Paul Waldman’s Illogic On Guns
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 6 months ago
As we have yet another round of our repeated and possibly fruitless arguments about the role of guns in American society, there’s one thing I desperately want to hear gun advocates say. It’s not complicated, it would have the benefit of honesty, and it might enable us to move this debate to ground where we could actually make choices about what kind of society we want to have.
What I want to hear gun advocates say is, “This is the price America has to pay for the right some of us cherish.”
The reason I want to hear this is that on no other basic debate over constitutional rights that I can think of does one side argue that there are no tradeoffs, that exercising a particular right, even in the most extreme way, doesn’t actually involve any cost whatsoever. Only gun advocates say that.
But it doesn’t work that way. Paul has tried to force us into a formal logical fallacy, and you can think of it as a “Hobson’s Choice” (not a Hobbesian Trap, but Hobson’s Choice), where someone puts forward what he claims to be a free choice, but where only one option is really presented.
Don’t bite on things like this. Here is the answer. Criminals and terrorists will get their guns anyway because only peaceable people obey the laws. Paul knows that, and so does everyone else. It wouldn’t matter if every gun in America was confiscated (something that would lead to bloody civil war, and which I am only granting for the sake of argument). Weapons will still flow from across the American border. Or another way for criminals to get their guns is to attack police, kill them, and steal their weapons. This happens frequently in South American countries.
Another way to get weapons is to buy fertilizer. Or gasoline. Or any of a number of fire accelerants, or acid to throw in the face of other people (this happens more than you care to know in far Eastern countries like Japan). You see, Paul is in that category of people who want the state to have a monopoly of force, and dresses his designs for control up in all sorts of sympathy for victims.
Don’t believe him. He isn’t being honest about things, and you know that because he isn’t advocating that the police be disarmed. Because all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other animals.
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