Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The Right to Short Sleeves

teh
Without getting into all the particulars of the gun control debate, I’ll just say I was glad to see this point made in a discussion (monologue?) on the topic:
No one is a 2nd amendment absolutist, because everyone agrees that there are some types of arms which private citizens may never have, such as tactical nuclear weapons. The debate is clearly over what restrictions we will have over the armaments of private citizens, not whether there should be any.
I’ve long argued this to gun rights absolutists who never have a good counter to it. Similarly, I never see gun control advocates pose this. I’m not sure why. No one can make a reasonable argument for privately owning anti-aircraft missiles, mustard gas, weaponized biological agents or even a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons.

By the way, I’ve already had the tactical nuclear weapons argument. 25 years ago, the man now known as blogger Jerome Prophet and I had this very discussion. He was being a gun ownership absolutists and I was, well, probably being an ass taking it up to the nuke level. Undeterred, JP countered with a ‘why not’, suggesting that mutually assured destruction was just as apt to work on a personal level as it does between nations. What I can’t remember is what we were drinking that night.

1 comment:

JeromeProphet said...

I think it was something that had to have been on sale at Finest?