If your entire thesis revolves around impossible fantasy situations you need to spend less time writing about your arguments and more time thinking about them.
That’s how I feel about the pro-gun argument that we need to oppose government regulation of firearms because we might need to overthrow the government. To my mind, that’s already a ridiculous fantasy situation, but clearly to some people it’s not. I’m making a sincere effort to take you guys seriously. If I adopt what sounds to me like a ridiculous premise to start with (we need lots of guns in private hands because we might need to shoot the soldiers and the cops and the politicians) and argue what follows from that, and you tell me my conclusions are ridiculous, that doesn’t leave me much motivation to continue to try to understand what you have to say.
(This is, of course, assuming that you or Darxus or that intitial Daily Kos poster whose article I should have read but didn’t spoke for a monolithic and unanimous gun rights movement, speaking of silly premises.)
I certainly could have made exactly the same argument just discussing various points in the range from captive-bolt pistols used in slaughterhouses to machine guns, but I was hoping to demonstrate that there are extremes that any reasonable person is going to agree about. And I have the impression that there are plenty of gun-rights activists for whom a machine gun isn’t the obvious thing that private citizens shouldn’t be able to get easily, so that wouldn’t have been a good end point to choose.
(Also, while we’re throwing around dictators, Yanayev. Just to point out that not only are handguns not sufficient for a revolution, neither are they necessary.)
PS — Where on the scale from a little toy gun with a flag that pops out and says “bang” to the hypothetical doomsday bomb that will destroy the entire universe do you think a discussion of restricting private citizens’ access to weapon becomes ridiculous? Put another way, what kind of weapon is so powerful that it is obvious to you that a sensible government ought to restrict access to it?
Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)
(This is, of course, assuming that you or Darxus or that intitial Daily Kos poster whose article I should have read but didn’t spoke for a monolithic and unanimous gun rights movement, speaking of silly premises.)
I certainly could have made exactly the same argument just discussing various points in the range from captive-bolt pistols used in slaughterhouses to machine guns, but I was hoping to demonstrate that there are extremes that any reasonable person is going to agree about. And I have the impression that there are plenty of gun-rights activists for whom a machine gun isn’t the obvious thing that private citizens shouldn’t be able to get easily, so that wouldn’t have been a good end point to choose.
(Also, while we’re throwing around dictators, Yanayev. Just to point out that not only are handguns not sufficient for a revolution, neither are they necessary.)
PS — Where on the scale from a little toy gun with a flag that pops out and says “bang” to the hypothetical doomsday bomb that will destroy the entire universe do you think a discussion of restricting private citizens’ access to weapon becomes ridiculous? Put another way, what kind of weapon is so powerful that it is obvious to you that a sensible government ought to restrict access to it?