Debate about Gun Control

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-20-2017, 02:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Guns are no means of defense.

There are two basic and conflicting sets of values at work.  One suggests a large number of decent armed trained citizens can suppress bad guys.  The other suggests if their are fewer guns fewer people get hurt by guns.  Neither are free of logic.  Both schemes, when adopted by a local culture, have worked very well thank you. 

They are so much in conflict, though, that if an extreme partisan latches firmly into one scheme, the other seems at a deep values lock level to be irrational and doomed to failure.

While both schemes have worked, moving to either scheme and making either work at a national level seems implausible.  Ya kant get dayah from heah.  At this point the conversation isn't dominated by how to compromise, or how to move to one scheme or the other.  It's about extreme partisans dedicated to one perspective or the other declaring what seems to them obvious absolute truths but which seem from another perspective to be absurd meaningless statements.

From one perspective, if the bad guy has a gun, and nobody else has, the good guys are defenseless.  As the bad guys have so many ways of getting a gun, ways that aren't going to be blocked in this culture any time soon, the logic of the red perspective seems clear and obvious.  It is so clear and obvious that even a blue extreme partisan ought to be able to comprehend it, even if they can't bring themselves to agree.  To me, "guns are no means of defense" make as much sense as denying global warming or rejecting evolution.

This isn't to say that a red partisan declaring his love of firepower is precisely a winning argument, either.  It might fit with his experience of the real world, mesh with his values, and be deeply part of his way of life, but it isn't going to get positive reaction from a blue partisan.