“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain

Two men are walking home late at night from a beerhall, drunk, and they stop on a bridge to pee.

One of them says, “Look at the fish dancing in the water! See how happy they are in the moonlight!”

The other one says, “You’re not a fish. You can’t know how happy they are!”

The first one replies, “You’re not me. You can’t know whether I know how happy they are!”

In reality I know what’s going on in your head better than you do.

But since I understand you, I know that it isn’t worth arguing with you about it.

Thank you, it’s been a pleasant conversation for me, and I think you may in the future look back on it as a pleasant conversation for you too.

No, it’s insulting because it supposes that YOU know what I want, and it’s something really nasty.

No, that isn’t why my analogy is unsulting.

My analogy is insulting because it supposes that your intransigence comes because you know what you want and what you want takes precedence over whatever arguments anyone comes up with about the good of society.

It supposes that you are biased, that you start with what you want and then rationalise reasons why it’s good. It supposes, in short, that you are human.

There is no point in me or anyone else arguing with you about the morality, ethics, or utility in you shooting the people you choose to shoot. You’ll decide that for yourself and if it comes to court we can discuss it then.

I claim that it does no good to try to do gun control. The attempt causes more harm than it can do good. Why get all these gun nuts riled up? They don’t kill that many people. Outside the inner cities we lose fewer people to guns than we do to tobacco use. We lose fewer people to guns than we do to side effects of obesity. Rationally, it just isn’t that important.

We fought the civil war because we disagreed about slavery. Over a million people died, lots of people were forced into poverty, slaves who hadn’t been hungry before went hungry for awhile—ideally it could have been handled better, but we decided it was worth the cost because we couldn’t agree and we couldn’t agree to disagree. This case is different.

We can agree to disagree. I feel like I’m better off when people don’t point guns at me. You feel like you’re better off when you can point guns at people. OK, we’ll do it your way. I’ll trust you not to kill me without good reason, and you’ll trust the courts not to punish you too much if you do have good reason.

If most of the people in my town agree with me, we’ll pass local gun control. You can still have guns in our town, just don’t get caught. If you and some other gun nut have a shootout in my town and you win, you can expect legal consequences—and that’s still better than losing. But better still if you can arrange to have your battle somewhere else.

This is not worth a civil war. If we want to cut the death rate, we’d do better to work toward reducing tobacco use. That probably wouldn’t involve making tobacco illegal, but it probably would involve making tobacco companies illegal and tobacco advertising illegal, etc. Or if we decide that suicide should be legal, then we might consider tobacco use a legal form of slow suicide and offer pleasant hospices for them to die in rather than wreck our health care budget trying to “cure” them. (I can see the bumper stickers now. “Cure tobacco, not smokers.”)

But I’m talking rationally again. Sorry about that. The reason it’s utterly useless to argue about this is that it’s a conflict between two irrational desires. Gun nuts have an irrational desire to be able to shoot people. And gun control nuts have an irrational desire to not get shot. There’s no possible way to resolve this issue.

On that subject, the UK government is trying to compile a national DNA database, which is effectively a registration of everyone’s procreative ability. They plan to use it for solving rape and other crimes.

Thomas, there are circumstances under which it is perfectly appropriate, even morally obligatory, to kill people. You HAVE heard of “self defense”, haven’t you? It’s accepted as moral by almost everybody, gun owner or not.

OTOH, I’m hard pressed to think of a circumstance under which rape could even be morally permissible, let alone obligatory. And virtually everyone agrees with me.

Therefore your analogy is both radically inappropriate, and amazingly insulting.

The appropriate analogy would be a proposal to geld all men who aren’t government employed procreators, just because you could potentially use the equipment to rape.

People who peacefully maintain their right to legally rape once a year, and people who spend the day at home peacefully keeping their families safe, are not rapists any more than people who peacefully own guns are murderers.

However, practically the whole point of owning guns is to be able to kill people. You can enjoy target practice but you could enjoy that with BB guns. You can own a handgun and possibly hunt rabbits with it if it’s low-caliber enough, or you can go to the dump and plunk at rats, but how many people do? Just as the people who would support rape day would want to be able to do rapes under controlled, regulated conditions, people who want guns mostly want to be able to kill people.

I will repeat my main point, since you may have missed it in all the emotion. There are a lot of people like you who care deeply about their right to defend themselves with guns. If gun control ever becomes a real threat, you guys are all going to turn into single-issue voters. It’s a deeply emotional issue for you, not something that you could be persuaded on by rational argument—even if there were rational arguments in favor of gun control which I do not think is fully established.

