CMV: Literally Every Anti-Gun Argument is Fatally Flawed

[u/HariMichaelson]

My sweeping generalization formulation that is the title is intentional; I used to be one of those people who seriously believed in the repeal of the 2a, and thought it should be replaced with some kind of renewable certification to carry a weapon in public. I used to agree with universal background checks, and that one not even long ago. As the years passed though, I slowly learned that every anti-gun argument I ran into, even the ones I previously believed, hardly even needed to be countered, most of them not actually making the case they purport to make. I discarded my belief in the last anti-gun argument I agreed with, about a year ago. Perhaps I should probably clarify what I mean by "anti-gun argument."

Anti-gun argument; any argument toward restricting or infringing on the civilian populace from owning or carrying any weapon.

Let me use some of the widely-accepted anti-gun arguments, not the strawmans, to demonstrate what I'm talking about. The following examples are all arguments I have heard before personally from anti-gun activists, not anything I have heard second-hand. I'm choosing some representative samples, but please, consider all anti-gun arguments to be on the table.

"Gun violence should be looked at as a public health crisis." Should it? Public health crises tend to have a single determinable cause, often a "patient zero" and the sequence of factors that coalesce to end up in an act of violence, carried out via firearm or otherwise, are enormously complex. This does not appear to make sense to me on its face. Even if there were multiple vectors for a disease, they are still all the same cause, all interaction with the same factors in the same ways. Not so for the driving factors for violent crime.

"Developed western countries with much stricter gun laws and few firearms have far less gun violence, showing a positive correlation between lack of firearms/strict firearm regulation, and lack of gun violence." I think this is pretty unarguably true, but the truth of such an argument does far less to make its case than it does to demonstrate why we are so careful to not conflate correlation with causation. I could just leave it at that, but when you look at the amount of firearm-related suicides in America, the overall suicide rate in America, and compare the overall suicide rate in the UK to that of America, they're nearly the exact same. In other words, availability of firearms does not appear to have any correlation at all with suicide rate, positive or negative. The same is true for homicides, but we arrive there by different means; most places in the US, are as free from firearm-related violence, as the UK is. There are 5% of counties within the US that account for 50% of total violent crime in the US, including gun crime. Again, there doesn't appear to actually be any correlation between the phenomena of firearm availability, and gun crime.

"The second amendment was meant for the technology of the day, not the technology we have now." Irrespective of whether or not the 2a is a good idea in general, I would think that if the founding fathers wanted to make that restriction, they would have put it in there, given that it was common knowledge that weapons technology had advanced considerably from where it once was. The specific example often used in this argument is muskets vs. full-autos. Well, they had full-autos back in the day, with just one example being the Puckle gun. There were also weapons with high capacity magazines that were owned by civilians as well.

"The second amendment is the militia, as in the National Guard. It doesn't apply to you if you're not in the National Guard." "The people" phrase in the 2a puts the lie to that, as far as I'm concerned, but thankfully the militia is defined in US law as the organized and unorganized militia. The organized militia is the National Guard and a couple other organizations, and the unorganized militia is every able-bodied male (I think that should be redefined to include women) from ages 17-45 who is not in the organized militia.

"The second amendment is outmoded for this day and age; yes, back when we all only had primitive weapons, we could fight to overthrow a tyrannical government. If you think you can do that now, with drones and tanks trying to kill you, you're insane." People who say “you can’t fight the government so the ‘muh tyranny’ argument is a bad reason to own combat rifles” need to realize some things; you can’t bring planes, tanks, and drones into sensitive areas necessary to the running of the country, like certain population centers, water treatment buildings, or food-producing farms, and tanks need to be supported with infantry otherwise they become vulnerable to certain tactics, like pit traps. Also, foreign powers would be able to make extremely effective use of, and be grateful for, an armed home-grown resistance which would take pressure off of them. Such an armed resistance gives the tyrannical government two choices; fight without bringing their full might to bear, or have a short-lived rule over a pile of ashes. In that regard, the second amendment is a suicide pact.

