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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.
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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