Meaningful gun control is not going to happen. Not unless the culture changed dramatically and not until the oldtimers who couldn’t change with the times died out. It isn’t worth arguing about, it just riles people up for no purpose.

We’ve gone a long way toward making tobacco illegal. That’s a different case. Everybody knows it’s an intensely addictive drug. Expensive. Most people admit now that it’s unhealthy. We don’t get that many people strongly dedicated to their identities as smokes even though there’s a well-heeled industry that advertises heavily. It’s different. Smokers mostly know they’re in the wrong but they kind of enjoy their addiction. But gun nuts think they’re right. The more threatened they feel the harder they’ll fight back and the more they’ll organise.

And the number of gun owners who kill people is very low. It isn’t one in a thousand per year. Better to live with it and focus on more important problems.

“It’s not impossible nor even difficult to have sensible gun-control laws and practices while allowing people who like guns to own them.”

That’s true. The problem is that the sensible laws, the ones that prohibit behavior that actually hurts somebody, or poses a disproportionate risk, (Compare the risks of gun ownership to having a swiming pool in your backyard, for instance.) have all been long since enacted. The kinds of laws that they’re trying to pass today may have to be presented, for PR purposes, as “reasonable”, but they’re clearly motivated by an animus against gun ownership.

As demonstrated by your ‘rape day’ analogy. Just how warped do you have to be, to consider peacefully owning a gun as analogous to rape?

OK, I see it now.

Imagine that it wouldn’t be impossible or difficult to detect who had sex with whom, and imagine that the government wanted to keep a complete registry of that—just in case.

As it is we try to track that only after someone is diagnosed with an STD, so we can find the other victims and treat them. But if we were to try to track everybody all the time, wouldn’t a lot of people have emotional objections to it? I think that’s the kind of objection a lot of gun owners have to the presumably-innocuous registries you’d like.

A lot of people would feel like government files on who they had sex with would be the first step toward the government doing something about it.

And people who want guns as a symbol of power hate the symbol of government control on their guns. Just hate it.

We’d do better arguing about whether to make everybody pee in a cup every day in front of witnesses.

I don’t think it’s a lot of men and even if it was a lot of men, I don’t think this would’ve been a big issue.

It’s not impossible nor even difficult to have sensible gun-control laws and practices while allowing people who like guns to own them. I still think it’s the industry who makes most trouble here.

I mean, in your analogy, it’s as if some paid ideologue/lobbyist argued that we need the rape day because banning it would be a step to banning the sexual intercourse completely. I don’t believe there is a large group of people stupid enough to buy into this argument. It must be the industry.

This is not a topic where rational discussion is useful.

Let’s try a farcical thought experiment. Imagine that in large parts of the country there was a tradition that on one particular day of the year it was considered acceptable for men to rape any women they could find. So on that day pretty much everything stopped—some men would be spending the day protecting their womenfolk, and some men would be looking for inadequately protected women, and almost all the women would be hiding.

Of course people would argue about it. Proponents would point to their interpretation of the Constitution that support the practice. Opponents would talk about STDs. Proponents would explain that the (few) random childbirths are a good thing and increase the genetic variability of the race. Opponents would say it’s unethical and barbarous. Proponents would point out how it strengthens families, that men protecting their wives and daughters from outright physical threat is great. Opponents would point out how bad it is for women. Proponents would put forth statistical studies showing that places that have rape day have fewer rapes the rest of the year. Back and forth, back and forth.

But what it would come down to is that such a big slice of the public would be dead-set against quitting the custom, that nothing would be done. They’d just keep arguing back and forth for years and years and years.

I tend to think that gun ownership is not nearly as bad as a rape day would be. But the principle is the same. A whole lot of men really really like having guns. They go to shooting ranges and practice their aim. They fantasise about being powerful. They feel good in ways they couldn’t do if somebody took their guns away.

No matter who’s right about the rational arguments, there’s no way they’d accept such arguments. Not that any particular gun control arguments are right, I’m saying it doesn’t matter whether any of the arguments are right. It isn’t something that can be settled by rational argument. It isn’t open to discussion.

Think about how you’d feel if people started making rational arguments about how much better off we’d all be if we did start having a rape day. That’s how gun nuts feel about gun control.

Never mind who’s right. It just isn’t worth arguing about. Pick something where you can make a difference. This isn’t it.

You know, there’s this field called “criminology”. They don’t use the word “Medical association” in the names of their journals, and they have the modesty not to publis “studies” on the virtues of bleeding as a treatment for kidney failure. A pity doctors aren’t similarly modest as to the univeriality of their competence.