Smasharoo wrote:
How do we do so when criminals aren't equipped with such weapons? You're arguing a false dilemma Smash.
Yeah, no. I'm not. I'm not sure if you just learned the phrase "false dilemma" or what, but it's not actually applicable as a response to anything you disagree with. Here's a false dilemma: "If we take away guns, then people will use knives, if we take away knives, they'll use sticks, if we take away sticks, they'll use fists. Do you want to cut everyone's hands off?"
Actually, that's a slippery slope fallacy Smash. Try to keep them straight.
A False Dilemma is when you present an argument in the form of "either A, or B", when there are other choices available. So when you argue that in the absence of a perfect means to prevent gun crime before it happens we must eliminate all guns, you are committing a false dilemma fallacy. You're saying that we either devise a perfect pre-crime solution to gun violence *or* ban all guns. There are other options though. Hence the fallacy.
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What I asked was a simple question. Saying "we should try to have less crime" is nice, but completely fucking useless.
And yet, that's how we deal with all other forms of crime, isn't it? It's exceptionally rare for a police officer to prevent a crime from occurring, yet we still have police departments, don't we? So it's a bit silly to argue that a course of action should be rejected because it can't prevent gun violence before it happens. But that's exactly the argument you made. We can't prevent robbery from happening. We can only punish those who commit the crime. Same for pretty much all criminal acts in our society.
If you want to make a broader argument about how we should approach criminal justice, by all means, go ahead. But don't treat gun violence as though it's somehow special or different in this regard.
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Enacting stricter gun control laws may or may not reduce gun crimes, but there's an obvious logical reason to think it might, and really not much of an argument that it will increase gun crimes.
Remove the word gun in "gun crimes" and it's a different issue though. Isn't the objective to prevent "crime", and not worry about how the crime is committed? We could ban blue cars, and pat ourselves on the back about how much we've reduced the rate of "blue car accidents", but that would be a really really silly way to approach the issue.
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It's an attempt to take action to solve a problem. Surely you can distinguish between that and "golly we should all wish really hard that people weren't so mean".
Except the proposed action has no likelihood of addressing let along solving the problem and involves a significant infringement of a long established right within our legal system. So forgive me if I reject it as a legitimate solution. The degree to which other law enforcement and investigative measures can be enacted which might have some minor benefit seems more reasonable, if for no other reason than they are less likely to both make us less safe from criminal activities and less likely to automatically infringe our rights.