Selling drugs and having people use them voluntarily is a classic case of someone doing something that creates bad incentives, and libertarians being unwilling to do anything about it because people respond to the incentives voluntarily. I find this to be a serious flaw with libertarianism.
A government with the power to perfectly engineer incentives and internalize externalities according to your values necessarily has the power to engineer them according to your enemy's.
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You can believe we should ban drugs, doesn't change that people are inconsistent here. The same exact statement can be made here but even worse with plenty of other stuff we have legally.
If we're cool with something that helps kill others way easier and putting it on the sole responsibility of the user, why not the thing that only kills themselves?
Because compared to guns, a huge proportion of drug uses are bad cases. If the proportion of people who abused drugs were the same as the proportion who abuse guns, there would essentially be no drug problem.
Also, guns are in the Constitution and drugs aren't. If you want to ban guns, get the Constitution amended first.
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The thing is they're willing to do things about it, like expel or shun druggies to leave them to rot off on account of their own bad choices, or sell them drugs laced with poison and plainly advertised as such.
But people call this cruel and illegal despite being voluntary solutions to align incentives. Pointing to a deeper disagreement.
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One thing I’d point out is that marijuana can severely exacerbate latent schizophrenia and causes psychotic breaks in a small but relevant portion of the population. Several noteworthy recent murders in the UK have been the result of marijuana-induced schizophrenia.
In general drugs do impose severe externalities on others.
Even if it's directly causing the schizophrenia and not some kind of selection effect, is it still enough to be anywhere near equal the amount of harm that tobacco or alcohol causes?
I'm not sure how marijuana is supposed to be less harmful than alcohol? It's not like driving stoned is safer than driving drunk, and marijuana is also very bad for the teen brain.
There are people who believe this. I've heard it argued in person. And I've smelled weed smoke wafting out of open moving car windows.
I’ve also seen people pouring out their big gulp and replacing it with beer at 1 in the afternoon. Plenty of people still drive drunk.
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I'd be astonished if it weren't.
All depends on the dose and your tolerance. i got high precisely once in my life and refuse to touch the stuff based on that experience. It would never occur to me to drive in the state I was in.
Alcohol, on the other hand, as long as you didn't drink too much, seems relatively safe. I think there was even a Mythbuster's episode when they were comparing it to driving while sleep deprived, and the latter can easily be more dangerous.
Yes, of course. And it's not apples to apples in terms of 'level' of inebriation; they're different beasts.
But having experience with both, the trouble with alcohol is that it makes it difficult to judge how impaired you really are. Whereas with thc, you're highly-aware of your state and if anything much more likely to drive much slower than usual if not pull over for a while.
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This is because of our MADD DUI thresholds. Get someone to 0.08 and maybe they're a little less alert and a little less cautious, but not really out of the range of sober drivers. Most fatal alcohol-involved collisions are at twice that, though.
The caricature of stoned drivers is they wait for the stop sign to turn green. Based on the drivers I've seen in cars stinking of weed (that I could smell from my own car), they drive very erratically but not fast. I wouldn't be surprised if their most common accident was just driving off the road with no or minor injuries, but I'm not aware of any studies.
In my experience, stoned drivers exercise what seems like a superabundance of caution because they feel like everything around them is happening too fast and they can't quite keep up. So they go very slowly; sit at stop signs a very long time to make sure no one is about to come. Check every direction five times, etc.
While it's not ideal, it occurs to me as closer to 'silly' than 'reckless'. Should be avoided either way ofc. But someone on weed, unlike someone on alcohol, doesn't wake up the next day to find dents they don't remember or a mailbox in their grille.
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This is the key point. If both sides are arguing from principle and you can expect logical consistency from both, then Mr. Terrific's argument makes perfect sense; at a certain point you have to decide where the line is drawn. Superman wants to draw that line. Mr. Terrific does not agree, but he won't help him draw that line.
Except consistency and principles are not worth jack in the real world; they are specific weaknesses to be attacked and exploited. Pro-gun people want guns because they don't trust anti-gun people, or people in general, and they want the ability to shoot them if they defect. Anti-gun people don't want pro-gun people to have guns because they don't trust pro-gun people, or people in general, to have guns, and they want them to be disarmed and powerless especially if they're from the other political side.
Whatever side can do to hurt and cripple the other side is the point, whatever they say to try and justify it is noise. The current state of affairs where people whine about it and bandy about the laws as if they have any real ability or desire to enforce the laws is awful, but as long as the cities of America aren't engaged in open urban warfare against their political opponents, I'm optimistic. Vigilante assassinations or edge cases aren't quite there yet, and if we escalate to shooting wars the anti-gun side will suddenly find a lot of excuses to be pro-gun and discard what principles made them think guns aren't necessary.
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The steelman of the next argument is not telos, but impact: advocates of this position believe the firearms are unnecessary for normal (or sometimes all non-military, or even all) users in ways that's not applicable to pocket knives or kitchen knives. This tends to get some fuzzy exceptions, but it's not fundamentally wrong, and the same people will often bite down on the bullet regarding smoking, speeding, or dangerous dogs.