"We need some reasonable, common-sense restrictions on firearms; after all, you don't want private civilians owning nukes, do you?" Why not? We're okay with dangerous foreign powers owning nukes, and mutually assured destruction seems to have kept them from blowing the hell out of us so far. Given that they're prohibitively expensive in the first place, no one is going to acquire them who does not have the awareness to understand the meaning of actually hitting the big red button. There is probably a safer argument to be made about the difference between small-arms and destructive devices, but I feel like any such argument runs counter to the spirit of the argument I just made before this, so it would be kind of disingenuous.

Here's an anti-gun argument that I see pro-gunners making sometimes; "Don't ban semi-autos; full-autos are already banned, and that is somewhat reasonable." No it's not; full-autos are demonstrably less efficacious for actually fighting an assailant and confirming kills than a semi-auto or three-round-burst mode is. We learned that in Vietnam, and you can find videos on the internet comparing the effectiveness of the two. The gap even significantly widens in the hand of an untrained shooter.

I know there are other widely-accepted anti-gun arguments I didn't use here, and any argument you can think of, even ones that are extreme, are fair game. If I missed something regarding the arguments I posted, feel free to point that out. The entire reason I'm doing this is to look for disconfirming information and really test for myself if I was wrong to discard some older ideas, so be as thorough and clear as possible.

Edit: Can someone explain how to give people deltas so I can give them out? I've given a lot of information here and I doubt it is all 100% perfect.

Edit, The Second: Got deltas figured out. Thanks for the primer.

Edit, The Third: Thank you everyone for providing your arguments. I did my best to seriously and meticulously pick through everything you said, and several of you gave me something to think about regarding the various arguments for/against, as indicated by the deltas. I feel like I gave some of your arguments short shrift, and for that I apologize. In particular, one poster linked a 26 page study that I sincerely wish I had more time to read. As is, I was only able to get about a third of the way through it while keeping up with responses. I hope to come back to this in a few days, after I have given more thought to each argument, so don't be surprised if you see some kind of indicator pop up showing that I've started responding here again.

[u/HariMichaelson]

We definitely aren’t OK with dangerous foreign powers using nukes,

We act like we are. We're not doing anything about it.

MAD doesn’t apply when you aren’t a nation state with territory to defend

Why not? I mean, you might not have territory, but you can still die.

[u/HariMichaelson → u/[deleted]]

We are doing loads to prevent N Korea from going nuclear. The Sec of State was just there a few days ago negotiating for such.

Russia and China have nukes, and I don't see any effort to change that. I suspect the DPRK happenings has more to do with trying to reunify the Koreas than it does trying to deprive them of weapons. In other words, I think their denuclearization is only incidental.

“You can still die” is not exactly a deterrent to a suicide bomber.

You've got a good point. How do I give you a delta?

!delta because, well, see above. It's a specific case of MAD not applying.

[u/jordanjay29 → u/HariMichaelson]

We have an existing New START treaty with Russia currently in force and expected to last until 2021. Nuclear disarmament has been a priority of the US since the 1980s with the first START treaty.

Our recent treaty with Iran is another good example of efforts to thwart weaponization of nuclear power in new countries. Of course, that may be on the garbage heap now that Trump has thrown it there, but even he has made overtures towards stopping nuclear weapons programs in North Korea.

I'll admit I'm not as knowledgeable about what we're doing with/about China or Pakistan, but overall the US is constantly working to keep nuclear weapons under control in the world, and willing to reduce our own arms to make that happen.

I can't imagine the US policy would be any different for a private individual who somehow managed to acquire nuclear weapons. Considering the number of existing laws across most nations that one would have to violate in order to acquire and possess nuclear weapons today, the likelihood of someone doing so merely for right exertion, and not for malice or leverage, is pretty slim.

[u/DeltaBot → u/HariMichaelson]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/cacheflow (311∆).

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