The barber shop I frequent looks like something out of the old West, or at least a Hollywood version of it. Cowboy movie posters, ammunition boxes -- It has more old guns and shooting paraphernalia on display than most small gun shops and indeed Bob the barber is a licensed gun dealer.
So anyway, there I am waiting my turn along with one deputy and the rest of my disreputable contemporaries and reading American Rifleman -- and the first thing I see is an article by Wayne LaPierre of the NRA telling us that the "irreversible ratchet" of gun control has been turned back in Canada after their gun registration policy has cost a fortune and produced no measurable results. Why am I laughing? It's because that "camel's nose" and "irreversible ratchet" argument has been used to death since I can remember to counter any gun control laws at all, reasonable and unreasonable. It's because all I hear from NRA sources is that Obama is a gun grabber and he's so close to grabbing your guns that you'd better stock up on ammo and bury it in the back yard because here we go down the slippery slope to disarmed totalitarianism. Catalogs are selling books on just how to do that and ammunition prices are sky high, along with the prices of military surplus waterproof containers. Shops can't keep AK-47s on the racks.
Then if one looks at the news and realizes that under the current administration gun rights have been expanded to allow concealed carry in the national parks, as they are in most state parks and nearly everywhere else, that the last bastion of handgun banning, Chicago, Illinois may be about to fall and that 309 members of Congress and a majority of Americans approve, -- one has a hard time believing that there is a nationwide confiscation program being planned or that any gun control measures are by nature irreversible. Nearly all the states now issue concealed carry permits while crime continues to decline, so if that policy of citing the slippery slope fallacy has been debunked, where is the apology for all the fear mongering? were they wrong? Did the will of the majority actually prevail over the evil gun grabbing Liberals just like it's supposed to?
No, the ratchet works both ways, the camel isn't interested in your tent and the slope wasn't so slippery after all. Do I suspect that the worst thing that could happen to the NRA would be a definitive affirmation of the second amendment of the individual's right to keep and bear arms and a legislative branch inclined to go along with them? Does a red-neck shoot in the woods?
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteAnd according to this article, I totally agree with your opinion, but only this time! :)
I thought gun sales were going through the roof because...
ReplyDelete...Liberals had a majority in Congress?
...there was a black man in the White House?"
...the President was a muslim who was not born in the United States?
Now you want me to believe that the reason gun sales have gone through the roof is because all these people thought that the gooberment was going to take their guns away...
Oh, and we wonder why reality is such a foreign concept to so many...
Well, don't forget Nazi Pelosi and ACORN. There are ever so many reasons to buy more ammunition and bury it in the back yard.
ReplyDeleteI'm always suspicious of slippery-slope arguments. Based on such arguments, the government should never change anything at all, since any change could conceiveably be interpreted as legitimizing something bad later on.
ReplyDeleteThe basic assumption behind the SS argument is that "if we go an inch, we'll go a foot and if we go a foot we'll go a mile"
ReplyDeleteSince that's an assumption without any supporting evidence, the argument is a fallacy. And you're right, it's always that argument against doing anything.
It's like the potato chip argument -- don't eat one because you'll then eat two and then four and. . . well OK, that one is true.
Paul Fussell, author of some of the more painful works on the 'good war' (WWII) gets this 2nd Amendment business right.
ReplyDeleteIn his collection of essays "Thank God for the Atom Bomb..." Fussell opines that if you own a weapon you've joined the militia. A weekend a month training in handling arms and small unit tactics. A couple of weeks every other year or so living in a tent, digging strip latrines and defending our borders. And hope you don't draw Canada in the winter or Mexico in the summer.
Sounds right to me.
"Does a red-neck shoot in the woods? "
ReplyDeleteHey! I resemble that remark :)
I'm afraid I do too.
ReplyDelete