Over at the Duke Center for Firearms Law, there’s a good piece this week by A.W. Geisel explaining the multiple lawsuits over the ATF’s brace ban. Some of the suits attack the brace ban from an administrative law angle, and others mount a frontal attack on Second Amendment grounds. Geisel posted the upshot in
I was mulling over the 600 hour's requirement to become a licensed hairdresser, and found myself wondering, "is that really that unreasonable, especially compared to carrying a concealed handgun?"
After all, being a hairdresser necessarily involves wielding a variety of sharp objects around someone else's head, several hours a day; there's a lot of potential for injury there, possibly resulting in lasting disfigurement, so that risk requires a lot of mitigation. By contrast, teaching someone how to carry a firearm responsibly is largely a matter of "keep it holstered unless and until a very limited set of circumstances apply in which you're justified in inflicting lethal injury on someone." If all we had to teach hairdressers was "leave your scissors on the cart at all times, unless and until you have reason to need to stab someone with them," hairdresser training could be *a lot* shorter. Concealed carriers don't need to know how to *safely* point a gun at someone's head eight hours a day.
This argument is why I think the anti-gun control (or pro gun) communities and the pro choice (pro abortion) communities should come together. It's not that the pro gun community is FOR shooting violence, it's that we realize merely banning guns won't fix it (and isn't the root cause anyway). Likewise, the pro choice community isn't demanding that everyone use abortion and only abortion as a means of birth control, just that we would still like it to be an option, a safe, legal option, until we fix all the other issues that cause unwanted pregnancies (better sex education, better access to other forms of birth control - who knew Planned Parenthood was good for the communities they're in? - less financial stress, better access to health care including mental health) and abortions fade away into a rarity instead of the primary answer. In fact, fixing many of the things that cause violent shootings to happen (financial stress, mental health care access) will also lower the number of abortions performed.
I think the other proof (or at least the excuse I tell myself to believe this is true) that this would work is that this meeting of the communities would thoroughly piss off the extremes in American politics - the far right would be screaming that killing babies would make Jesus cry upon his cross, and the far left would be screaming "how dare you?! guns are the atheist Devil!!" Anything that manages to piss off the extemists makes my Moderate little heart leap with joy. Why haven't we seen this happen yet? Both sides of the issues would rather play tit for tat games instead of pausing to think around their emotions. Which is why we see Texas banning abortions in response to California banning guns and so on and so on. I used to think we could solve the issues by introducing legislature that would tie the two issues directly together (ban one, you automatically ban the other), but all these tit for tat legislation moves we see have told me the various "true believers" would rather lose the thing they prefer so long as they could spite the thing they despise.
> The general form of it is:
> Stupid rule exists in Circumstance X, and I like X.
> Stupid rule does not exist in similar Circumstance Y, and I don’t like Y.
> That is an unjustifiable double standard.
> So the rule should be applied to Y just like it’s applied to X. (This one is the boomerang.)
My favourite euphemism to refer to this general form is "One man's Ponens is another man's Tollens" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_tollens). The idea being that, in formal logic, if you have a material implication it can go both ways:
Stupid Rule X implies Stupid Rule Y
(Ponens) Stupid Rule X exists, therefore Stupid Rule Y should exist
(Tollens) Stupid Rule Y does not exist, therefore Stupid Rule X should not exist
I was mulling over the 600 hour's requirement to become a licensed hairdresser, and found myself wondering, "is that really that unreasonable, especially compared to carrying a concealed handgun?"
After all, being a hairdresser necessarily involves wielding a variety of sharp objects around someone else's head, several hours a day; there's a lot of potential for injury there, possibly resulting in lasting disfigurement, so that risk requires a lot of mitigation. By contrast, teaching someone how to carry a firearm responsibly is largely a matter of "keep it holstered unless and until a very limited set of circumstances apply in which you're justified in inflicting lethal injury on someone." If all we had to teach hairdressers was "leave your scissors on the cart at all times, unless and until you have reason to need to stab someone with them," hairdresser training could be *a lot* shorter. Concealed carriers don't need to know how to *safely* point a gun at someone's head eight hours a day.
This argument is why I think the anti-gun control (or pro gun) communities and the pro choice (pro abortion) communities should come together. It's not that the pro gun community is FOR shooting violence, it's that we realize merely banning guns won't fix it (and isn't the root cause anyway). Likewise, the pro choice community isn't demanding that everyone use abortion and only abortion as a means of birth control, just that we would still like it to be an option, a safe, legal option, until we fix all the other issues that cause unwanted pregnancies (better sex education, better access to other forms of birth control - who knew Planned Parenthood was good for the communities they're in? - less financial stress, better access to health care including mental health) and abortions fade away into a rarity instead of the primary answer. In fact, fixing many of the things that cause violent shootings to happen (financial stress, mental health care access) will also lower the number of abortions performed.
I think the other proof (or at least the excuse I tell myself to believe this is true) that this would work is that this meeting of the communities would thoroughly piss off the extremes in American politics - the far right would be screaming that killing babies would make Jesus cry upon his cross, and the far left would be screaming "how dare you?! guns are the atheist Devil!!" Anything that manages to piss off the extemists makes my Moderate little heart leap with joy. Why haven't we seen this happen yet? Both sides of the issues would rather play tit for tat games instead of pausing to think around their emotions. Which is why we see Texas banning abortions in response to California banning guns and so on and so on. I used to think we could solve the issues by introducing legislature that would tie the two issues directly together (ban one, you automatically ban the other), but all these tit for tat legislation moves we see have told me the various "true believers" would rather lose the thing they prefer so long as they could spite the thing they despise.