Originally Posted by
Mina
It's a hot day today, but I don't dare remove my jacket, because when I look down the road I see that everyone is going to be running naked in the streets if we start taking off clothing.
That kind of argument strikes me as "I can't deny the prudence of that next step, so I must instead pretend that we're standing on a slippery slope where any step in that direction must necessarily lead to the utmost extreme." Yet we know for a FACT that it's not a slippery slope. For example, we know that gun controls have been made and reversed... that taking a step in that direction doesn't lead inevitably to total gun seizure, any more than rolling back gun controls leads to a an A-bomb in every home.
I'd take a "see how it works" approach. Unlike the gun fetishists, I don't start with an assumption about how it would turn out. There are regulations that turn out to be overreaches and others that turn out to be insufficient, and depending on what the data shows us, we can fine tune our course as we move forward.
Actually, my idea would be to do structured experimentation, to guide us. Like pick two groups of ten states each, designed so that together they're more or less a matched set (similar overall urbanization, population level, income level, crime levels, etc.) Then implement a change in one set (e.g., reinstate waiting periods for gun purchases). Then track the stats. If there's no clear benefit, reverse it. If there is, roll it out nationally. We're a big enough country we could run a couple of those experiments at any given time, and gradually come up with an approach that has the most bang for our buck, in terms of life savings/crime reduction without excess interference.
I expect you would get eager adoption among gun controllers, because they're pretty confident their ideas will work. By comparison, I expect you'd get fierce opposition among the gun fetishists, because they're also pretty confident the ideas of the gun controllers will work. They wouldn't want that kind of experiment, because if the group of ten states with a waiting period showed a significant dip in gun crime relative to the other group, it would really hurt their position. They prefer to argue based on blind assertions and rote repetitions of the NRA catechism, rather than have actual data to work with. It's the same basic reason that they blocked the CDC from doing any studies that might be used to support gun control. Deep down, they suspect the facts are against them, and so work to prevent anything that might make those facts clearer.
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