Standard
fallacious anti-gun control argument:
Guns are weapons. Pro-gun control people want
guns to be
illegal. We might as well make
weapons in general illegal if we're making guns illegal. But weapons include such necessary
implements as knives, bricks, and almost anything if one is
creative enough, therefore to ban all weapons is absurd.
Standard fallacious pro-gun control argument:
Guns are weapons. Anti-gun control people want guns to be legal. We might as well make weapons in general legal. But weapons include things of such ridiculous power as nukes that can blow up cities and engineered diseases that could potentially do much worse, therefore to make all weapons legal is absurd.
Notice something about these two arguments? Besides that they're nonsense? They're not contradictory. It's not an either-or thing here. It's a continuum we're arguing over and few people seem to realize that. It's not about abolutes - it's just where to put the cutoff point. Show me a person who thinks people should all own their own nukes, or a person who thinks all heavy blunt objects should be banned, and I'll show you a person who could use spending some time hospitalized. You don't want things around that will make it easy for some wacko to up and kill a whole buncha people, and you don't want to get rid of things that are useful for people to have around. There's a balance between utility and danger here that we should be looking for rather than wasting time calling each other fanatics.