((And Terrific is strawmanning Superman's argument in that scene. It's an Injustice film, so anyone who actually watches it knows Superman is going to go off the deep end, but at this point in the movie, Superman hasn't started intentional mass killings yet, or particularly aggressive treatment of normal criminals. He's a dictator, has killed the Joker, and clearly believes himself responsible for the deaths of Lois Lane and most of Metropolis, but it wasn't inevitable.))
The intermediate response is that necessity exists for firearms, even leaving aside the 30-40 feral hogs. Self-defense and hunting are legitimate needs, and for many people can exist in situations where their counterparts are not armed. The first time Superman hears a cry for help from someone he's disarmed, rushes to save them, and finds that they've been beaten to death before he could get there... well, there's a Irredeemable joke there, but I've got mixed feelings on the comic, so meh. Marksmanship and shooting sports are as legitimate as rugby or cycling for entertainment.
The more serious response is that it wouldn't work, and that's one that people don't really like to think about. If you can press a button and make every firearm on the planet disappear, CTRLPew will be making new ones within the hour. If you can press a button and make all of the ammunition disappear, there's a furry on twitter that made it out of thin air and scrap metal for fun. If you press a button and destroy the concept of guns, the same underlying technology makes bombs. Industrial farming depends on bombs. Several cult organizations have made biological weapons for weird ideological attacks, and ricin or some basic chemical weapons are so easy to make by accident that we have guidance to not do it by accident. Ukraine has just started to show some of the mechanisms that what used to be a funny child's toy can do.
If you sit down and think, seriously think, about what someone actually devoted to maximizing fatalities could do with the contents of a typical big box store, the entire exercise falls apart. ((Further information not available here. If you see the gap, do not spell it out.)) In the setting of Injustice, that gets even more ridiculous -- a high school dropout invented the cold gun and regularly stands toe-to-toe with The Flash -- but you don't really need to go to that extent.
The next step involves discussing marginal impact: availability of firearms making murder, and especially murder committed by the stupid or incapable of planning, easier. There's some questions about how long that lasts - the school shooting did take somewhere between thirty and fifty years to develop as a 'concept' after the material technology was available - but given the modern transfer of concepts like the vehicular mass-killing, that's probably an outlier.
Typically that's about the part where people get distracted or pull back.
But see here and here; they'll also advocate for kitchen knives without sharp tips for the same reason. Steelman, meet slippery slope.
Yes, agreed. And the slope goes down pretty fast, if not 'execute people for not recycling in three days' fast.
((well, maybe in Canada.))
Allow my to stake my flag: Any consenting a adult who smokes a cigaret in the privacy of their own home should be drawn, quartered, and displayed outside the public library like its 1300.
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I'm pro gun rights, but I think there are meaningful distinctions between some of the the things mentioned and guns.
Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it. Yes, yes, there's secondhand smoke, but if you're not frequently around smokers while they light up, it's not that much of a concern. Generally, little-l liberal paternalism is okay with "victimless crimes", and tobacco smoking is pretty close to a perfect example of this. You can't even make the socialized healthcare case against smoking, since it actually saves taxpayers money by killing people early.
Speeding is already illegal. However, traffic laws rely heavily on voluntary compliance with the law, since there aren't enough police in the world to catch all the people speeding. In theory, traffic cameras can also solve this issue, but if there were too many traffic cameras, people might genuinely get up in arms about it. Generally speaking, we are dealing with a bunch of trade offs when it comes to traffic laws, and it is unclear that "lock up anyone who speeds" is the best all around solution for society as a whole.
I also think we generally do make pet owners responsible for injuries and damage that are done by their animals. Tort law probably already covers a lot of the things we'd want from a legal code that deals with dangerous animals.
Superman argued that people will resent having their guns confiscated, but they will be alive to resent it. That's a blatant claim that guns should be taken away from people for the benefit of those same people.
Not really. If A and B both want guns, and there’s a possibility of at least one of them shooting the other but no possibility of them shooting themselves, they will still be safer without guns, no?
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It really is as simple as the left needs something to blame for the bad behavior of its ethnic constituencies. They need a fake issue to distract from the fact that virtually all crime statistically speaking is either in left-controlled areas or among left-controlled demographics, or both. Hence, guns. Or knives now, in Britain. The problem must be those pointed assault knives without the civilized blunted tips, sold in a locked container with a background check.
Consider how little they punish gun crime among the criminal underclass. We have tens of thousands of gun laws. It's not as if there are no tools to combat illegal guns being carried by known felons. Just start handing out max sentences for anything involving an illegal gun or a felon in possession of one. That would do infinitely more for public safety and black lives than trying to limit the magazine capacity of full-sized handguns or the grip angle of a rifle.
All the stuff you mention isn't banned because it's dangerous, they're banned because they were part of a fantasy that we could ban a fashionable weapon among the underclass and thus eliminate crime. Fashion is always changing.
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