A: I am against guns, because guns kill people and I am against killing people. I am horrified that someone likes killing people.
B: No, I don’t like killing people, that’s nonsense. I believe that having guns would reduce killings. Here is my model that kinda supports my argument...
A: Nice try! But I know you truly are just another nutjob who likes killing people. See, we have fundamentally different values, that’s why we can never agree.
Okay; I admit that I am not an American, and I have never debated any Americans on this topic. I am just extrapolating from my general model of people. But I have a feeling that if I went to a random progressive American university, chose dozen random anti-gun students and asked them: “explain to me why some people are pro-guns”, most of them wouldn’t give an answer “because according to their model (which is factually wrong, of course), owning guns prevents human deaths”. Instead I would probably hear something about crazyness or religion or something like that. (If there actually was some research about this, I would like to see the results.)
You can’t drink alcohol on a beach in New Jersey (without a permit). Why? Because some idiot was unreasonable once, and someone complained, and now there is a universal quantifier in place.
It’s hard to draw lines against scoundrel behavior in a way that avoids undesirable side effects for reasonable people (law is hard because it is a kind of applied analytic philosophy).
I imagine gun debates like this:
A: I am against guns, because guns kill people and I am against killing people. I am horrified that someone likes killing people.
B: No, I don’t like killing people, that’s nonsense. I believe that having guns would reduce killings. Here is my model that kinda supports my argument...
A: Nice try! But I know you truly are just another nutjob who likes killing people. See, we have fundamentally different values, that’s why we can never agree.
Okay; I admit that I am not an American, and I have never debated any Americans on this topic. I am just extrapolating from my general model of people. But I have a feeling that if I went to a random progressive American university, chose dozen random anti-gun students and asked them: “explain to me why some people are pro-guns”, most of them wouldn’t give an answer “because according to their model (which is factually wrong, of course), owning guns prevents human deaths”. Instead I would probably hear something about crazyness or religion or something like that. (If there actually was some research about this, I would like to see the results.)
You can’t drink alcohol on a beach in New Jersey (without a permit). Why? Because some idiot was unreasonable once, and someone complained, and now there is a universal quantifier in place.
It’s hard to draw lines against scoundrel behavior in a way that avoids undesirable side effects for reasonable people (law is hard because it is a kind of applied analytic philosophy).