And it would be rather silly of you to assume that to be my intention, wouldn’t it? It’s a wonder your side doesn’t slide off the face of the earth, what with all those slippery slopes surrounding you everywhere.
If, minty, if. I wrote IF. I’m pretty sure you read that word - after all you did quote it.
I know this doesn’t apply to you because you’ve said so in several threads. It does, however, apply to a great many of the people who wish to “regulate” guns. Obviously. Else we wouldn’t have these de facto gun bans. Sheesh. And we wouldn’t be sliding all over the place, if the gun control laws weren’t built on such an incline.
How are these laws of Chicago and D.C., not evidence of a slippery slope? Mandatory registration of legally owned handguns is invoked (something that even you claims to support), then the registration process is frozen even tho’ guns must still be registered to be legally owned. Mandatory registration was the hill would-be handgun owners were made to climb; freezing the process provided the ice. Slopes don’t get much more slippery.
“How are these laws of Chicago and D.C., not evidence of a slippery slope?”
Because as far as I know, the advocates of those city ordinances were perfectly frank about what they were attempting to accomplish.
FTR, there is a small community here in Virginia that has a gun ban which works. Anyone caught with a gun does time, a year IIRC. Unfortunately, I can’t recall the name of the town.
So, it’s your contention that a “slippery slope” necessarily contains a hidden agenda? I’ve always thought of it as situation that is merely “precarious,” and slips unyieldingly in one direction. I’ve never thought of a slippery slope as necessarily containing subterfuge.
A quick check of a couple on-line dictionaries and a site of logical fallacies seems to bear out my definition. None of these makes any mention of hidden agendas or intentional deceptions. If you can find one that does, I’d be interested in looking at it.
So, while they may have perfectly frank about their intentions, the examples may still be evidence of a the slippery slope.
I find it interesting that you labor under a different assumption. May explain a lot of the talking past each other you and I have been doing over the years when this idea comes up.
Umm, Jeff? That’s not evidence that a gun ban works. Evidence that it works would mean no prosecutions for possession of a gun would be necessary - no one has a gun; they’re banned. And it also would mean that no crimes (other than actually possessing the gun) are committed using the gun.
Isn’t this the desired result of a gun ban? No gun crime? That’s the mantra I hear.
Rather, the fact that people are prosecuted for posessing a gun means the ban doesn’t work. Else they’d not have one.
I will point out, and I think this is something left out of gun debates generally, that regulation on firearms works best when there are borders involved. If Raleigh, NC bans all rifles, but Lizard Lick, NC sells all the guns you want, you’ll just get people driving 45 minutes outside of Raleigh to buy their guns. If you ban guns in (snicker) all the South, then you’ll just get a market of people buying guns in New England, driving them down to the South, and selling them on the black market down here. There’s no borders to impair such smuggling. Only if you regulate guns on a national level do you make it even slightly plausible for specific gun control measures to work: in such a case, it becomes sufficiently difficult to smuggle guns that their prices go up, making demand for them diminish.
Daniel
That might make legitimate demand for them diminish. However, it’s also going to make theft of them increase. And black markets flourish. We tried a similar experiment in the 1920’s - a little thing called prohibition. And that worked so well.
It can’t be a slippery slope if what’s being sold is already the bottom of the hill. There’s nowhere further to slip from there.
Not necessarily intentional subtefuge, but there has to be somewhere else to go. Gun registration might be a slippery slope to gun confiscation, but gun confiscation isn’t a slippery slope leading to gun confiscation.
http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/distract/ss.htm
Of course, it’s pretty much a given that the slippery slope argument depends upon all movement being one-way, down to the bottom of the hill. In reality, movement on firearms issues is all over the place. What “shall issue” licenses giveth, the assault rifle ban taketh away.
Seems to me an obvious problem with the lame Prohibition canard is that you can make gin in a bathtub.
Firearms, I’m afraid, are not terribly comparable to alcohol. The size of a black market depends on many factors, including demand for the product, profit margin for the illegal sellers, difficulty of manufacture and transportation, significance and enforcement of legal deterrents, social acceptance, etc.
I’m not saying whether it’s a good idea (similar to outlawing heroin) or a bad idea (similar to outlawing alcohol). I’m just saying that local measures are absurdly easy to defeat, and only measures that apply to an area surrounded by enforced borders has any real teeth.
