You mean false equivalence? Or do you actually think the thought experiment is deliberately deceptive?
You could say it’s false equivalence (which I think of as a type of equivocation). There are some parallels between drugs and guns (I also think there should be a spectrum approach on drugs) but interchanging them in the argument creates more confusion than clarity.
Here’s what I mean by spectrum: it seems reasonable to have some restrictions on both weapons and drugs, and also that neither one should be outright banned. On the far extreme, I think there’s not a right for a citizen to own a nuke. I also think that if there was a drug that gives an incredible high for 5 minutes, but then the person’s arms and legs fall off, that drug should be banned. On the other side, caffeine (by all means a drug) seems to act as a mild stimulant that many are able to use responsibly (though there certainly are some health and addiction risks that seem to go unnoticed), and many are able to use knives for practical and non-violent purposes.
Somewhere in between knives and nukes is a spot where I’d say, okay, beyond this line I don’t think we should allow these weapons to be sold. Somewhere between coffee and super-high limbs-fall-off drug is a line where I’d say, okay, beyond this I don’t think we should allow these drugs to be sold. In the area before these lines are shades of regulation, where yes, this should be allowed in principle, but it should be heavily regulated (only in lab settings/only for specially permitted cases), and before that a shade of medium regulation (Doctor’s prescription only/licenses), and so on.
The reason I find it to be more confusing than helpful is that the line on the spectrum is already difficult enough on one issue, comparing it to another issue magnifies those disputes. I might think pot is analogous to a crossbow, you might think it’s analogous to an assault rifle. It’s trying to have both those conversations simultaneously, when I don’t think the translation works (at least, not until there’s agreement on at least one spectrum).
Now, all of that is a bit moot because the scenario you brought up next works much better for me because it limits the scope of what we’re talking about, but I wanted to clarify.
Either way, let's flesh it out a bit: my friends on the left tell me the war on drugs is a failure because being illegal only forces them underground, and because restricting drugs is treating the symptom and not the disease. On these issues they have an intuitive understanding of how unrealistic and ineffective these kinds of restrictions are. But this understanding vanishes when we start talking about guns.
I know very little about weapons trafficking, but on the face of it I think you have a point that if we were to ban guns, it’s not as if we could realistically expect them to disappear. Off the top of my head, some differences are that:
I imagine manufacturing weapons is more difficult than manufacturing drugs (so restrictions cutting into the supply are not as easily replaced by home-brewed operations in the case of guns).
The illegality of drugs create a situation where addicts are less likely to pursue treatment. I don’t see a clean analogy in guns for that scenario.
Guns (at least the ones that would be banned) seem more difficult to traffic, the amount of buyers would ostensibly be lower, the product is larger, and I’d imagine between the two scenarios of seeing a drug deal go down and a gun deal go down, one is more likely to immediately contact the police in the case of the second.
But you are right that we couldn’t expect guns to disappear in the aftermath of a ban.
That said, the US is so lax on gun restrictions that the black market is supplied via purchases at legal locations (often gun shows). Guns are actively trafficked out of the US and into Mexico.
Again, I’m not advocating a total ban on guns. But I think that doesn’t mean we can’t put some sensible restrictions in place.
The John Oliver video is indeed pretty good. I’m always a bit upset that the jokes are a bit formulaic (the non-sequitur “saying *topic* is like *simplification* is like saying *good thing* is like *bad thing*. I’m not even saying that joke form is bad, they just lean on it a bit too hard) because they are suspiciously evenly spaced out. It feels less like using humor to condense a complicated subject, and more like reward to keep my attention. All in all though, I think the show picks typically excellent topics in that they are
usually unnoticed or ignored problems that just a little exposure can get people riled up about.
Our founding fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment so that an arm population could, if necessary rise up and over through a tyrannical government.
Just an observation. I’ve heard the argument about keeping the gap between civilian arms and government arms as narrow as possible, but it seems like if the gap was the main concern we’d also hear calls for demilitarization and reducing the firepower that government agents (e.g. police) have. But I typically hear the opposite from those very same people, which seems counter intuitive, no?
We love guns and we're violent. That's the way it is.
Can’t say I’m satisfied by your line of argument here.
Partially because it seems to imply that the nation is wholly set against gun control because of a violent history. And to be frank, the gun control “brand” isn’t doing the best right now(partially because of extreme positions taken by advocates, but also partially because of misinformation). But I saying we’re just violent and we love guns is a mischaracterization.
Take, for example, some of the actual gun control issues up for debate. Just recently (but before this shooting) there was some
Preventive Medicine research on where public opinion is at 2 years after the Newtown shootings. The findings on specific issues are what interest me the most:
Edit: That image cut off the caption explaining what the bottom axis represents: the horizontal axis is %support for the position
The first 3 policies strike me as particularly sensible (I’m for the last 2, but I’m not sure how we go about performing temporary removals, I’d have to know more). And support seems to cut across the divide between gun owners and not. Public opinion is not the end-all be-all metric for what law should be, but I’d like to reframe what a gun control agenda actually means.
We’re not going to get a ban on handguns, we probably aren’t even going to get a ban on assault weapons. But having to go through those discussions when that’s not what’s on the table is tiresome.
If there are 3 highly publicized school shootings in a year that equals 1 out of every 100 million Americans doing it. That's such a tiny number that you can almost say it's not really a problem...Except of course to the families and communities that suffer such a horror. I'm not trying to diminish it, but without the media circus, school shootings weren't be perceived as common place.
I find your thoughts a little hard to follow in this section. You start with saying that there are a small amount of highly publicized school shootings, and if the media didn’t highly publicize them, there would be none (by definition, right?). Surely we’d want to talk about number of school shootings (or just shootings), publicized or not?
I also find the last sentence odd because in the very first post of this thread, you say:
School shootings have become a common occurrence in America, why?
If you’re playing devil’s advocate that’s totally alright (it’s a good thing to have in these conversations really), but your position seems to shift a lot. I don’t think you’re a bad person, and from what I’ve seen you post elsewhere on films, I know you’re not a dumb person. Forgive me if it seems I’m implying either.
Regardless, I think a parallel argument that the effect of the media’s widespread coverage of shootings exaggerates the actual danger that one is in of dying by gun violence (which is relatively small, even where the rates are highest) is a fair one. But I also think it’s fair to say that if one’s primary concern was media worrying the populace about things that are actually not likely to harm them, there are more salient misrepresentations:
Note: There's a version of this graph that includes 2001 (and 9/11), which had a death total of 2,990 for the year. But I can't upload from here and I couldn't find a hosted version of that graph in my quick search.
I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t “trade” gun control for other issues (health care, prisoner rehabilitation, education, to name a few) because it’s true, progress on those issues would likely net a greater, and clearer, benefit. But that sort of trade doesn’t seem to be on the table.