By what they DON'T say, shall ye know them....

[unixronin]

The Second Amendment column in this month's issue of Guns & Ammo magazine mentions an interesting statistic, in the course of arguing that the Gun-Free School Zones Act may well have cost more children's lives than it has saved.

The statistic:   Between 1997 and 2002, 32 students were shot and killed in elementary and secondary schools across the US.

Sounds bad, doesn't it?  Makes it understandable why there's a lot of fuss on the subject, huh?

Here's what so interesting about that number:  During the same period, in the same schools, 53 students died playing football.  That's more than half again as many.

So why don't we have a football-free schools act, "for the sake of the children"?  Surely if it's killing 65% more students every year than those horrible, evil guns, football must be a really serious problem, right?

Simple.  We don't have a football-free schools act because it's not about preventing child deaths.  It's about exploiting child deaths to ban guns, regardless of how many children's lives that saves or costs.

So next time someone tells you that guns need to be banned "for the sake of the children", ask them how they feel about banning football.  Or any of the other causes that kill more kids every year than guns do -- bicycles, swimming pools, .........

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

But a complementary slippery slope could be posed: if banning the mere possession of something dangerous is anathema to freedom, and we can ban only the use of dangerous objects, then you and I and my neighbor Clyde have the right to possess all kinds of things: virus code, firearms, anthrax, nerve gas, thermonuclear weapons--as long as we don't use them, and of course if Clyde gets testy one night and nukes Sacramento, then he should be tried and punished harshly.

All of which proves, I think, that slippery-slope arguments lead to silliness.

Well, not really. What it shows is that it's possible to generate an absurd situation from a slippery-slope argument by stretching it beyond its reasonable scope.

Existing law requires a destructive-devices permit for the possession of, for example, thermonuclear weapons. I don't see a problem with that. Personally, my preferred resolution on that issue is that NO-ONE should be trusted to possess nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, not only including governments but ESPECIALLY governments. (I have a personal conviction that nuclear weapons are one of the most simultaneously useless and dangerous military devices ever invented; the only situation in which you dare use them is that in which nobody else has them. That window lasted about four years.)
Since no-one in their right mind has ever suggested that nuclear, biological and chemical weapons fall within the definition of personal arms and thus within the purview of the Second Amendment, and since there is no conceivable argument which can justify their possession by individuals nor any conceivable utility for such possession, I move we exclude them from discussion as irrelevant to the point.

A handgun?  Ditto--but now we're getting into weaponry that's as well suited to offense as to defense.

That's subject to debate and a lot of misconception. Ask anyone with military experience and a grasp of the realities, and they'll tell you that a pistol is not an offensive weapon, it's a defensive one -- and at that, it's not a very good one in a serious fight; in any firefight, a pistol is a last-ditch weapon to buy you time to get your hands on a better one. Even for home defense, a good pump shotgun is a vastly better defensive weapon than a pistol -- it's harder for someone to take it away from you, it has much more firepower, it's easier to hit with, that big .78-caliber hole is AWFULLY intimidating to look down, and Hollywood has helped make the distinctive "sha-CHUNK" of racking the slide a sound instantly identifiable to anyone who hasn't been asleep for the past fifty years.
However, a pump shotgun isn't very practical to carry around all day, and certainly isn't very concealable. A pistol is both, which makes it a much better personal defense weapon outside of the home. It still makes a lousy offensive weapon; as an offensive weapon, all but the most specialized pistols are too hard for most people to hit anything with beyond 10 meters or so, and all but the largest-caliber are seriously deficient in firepower. (As witness any number of police shootings in which police have fired off fifty to sixty rounds at a perp, and hit him ten to a dozen times, before he actually goes down.)

A case of dynamite? [...] What in hell does Clyde want with [that]?

Does Clyde own a farm?  Does he need to blast stumps? Granted, there's few cases in which an urban dweller needs dynamite. But there's any number of reasons rural dwellers might need the stuff. (A good friend of ours in New Hampshire used several hundred pounds of dynamite in the course of blasting his foundation and basement out of granite bedrock.)

I have no problem with Clyde needing to show a legitimate need in order to purchase a case of dynamite or any other type of explosive, and then having to account for it and how it was used. But I don't see why, if he has a legitimate need for it, he should be prohibited from buying it because you don't need any. Once again, though, blasting materials do not fall into the category of personal arms.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

I like this:

NO-ONE should be trusted to possess nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, not only including governments but ESPECIALLY governments.

I think we're agreeing on everything, almost. We agree that shotguns are okay, being hard to conceal and well-suited to defense; we agree that nobody, absent a need to do some heavy earth-moving, needs high explosives; we agree that nuclear, biogical or chemical hazardous materials, being useful as weapons of mass destruction, are to be kept out of private hands (and public hands too, we wish).

Which leaves handguns, the easily-concealed lethal weapons everybody gets their knickers in a twist about.

Yikes, I'm being called to dinner. More later.