Reply #89: "we'll never know" [View All]

[iverglas]

"And finally how safe were the passengers on the hijacked flights on 9/11? That is perhaps the ultimate failure of gun-free zones. When decent people are stripped of their ability to defend themselves, they will be at the mercy of thugs with box cutters."

And how safe have millions of air travellers been because firearms are banned on board commercial aircraft? "We will never know", but we might hazard a pretty good guess.

"Our prison system is an example of the perfect gun-free zones. There are no guns, and cops on every corner. Yet violent crime including murder is rampant."

I'll be brief: ditto.

And I'll keep wondering what your point might have been.


I assume you're not suggesting that it should be legal for private individuals to carry firearms on board commercial aircraft, or for inmates to carry firearms inside prisons. Correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly.

If you *are* suggesting that it should be legal for private individuals to carry firearms on board commercial aircraft, or for inmates to carry firearms inside prisons, you might try hazarding your own guess as to how unsafe ... say, dead ... quite a lot of air travellers and prison guards might be today.

If you *aren't* suggesting this, then I'll assume it's because you think that denying access to firearms in those situations is an effective way of preventing the deaths that could be expected to occur if access to firearms were granted. Huh. Imagine that. But perhaps I assume wrongly.


"There are sometimes unfortunate deaths involving guns. However, there are a lot more deaths involving doctors. The reason we don't ban hospitals is because they do a lot more good than harm. So do guns."

Is that actually the governing consideration, in your mind? - that firearms "do a lot more good than harm"? I'd understood that the governing consideration, for USAmerican opponents of greater state interference in who may possess and carry firearms, was that second amendment thing.

But as long as you make the argument, which you just did, let's have a look at it.

You've made the bald assertion -- "So do guns <do a lot more good than harm>" -- apparently as argument for no more state interference in who may possess and carry firearms.

So I'll make one too: No they don't. And there we are. Of course, we could always do something a little better than fling unexplained opinions around.

As a preliminary matter, whether or not something "does more good than harm" really is not always the ONLY, let alone the GOVERNING, consideration in deciding what to do about it. Really. It isn't.

In many cases, it is indeed usually *a* consideration. And when it is, there obviously has to be a standard against which the thing in question may be measured in order to determine whether it "does good" or "does harm" -- i.e. what is "good" and what is "harm", to start with -- and the degree to which it does both.

By any conceivable standard that a rational person speaking in good faith would apply, hospitals do indeed "do more good than harm".

Large numbers, I'd confidently say most, of the people who die in hospitals were likely to die in any event, hospital or no hospital, of precisely what they did die of, or even of problems caused by efforts to prevent them from dying of that cause. Is a death on the operating table during surgery to correct a predictably fatal defect or injury a death involving a doctor/hospital in the sense that a death from a gunshot wound is a death involving a firearm? Only to the most disingenuous. How many of the people who have died of gunshot wounds were likely to die of gunshot wounds, firearm or no firearm? What sense does your purported analogy make?

"Deaths involving doctors", you say. Hmm. Would those be deaths in which someone threw a doctor at someone else and knocked the victim dead? In which someone poured doctors on someone else, and lit a doctor to set the person on fire? That's kinda what "deaths involving baseballs" or "deaths involving gas/matches" ... or "deaths involving firearms" ... might look like. What do "deaths involving doctors" look like, and how exactly do they look remotely the same as deaths involving firearms, or would banning hospitals be remotely the same as banning firearms?

Such bafflegab you speak.

Our country will be safest when all law-abiding citizens have the tools to ensure their own safety ... .

And the instant you can prove that none of those "law-abiding citizens" has ever injured or killed anyone with a firearm, I might agree that you have some foundation for the assertion that access to firearms on the part of all those law-abiders should not be restricted.

Of course, I'd be requiring that you apply the same statement to air travellers and prison inmates, too. After all, "Gun-free zones will never deter those bent on criminal intent", right? And inmates and air travellers ... and schoolchildren? ... are surely just as entitled to have "the tools to ensure their own safety" as anyone else.

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