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Notes -
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.
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.))
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