Friday, February 06, 2004
Guns Don't Kill People --
Sorry, but here I go again. It's the coffee in the morning, it gets me all jazzed up.
My Mom sent me a forward, as she likes to do, of Andy Rooney giving one of his famous rants on nonsense that I'm sure comes right off the top of his stupid head.
One of them was the old argument, guns don't kill people, people kill people -- people kill people with knives and baseball bats, but we're not going to outlaw them, blah blah 2nd Amendment, blah blah liberal.
This is a terrible analogy.
How about this: weapons of mass destruction don't kill people, people kill people. Therefore, why should we concern ourselves with WMD?
Why? Because while people will always want to kill other people, we should be careful to keep the most potent tools away from everyone so that those bad people don't murder others.
If those Columbine brats had only had bats and knives, I'm sure they could have been easily restrained.
Guns and nuclear weapons have only one intended purpose -- to hurt/kill things. Kitchen knives and baseball bats have uses which are totally separate from whatever violent way they can also be used. Should we ban dangerous knives like switchblades, sure, why not.
But anything can be used as a weapon -- a shoe, a chair, a car, binoculars, clenched fists -- and obviously we don't want to ban all of these as well.
SO the gun-lovers most favoritest attempt at reducing the gun control argument to absurdity is actually pretty absurd itself.
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Sorry, but here I go again. It's the coffee in the morning, it gets me all jazzed up.
My Mom sent me a forward, as she likes to do, of Andy Rooney giving one of his famous rants on nonsense that I'm sure comes right off the top of his stupid head.
One of them was the old argument, guns don't kill people, people kill people -- people kill people with knives and baseball bats, but we're not going to outlaw them, blah blah 2nd Amendment, blah blah liberal.
This is a terrible analogy.
How about this: weapons of mass destruction don't kill people, people kill people. Therefore, why should we concern ourselves with WMD?
Why? Because while people will always want to kill other people, we should be careful to keep the most potent tools away from everyone so that those bad people don't murder others.
If those Columbine brats had only had bats and knives, I'm sure they could have been easily restrained.
Guns and nuclear weapons have only one intended purpose -- to hurt/kill things. Kitchen knives and baseball bats have uses which are totally separate from whatever violent way they can also be used. Should we ban dangerous knives like switchblades, sure, why not.
But anything can be used as a weapon -- a shoe, a chair, a car, binoculars, clenched fists -- and obviously we don't want to ban all of these as well.
SO the gun-lovers most favoritest attempt at reducing the gun control argument to absurdity is actually pretty absurd itself.
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