Michael Huemer - The Moral Case Against Gun Control
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- Опубліковано 27 лип 2024
- Michael Huemer, professor of philosophy, makes the moral case against gun control laws at the University of San Diego's Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy. Shermer's remarks are part of a debate with Michael Shermer. Watch the whole video here: • DEBATE: Does America N... .
Title should be:
“Adam Driver makes the case for the right to gun ownership”
If only our policy makers could be this logical. Thank you for this well thought out argument.
Have you ever heard debates when deciding on policies by politicians?
It's always 99% rhetoric.
Very Based
Hi bean
Half of the comments on this video are people asserting that his argument is invalid or unsound, yet none of them explain how.
this is their answer: "muh feelings"
or sometimes: "if we ban guns, criminals will become good people by the magic power of friendship"
1) He assumes, but never establishes the moral right to bear arms (very different from the legal right, think slavery), and then proceeds to argue against violating the moral right to bear arms except in the most extreme circumstances.
2) He makes a general claim: "The Moral Case Against Gun Control", but only shows that a specific set of gun restrictions are flawed. I grant that the video's title might be clickbait, since the title of his slideshow is "Problems with Gun Control". Still, it seems like there could be effective gun control, since 95% of the world has it, and he only considers a very narrow band of options.
3) He compares "Defensive Gun Use" to "Gun Crimes", but presumably you can defend against misdemeanors and unarmed criminals with a gun, so it's an apples and oranges comparison. How many unarmed burglaries are morally equivalent to murder?
All these points can be fixed, and there may still be a moral case against gun control, but it isn't this one.
@@urikamoment I think the specific cases were used to underscore the second component of his argument; the main thrust of his argument was that: 1) gun ownership is a right, which he argued for in the beginning with the analogy about the government being an accomplice to crime, and 2) that in order for the state to be ethically permitted to violate someone's ability to exercise their right, the person's exercising of their right must produce much more bad than good (sorry for the poor wording there). The specific cases highlighted emphasize that it's not at all obvious that having guns makes us worse off than having no guns, so the state doesn't have the right to take them. To me, this is the strongest argument in favor of gun control on offer, but that's just my opinion.
@@urikamoment exactly right, you saved me the time of saying this myself.
I'm in Australia, and I've got to tell you, we look in bemusement at the USA on these issues.
I find michael to be quite a poor moral philosopher. I've disagreed on pretty much everything I've heard him say so far.
@@haydenwalton2766 (Un?)Surprisingly, the quality of someone's philosophy and your tendency to agree with them are probably not positively correlated.
a) Person A visits their friend, Person B, who is known to suffer from mental illness. Person A leaves a loaded gun on Person B's coffee table. After Person A leaves, Person B commits suicide with the gun.
Q: Did Person A participate in Person B's suicide?
b) Person A visits their friend, Person B, who is known to suffer from mental illness. Person A actively encourages Person B to commit suicide, and hands a gun to Person B. After Person A leaves, Person B commits suicide with the gun.
Q: Did Person A participate in Person B's suicide?
c) Person A openly declares that if they possessed a gun, they would commit a school shooting. This has been made aware to educational and police authorities. Because of a lack of red-flag laws, Person A legally purchases a gun through a gun show loophole and commits a school shooting.
Q: Did the lawmakers participate in the school shooting?
While not identical, I hope to have illustrated the limitations of Huemer's argument. If the state is an accomplice when the 'good' person is killed because they can't own a gun, then the state is equally responsible for when a 'bad' person kills people because they have access to guns.
Furthermore, by Huemer's logic, if personal safety is contingent upon all people having access to and owning guns, then America should have the lowest rate of violent crimes among developed countries. Unfortunately, the opposite is true, and America has the highest rates of violent crime among developed countries.
{While not identical, I hope to have illustrated the limitations of Huemer's argument. If the state is an accomplice when the 'good' person is killed because they can't own a gun, then the state is equally responsible for when a 'bad' person kills people because they have access to guns.}
This is false and assumes something like a necessarily totalitarian government, which Huemer(and I would disagree with). As he stated: "Your first moral duty is not to make sure that all the problems in the world are solved, but to make sure that you yourself do not violate the rights of any human being." You are assuming that governments are responsible to fix all problems in the world even if they have to violate the rights of individuals.
The government is not responsible for every problem it never fixed, but it is morally responsible for every violation of rights it commits and it becomes morally responsible for every negative consequence of its rights violations.
Very well reasoned arguments. I wish more people debated like this. Clear, rational and calm.
How do the liberals explain country with very strict gun laws, like Jamaica for example, having TEN times higher homicide rate than USA?
Jamaica is also different from the United States in many other ways. Cherry-picking a counter-example is no controlled experiment.
@@whitesoxMLB Citing nations like Australia or Germany is no less cherry picking. Pointing to any other nation is questionable.
There should be no law prohibiting concealed weapons or open carried weapons. The same reasoning against the purchase of guns applies to purchase of drugs. There is a very large drug culture. The war against drugs has failed to stop criminals from selling guns.
What???? It's okay to kill an innocent person to "maybe" prevent a "possible" war?
*I don't appreciate the term gun control being presented as being the same as gun bans. The idea of gun control is about increasing the difficulty of access for people who have presented themselves as being unfit for gun ownership. This is something that even gun owners support, since they understand the irresponsible gun owners are a threat to those around them.*
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The term right is a sociological construct regarding what is considered generally desirable for all. Thus the moment whatever is being denoted as a right is considered undesirable and/or problematic if left unconstrained - it is no longer a right.
