Quote of the day—Sebastian

Nothing is ever as easy as zealots want to convince you it is. If someone tells you there’s a simple solution to something, they are either ignorant, or know better and are hoping you’re ignorant enough to buy it. Gun ownership is no magic bullet against bad things happening, and gun control isn’t either. That’s why I’m not about grand solutions, and tend to believe people should be left free to fix their own problems and make their own choices. I oppose gun control because the movement is philosophically centered around denying individuals the right to make their own decisions about their own lives, security, and happiness.

Sebastian
October 26, 2016
Toddlers & Guns Continues
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

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6 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Sebastian

  1. I call this the ‘Silver Bullet Fallacy’. The belief that, if we just DO THIS ONE THING, everything will be okay and the seas will recede and the rainbows will come out, etc, etc.

    • Exactly. And the rise of the powerful central government is an institutionalization of that fallacy. You can see it starting with the Federalists, but it becomes really blatant starting with Teddy Roosevelt and Woody Wilson.

  2. There are often simple answers, but they are rarely easy or painless. The problem is that people demand painless (or at least, no pain now) as a prerequisite for any plan. So no simple and effective plan is ever considered. Or else they define the goal as something that any rational person would see if clearly impossible, which ensures that any attempt at it will have negative side-effects.

    Pretend a goal is on the other side of the wall, and it is shiny and sounds great. But it’s actually an illusion; it is impossible.

    Everyone wants to get over the wall to achieve the goal, but nobody wants to do all the hard work of jumping high all at once, and they fear actually getting there and having their illusion dashed when they try to pick it up, so they only put in half-measures on training. They face-plant into the middle of the wall, which only encourages the wall-builder to built it a little bit higher…. which makes the illusion appear all the more real, encouraging the jumpers to try just a little bit harder, and the pain of failure just a little bit greater. They keep doubling down and refusing to admit they can’t get over the wall, and even if they did it would be a failure, because that would an admission to themselves and the world THEY are a failure. They are too invested in the illusion to move on to goals which might work.

    • I would add that “life is pain” and to think that any stance on gun control is not going to involve some pain is naive.

      If we completely adhered to the Constitution we would have virtually no gun laws. So, we might have a few more instances of bad people doing bad things with them. Still these real world negatives are vastly outweighed by the positive effects of wide spread firearm ownership and carry that deters or stops crimes and checks our government.

      Conversely, strict gun control means good citizens get convicted for weapons possession, criminals are emboldened, and government is even more disrespectful of citizens and civil rights. A few bad actors might be stopped, but we know bad guys easily go around gun laws that only seem to impact the law-abiding. The balance in this awful equation is a lot more pain for good citizens.

      So pain is a part of life and we need to decide how to best manage it. The pain of a school shooting does not eclipse the pain of wide spread gun laws.

      • Exactly. But when you are surrounded by people with who chant the mantra “safety first!” and do everything they can to avoid the pain of lawsuits, they do all sorts of things to avoid pain now, virtually guaranteeing much greater pain later. Witness our schools: the pain of even minor subjective offense cannot be tolerated. In the name of tolerance and diversity, they have many zero-tolerance policies to enforce absolute intellectual conformity.

  3. People look for the grand solution because it is the nature of people to want to see a giant cause for giant results. In the Middle Ages people believed that the Black Plagues were caused by everything from comets to eating butter. The idea that a tiny flea could cause such a huge disaster was unimaginable. People at that time thought that comets and planets affected the lives of kings and the fortunes of countries.

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