Political Memes

You can find all sorts of well reasoned arguments if you just do a basic web search. And I mean that honestly. There are plenty of intelligent people who can reasonably argue that the Second Amendment ought to continue to exist, and it ought to be interpreted in a way that allows people to have their own shotguns or rifles or handguns.

I think a lot of the arguments that are made on paper look okay at a glance, but whether they stand up to statistical analysis is a different question. For example, we know that when seconds count police are minutes or hours away, you just can't expect the police to keep you safe, so you might argue that you should have guns in your house to protect yourself from home invasion. And there's some truth to that. At the same time, the fact that you have guns in your house makes it more likely that your kids are going to accidentally shoot themselves or someone else, or that you're going to. So the problem you're trying to solve by owning a weapon creates another risk, which offsets the overall value. But then that gets into a question of priorities and how much control you think you have over guns in your own home. Or you might remark that perhaps the solution is to decrease poverty, so that there is less likelihood of anyone trying to break into your house, or you could suggest that we try to fix the broken police system in the country, so that cops actually have some incentive to respond quickly to home invasion calls, and the cops won't accidentally shoot you if they think you're the criminal when you're actually the resident.

And even if you can argue that people ought to be able to have weapons to protect themselves from home invasion, then there's a lot of disagreement about what kind of weapons ought to be permissible. Perhaps shotguns or rifles should be allowed but handguns shouldn't, because you can't easily hide a shotgun or a rifle. And then you get into strange statistical analyses of what kind of guns tend to be used in what kind of shootings, and which ones are relatively safe, and which ones criminals would switch to if they had no other option.

So I think all of that is complicated enough that people who really want to keep their guns can get lost in the statistics and logic, and I didn't even go into depth, but you can imagine how people who want to make the affair complicated would do so. And all of that happens so that they don't have to answer the question about why your children got shot and Australia no longer has that problem, because they fixed it the last time their children got shot.