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#debate

originally posted in:Secular Sevens
Edited by Ric_Adbur: 1/17/2013 5:20:02 AM
20

Gun Control

Jred, Baph, and I discussed this a bit in Steam chat earlier, and we disagreed heavily on what should be done. I don't like debating in chatrooms, because it's difficult to type long arguments at that speed, so I thought I'd make a thread about it. In the past, I have been of the opinion that gun control is similar to the war on drugs - banning firearms will do nothing but take them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, while doing effectively nothing to prevent criminals from obtaining them, and also turning otherwise upstanding citizens into criminals for no good reason. However, recently I have also been swayed by the argument that certain weapons do not belong in the hands of the public due to their inherent danger. In the wrong hands, certain classes of weaponry are much more dangerous than others. Fully-automatic action weapons, for example. They have the potential to cause much greater harm at a much higher rate, and with much greater efficiency than if a semi-automatic weapon were used in the same context. It is the same reasoning behind why missiles, explosives, bombs, artillery, and other such weaponry is kept out of the hands of private citizens. Full-auto weapons aren't necessary for personal defense purposes, nor for hunting, and are in fact overkill in both roles. So there are only three reasons for someone to have them; 1 - they are a member of a military or law-enforcement group, 2 - they are an unstable or unethical individual bent on wanton violence, or 3 - they just think it's fun to shoot. I do not think 'fun' is a sufficient reason to balance out the danger of allowing such weapons to continue to be available to the public. Thoughts?

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  • I think black market arguments are crappy. People breaking that law doesn't justify removing that law. For instance, drunk driving still occurs even though it is illegal but that doesn't mean that we should legalize it. Obviously making something illegal doesn't completely stop it from being used, but it does make it more difficult for people to obtain it. Hell, sometimes even the concept of something being illegal is enough of a deterrent since some people associated with illegality with "wrongness". I also agree that activities or items that generally cause great collateral damage to other humans should be prohibited. For instance, drunk driving causes the deaths of many innocent people but people should have any right to drive drunk even if drunk driving doesn't entail the harm of other humans. Sometimes certain things should be restricted to prevent the unintentional loss of life.

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