Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Ban fertilizer

We should ban fertilizer. Tim McVeigh used fertilizer to build a bomb. We should also ban airplanes. The 9/11 terrorists used airplanes.

4 comments:

  1. We should ban water. Do you know how many people drown every year?

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  2. I guess the primary way to address these demands would be (to quote a guy I've read), "This is an argument from analogy minus the argument."

    It seems to me that fertilizer and passenger planes are fundamentally disanalogous to guns given that the primary purpose of guns is to kill things (people) and the purposes of the other two are decidedly not this.

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  3. If proponents of gun bans qualify their position in that respect, then we can qualify the analogy. For instance, some aircraft are designed to kill people.

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  4. Did you notice that I snuck in a qualification regarding the aircraft? ;^D

    To be fair, I have seen some gun-ban proponents qualify their position in this manner. Generally it is in response to pushback from their opponents. The problem is, of course, that killing a person is not always wrong.

    I'm not sure that I have ever heard a persuasive argument for firearm bans.

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