he fact that a given piece of policy is designed to reduce crime and save lives and does you no harm isn’t good enough
And this is the core of the pro/anti debate, right here.
I accept that gun control proposals are intended to reduce crime and save lives. I accept that anti-gun people generally have the best intentions, they want to save lives (I do too). I (along with most pro-gun people) just don’t believe that gun control laws will have a significant effect on reducing gun crime or overall making our society safer.
Also, let’s talk about Democrats. I feel I have some authority to speak on this subject as I am personally registered as a Democrat, and I come from a very blue state (Connecticut). I identify as liberal-libertarian- I think the married gay couple should have AR15s to defend themselves, their adopted children, and their legal marijuana farm from criminals, secure in the knowledge that universal health care will be there for them if they get hurt. I suspect we’d agree on a great many ways the GOP is utterly failing our nation.
But one thing that infuriates me about the left these days is an inability to even consider the possibility that we are wrong about anything. There’s the Left side, the Correct side, and the wrong side. And if you don’t support most of the liberal agenda you’re the so called deplorables and fuck you.
I’ll give a perfect example- the AR-15 rifle. There’s a big push to ban AR15s and similar rifles.
But consider FBI expanded homicide table 8. About 300-400 people each year are killed by rifles, that includes both ‘assault’ rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles.
To put that in perspective, about 300-350 people per year get struck by lightning. Getting struck by lightning is so rare we make jokes about it.
In comparison, every year about 800 people (mostly children) die from being tangled in their own bedsheets. And about 180,000 people per year in the US die of obesity-related issues.
So WHY are we burning tons of political capital and alienating all gun owners to ban something that is statistically not a serious threat to our society? If we put half that much effort into fighting obesity, we’d save 10x as many lives.