Originally Posted by
Eric Perez
Most of the murders are gang related. Lets get rid of all the gang members not the guns. Gang members will start killing eachother with rocks after the guns are taken. Then what? Get rid of all the rocks? people are so dumb
The majority but not an overwhelming majority of gun related deaths are related to gangs. This number has gotten worse as the number of guns on the streets have risen.
Killing each other with rocks? I think every sane person would rather be attacked with a rock. Hard to kill an innocent bystander with a rock, how about robbing a store with a rock? If rocks and guns had the same potential for killing then no one would care about gun control because they wouldn't be very dangerous.
Almost anything can be a weapon. true. You can kill with your bare hands, true.
Equating two things like a semi-auto handgun and a rock, based on their common but drastically unenlivenment potential to kill is a type of logical fallacy, I believe its called association fallacy though this is usually used in reference to people not items. The argument you illustrate is indeed a ridiculous argument with flawed logic, however it is fundamentally different from the argument made by proponents of gun control. A very simple minded person might read you rock example and think, "heck, hes right a rock can kill someone why make automatic weapon illegal" of course that person would be a complete idiot.
You see, the crux of the argument hinges not on the simple potential for an item to be used as a weapon but on the drastic difference in killing potential in term of speed, efficiency of effort and time and total killing capacity.
To make your argument reasonable you could think of a hypothetical situation were a single rock could kill many people with the same speed and efficiency as a handgun. For example a large boulder is suspended over a group of people and all you have to do to drop the boulder and kill them is pull and little trigger. Now this is not a good case for making boulders illegal but it is a good case for making traps capable of killing many people illegal and in fact they are. You still have ignore the time and effort in setting up the trap to make this at all a close comparison.
Basically, people are not concerned about certain types of guns simply because they have
a potential to kill but because they have
tremendous potential to kill with great ease.
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