Ninth Stage

Another liberal changes his her position on gun-control.

To be quite honest, the majority of the response I got to my first blog on gun control was negative and angry, and it got me down quite a bit. But, the majority of the arguments I saw were also better, more thought out, and much more educated than the ones that I had previously come in contact with. It certaintly was enough to change my mind.

Note that angry comments against gun-control advocates don’t really help.

I like this thought experiment that helped open his her eyes:

One of the good arguments I heard described a theoretical situation which may arise if certain types of guns were banned. The scenario went something along these lines: a couple type of guns are banned, but the ban doesn’t work, crime rates rise, and as a response, more guns are banned. This process would only continue to…well, continue along this path. This was probably one of the first arguments that I really hadn’t thought of before which didn’t really include any technical information about guns and stats and whatnot, and it was really the first one that got me thinking. This certaintly does seem like a very real possibilty, and even when I was all for gun control I’d never had any intention of saying that all guns should be banned or restricted, just a few of the more dangerous ones. This argument started me thinking about the various possible downsides of gun control before the others, and probably warmed me up a little to the information the others provided.

Add SmellyCat-13 as another datum for Say Uncle’s trend line.

UPDATE: Here’s the post and comments that inspired SmellyCat-13’s conversion.