Daniel
One: that’s the same page I looked at, minty. And it backs my understanding of the term slippery slope. Subterfuge is not integral.
And two: So, in Chicago, the people are, according to your statement, already at the bottom of the slope - at least as far as handguns are concerned. The slope has already been descended. Simply because someone’s slid all the way down one particular hill does not mean that hill (and others) no longer exist. I, in fact, know the bottom of that particular hill has been reached. That is, in essence, why I offer it up as an example of the slippery slope. It’s a case where we can see the progression, in each precarious step, from the top all the way to the bottom.
If I were to use an example where the bottom has yet to be reached, only the initial steps have been taken, you’d tell me it’s not a good example - actions a, b, & c are still available - thus, you’d cry, the slope does not exist.
Anyway, so it’s not your contention that the slippery slope necessarily contains elements of subterfuge? How do you then explain your first statement:
Do you now maintain that the advocates of those city ordinances admitted when instituting mandatory handgun registration that they were perfectly frank about holding a future intent to freeze the registration process? This is the only way I can conceive to reconcile your statements. Please explain, as I’m sure this isn’t what you are saying. After all, it’s very unlikely the officials that instituted registration in Chicago in 1968 were still in power 14 years later in 1982.
Not necessarily. You can issue all the carry permits you wish, but if a person cannot legally possess the item they are licensed to carry, what good is that? This is pretty stretched, but not totally divorced from reality. After all, there are those who would simply ban ammunition on the grounds it’s a dangerous object, in order to circumvent, technically, a private right to bear arms. See also, Chicago again, where one may own handguns as long as they’re registered - you just are no longer able to register them. So, as I said, a stretch, but a stretch that’s supported by two related examples.
Fine. How 'bout cocaine? That one’s a little more difficult to manufacture. Also, a moderately skilled machinist won’t find it all that difficult to manufacture a simple firearm either. Guys like John Browning, in his early teens, were making rather complex firearms with tools far inferior to those that many hobbyists have in their garages today. There really aren’t that many parts necessary to craft something that will fire a bullet and none of them need be complex.
As irrationally tenacious as I may sometimes get, Unca Beer, I’m no match for your mastery. I tip my hat to you. (I have to tell you that, in my mind’s eye, totally unbidden by my conscious mind, I see you literally foaming at the mouth: a gargoyle grimace with sudsy trickles down your chin. Definitely gonna check under my bed tonight.)
A person with auto mechanic-level skills who has a couple of key machine tools can make a smoothbore shotgun or musket. I’ve seen it done as a college shop project over a semester. Look up “Zip guns” too on Google sometime for simpler versions.
Give me a small shop, a Bridgeport mill, and a rifled barrel, and enough time and I could make an assault rifle. (making the rifled barrel is always hard)
It’s not near as easy as making bathtub gin, but it’s nowhere near as hard as most technologically illiterate people think it is.
All or nothing? Rather, the fact that people are prosecuted for murder means the ban on killing people doesn’t work. Else they’d not kill people. In other words, a law shouldn’t be bothered with unless it’s 100% effective?
While I personally think that attempting to ban guns here is stupendously asenine, this particular argument isn’t helping.
The question isn’t whether it’s impossible; the question is whether the increased difficulty of obtaining guns would raise their price sufficiently that demand would drop sufficiently that few enough people would have guns that fewer attacks would be fatal.
Although some people would manufacture guns illegally if they were more strictly regulated, I would expect to see most illegal guns smuggled into the country rather than manufactured locally: cheap overseas factories would probably be more cost efficient, even when taking costs of smuggling into consideration, than small-scale local factories.
Finally, I’ll point out that while simple guns can be manufactured easily and might remain common, a simple gun is less likely to kill its target than a complicated gun. Otherwise, why would anyone use complicated guns?
Daniel
Yeah, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar . . .
Given this particlar ban, the desired result has been achieved. There is no gun crime simply because nobody wants to be caught with a gun. It’s a rare case of a ban that works and the reason it works is that it’s such a small town. Can’t be much more than 1000 citizens there, if that many.
I’ll provide a cite once I can find the name of the town.
That is precisely why the slippery slope is a fallacy.