Gun Control

Republican logic: Regulate drugs, deregulate guns. Because weed is so much more dangerous than a bullet to the chest...

"But think of the children!!"

Yeah, let's. Please.

So TheAmazingAtheist (whose views I do not typically support) pretty much sums how I feel about gun control here:

NSFW – I realize he's a dick, but he's also super smart.

But here are some things I do and do not believe:

"We need bigger guns than the criminals so that we can shoot them!"
Sorry, you can't have them. Sort of like how you can't have a fighter jet to shoot down the 9-11 airplane. That's an infinitely regressive concept. By that standard, we'd all just be armed to the teeth with rocket launchers and mustard gas, awaiting an attack.

Doesn't make sense...

"I'm a gun collector!"
And I'm a cocaine collector. Tough luck. (I'm not really a cocaine collector.)

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!

"But the second amendment!"
The second amendment was meant to promote self defense via a reasonably sized weapon (assuming we're all contextualists here), a right that isn't going to be taken away from you. It also was meant to preserve the right of the people to stage a coup, which isn't possible, no matter how many AK47's you have, because Obama is never going to give us nukes or drones.

You can't just have a rocket launcher in your house.

"Freedom!!!"
How much pathos is it going to take for you to realize that infinite freedom has costs? Costs like the lives of children...

Do you want to be an eagle or do you want to be dead?

Relax. No one is taking away your shotgun or pistol. They're just taking away your automatic weapons, hopefully.

The real question I have isn't whether guns are good, because I think they're bad. But I think we should keep them legal for the same reason we should legalize drugs. Heroine is bad, too, but a black market for heroine is even worse. Unlike heroine, however, guns have the potential to cause nonviolent crimes (You can't deny that, and all I need to prove it is a Kanye quote: "314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago.") So how many should we keep legal? However many ward off a dangerous black market, I suppose. We'll have to keep a balance between arming too many citizens and creating another War on Drugs. That plus background checks and hugely regulating the guns we do legalize should be a good start.

Forever correctable,

—AKB