Stepping In It

I commented at Joe's.

I'm repeating the comment here...


Since it was brought up, the slippery slope fallacy is a term from formal debates where example A conjecturally leads to example n without supporting evidence of a logical progression.

However, in the real world there are slippery slopes where the presence of the first law leads to the passage of the second and so on until there are no rights remaining.  This has been seen with guns more than once and since it takes decades of hard work to reverse a law it's considered far better to fight their passage in the first place and skip all of the potential harm of having it on the books.

The historical fact is that governments can't be trusted with lists of gun owners.  All too often those lists become the means to disarm the law abiding.  And it has happened in the US and it is happening in California since they have recently banned a subset of firearms which were registered.

Often the argument to ban guns is couched in terms of saving lives.  That would be a noble goal; except that deaths caused by the criminal use of firearms is trivial compared to the number of deaths caused by governments deciding that a particular group needs to be eliminated.  Hitler and the holocaust are a common example, but he's just an honorable mention in the race to murder the most of your own citizens.  Every nation that's murdered millions of its own people has gun registration followed by gun prohibition before any "undesirables" are arrested or killed.  It literally takes centuries for the criminals to murder enough people at their present rates to catch up with the number of people murdered in a mere 40 years of the 20th century.

That the entire intent of the 2nd amendment was that the populace be armed well enough to resist tyranny (however unlikely) seems to contraindicate the government having the power to even locate all the guns, let alone confiscate them.  The people who wrote the Bill of Rights left copious notes about their position and the intent of every one of the first ten amendments (and of the Constitution itself).

Because lists can be used to do so much harm to the populace, it is wise to prevent any lists to be made of both guns and their owners.  Requiring insurance is merely making a list that is held in the hands of a private company.  Those lists could be appropriated and then used to confiscate.

Remember the intent of the 2nd.  It is to allow the populace to be armed well enough to resist tyranny.  In practical terms that means the citizenry must have access to an arsenal equal to the government and not subject to the government's permission because tyranny is a government job.