Most of you who know me—and, this being my first foray into the enterprise of blogging, that’s pretty much everyone reading this—will know that I’ve been talking about doing this for some time now. It turns out it’s pretty fucking hard to put together stuff you’re comfortable submitting for the approval of The Midnight Society—er, the world—er, a dozen or so people… anyway, I’m getting on with it, so here we go:
I’m going to start with the first of a few questions I’d like to ask all the gun rights advocates, and Second Amendment enthusiasts, and especially the batshit gun fanatics out there who have managed to stake such a powerful position in America’s debate over what to do about firearm-related violence:
QUESTION ONE: You do realize the U.S. Military has more than just rifles, right?
This is something I’ve always had a problem with. There’s this popular notion amongst gun rights advocates that an important part of the motivation behind the 2nd amendment is to ensure that the people have at their disposal the means to overthrow a government that has run afoul of its authority and become tyrannically oppressive. And so there is this base suspicion that any effort to reduce the access of people to firearms must surely be an effort on the part of the government to suppress the ability of the governed to resist a forthcoming imposition of tyrannical rule.
Now, I think this notion is paranoid, if not completely absurd (I’ll go into that in another post). But even if I accept it, how exactly does having semiautomatic assault rifles with large magazines give you any credible recourse against a government that has all manner of highly sophisticated, far more powerful military implements at its disposal? I really just don’t get this part. How exactly is it that you’re going to overthrow a government that has fighter jets, tanks, fully automatic chain-fed machine guns, mortars, grenades, grenade launchers, fully automatic grenade launchers, nukes, submarines, aircraft carriers, you name it… using rifles?
(NOTE: Fully automatic grenade launchers are awesome)
If the argument is that the people need to have the ability to fight back against their government in the face of tyranny, is it also the argument that we need to make all those other things legal for everyone? I mean, should, say, George Soros (you know, the evil left-wing billionaire), have the ability to buy himself a squadron of F-16s with a full complement of munitions, a fully stocked artillery battalion, and a fully equipped infantry battalion carrying state-of-the-art automatic weapons (all of which would be within his means1)?
What about nukes? Should he be able to buy a nuke on the free market?
Because if not, if really this is just about being able to do SOMETHING, to be able to fight back in SOME way, then don’t we need to acknowledge that we’re arguing over degree and not nature, here? And a tiny tiny degree, at that? We’re already WAY past the point at which the government is better armed than ordinary citizens by orders of magnitude, so how does restricting the magazine on a semi-automatic assault rifle to 15 rounds suddenly render us hopelessly susceptible to government tyranny?
And if you’re just going to give me the standard crap about a slippery slope, then I’d like to know whether, if we were further up the slope, you’d make the same case. If the fully automatic M249, which can fire hundreds of rounds per minute and hold 1000 rounds in a canister, were legal, and Adam Lanza used that instead of the AR-15 to murder, say, 60 instead of 12 people in Aurora, Colorado, would you be arguing that it needs to stay legal?
And if you would be arguing that, and so believe that our existing gun regulations are too strict, then let me make one more observation: even the M249 is still very near the bottom of your “slippery slope.” The slope you’re worried about starts with “ordinary citizens shouldn’t be able to have nukes,” and continues past “they shouldn’t be able to have cluster bombs or the F-16s to drop them,” and then on past “yeah and they probably shouldn’t be able to have tanks with high range explosive ordinance” and then goes on and on until you get to the M249, and then, finally, to 30 rounds vs. 15 rounds in a goddamn rifle clip.
In case I haven’t made my point, I’ve drawn a picture a picture of the slippery slope as I understand it:
(Click image to enlarge)
1 In case you don’t believe me:
F-16 unit price: ~$47 million
Howitzer unit price: ~$3.68 million
F-16s in a squadron: 12 or more, so let’s just say 12—that should be enough to level the Fox News building. So the jets cost $47 million x 12 = $564 million.
Howitzers in a battalion: 12. So those would cost 12 x $3.68 million = $46.32 million (assuming he gets the same deal Australia did, and I mean come on, Obama’s a ruthless socialist tyrant, you know he’s gonna give his boy Soros a break.)
That brings the total tab to a little over $1 billion. George Soros is estimated to be worth more than $19 billion. So he’s still got more than 90% of his money left over for personnel, ammunition, small arms, provisions, and so forth.
The Reason Files 