It is the case that there will be individuals who will not follow the law, but that is a non-issue with regard to having a particular law, since the law is about redress in the event that a violation has occurred and/or to increase the difficulty of an undesirable state of affairs. Laws are an attempt to preclude/retard undesirable states of affairs and/or promote/support desirable states of affairs.
I agree that guns are associated with self defense, unfortunately, it is also associated with assault of others. Thus, both states of affairs are true and the issue becomes what takes priority in the context of our social tapestries. I suspect most would agree that once an individual presents as one who will use guns as a means of assault that their use in such a manner forfeits the reasonableness of their having legal ownership and/or access.
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I consider the accomplice to be worse in the scenarios you painted, since the accomplice also denotes betrayal and thus instrumental in the victim's death. Since, in the absence of the accomplice there is room for the possibility of defense.
I consider the case of the state precluding access to a gun to not be analogous to the accomplice, since, the accomplice was an active participant to depriving the victim during an active aggression while the state had set the potential for such an event. Unfortunately, any granting of a gun also until the potential for the individual to be an aggressor with the gun.
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I don't share the intuition that it would be wrong to frame an innocent person to prevent massive injury and death, since not doing so is far worse. However, the wrong if ever discovered has the implication of causing far more problems (value of various institutions such as the police and/justice system are predicated on trust; and a violation of trust of institutions will likely result in far less support of the civility, order, and relative safety that such institutions generally foster) than what it solves in the moment and is thus far worse an option.
"I don't appreciate the term gun control being presented as being the same as gun bans." - Whether you appreciate it or not, the reality is that most gun-control advocacy groups have as either their stated or implicit goal the prohibition on non-government ownership of firearms. The fact that their tactics are incremental does not change that goal.
"The term right is a sociological construct regarding what is considered generally desirable for all. Thus the moment whatever is being denoted as a right is considered undesirable and/or problematic if left unconstrained - it is no longer a right." - Nothing in Huemer's argument requires that rights be absolute. No right is unconstrained. Huemer's argument is that the proper bounds of such constraint must account for the efficacy of the constraint on its intended target (here, criminals) *and* the adverse impact of the constraint on innocents (e.g. those who would otherwise use their firearm in justified self defense). Nowhere does Huemer argue there should be no constraints on gun owners.
"I suspect most would agree that once an individual presents as one who will use guns as a means of assault that their use in such a manner forfeits the reasonableness of their having legal ownership and/or access." - Sure, except most gun control laws in the United States are not narrowly tailored to individuals who present as one who will use guns as a means of assault. Thus, even by your stated metric, current gun control laws are overly broad and thus an unjustified infringement on the right to self defense for the millions of gun owners who do not fit that criterion.
"I don't share the intuition that it would be wrong to frame an innocent person to prevent massive injury and death, since not doing so is far worse." - If it is not clear to you why sacrificing the innocent person to quell the mob is morally dubious, regardless of whether or not the Sheriff's legerdemain is discovered, I might just suggest that you are not well-suited to judge moral questions. Sacrificing innocent people in secret is no more moral than doing it openly, and arguably less so.
@@_emh
Do you support some restriction on the number of shoots available without reloading?
Do you support some restriction on penetration power of a gun?
Do you support denial of gun ownership for those convicted of violent felonies? (This would entail the removal of ANY loopholes for the background check required to uphold this idea.)
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I have never advocated for the banning of guns.
The framing of an innocent is less of an issue than the assault to the overall trust of process that such an act would cause. Thus, it is not as much about the innocent, but rather the collapse of order and thus instigates for mob justice. The point...the framing of an innocent is horrid...the collapse of a justice due to such an act having been committed is far worse.
Consider that my issue with Trump wasn't that he was/is a horrid individual, but rather the sociological costs his being president would cause. Unfortunately, it happened and now we have major damage to our social institutions which maintain the country.
@@MyContext "Do you support some restriction on the number of shoots available without reloading?" - No. Again, using Huemer's rubric, such a rule demonstrably infringes on the rights of the law-abiding and criminals don't comply with it.
"Do you support some restriction on penetration power of a gun?" - No. First, the number of homicides committed each year with a high-powered cartridge are vanishingly small, if not zero. The FBI data sadly doesn't track rifles by caliber, but out of a total 19,200 reported homicides in 2022 only 542 were with rifles of any kind. The most common rifle caliber in the United States is the 5.56 NATO/.223 Remington, which is a low-powered cartridge by any ballistic standard. Banning high-powered cartridges like the .30-06 Springfield is not consistent with an aim of curbing gun violence and would impact only hunters and sportsman who use such cartridges.
Moreover, while only 542 homicides by rifle occurred in 2022, knives and other cutting instruments were used in 1,630 homicides, nearly three times as many. Do you support federal knife control laws and, if not, why not? Hands, fists, and feet were used in 665 homicides. What laws do you propose to address these homicides, or are they unworthy of attention because the "bad" tool wasn't used? The victims are no less dead. Why the lack of lobbying for the victims who were beaten to death?
"Do you support denial of gun ownership for those convicted of violent felonies? (This would entail the removal of ANY loopholes for the background check required to uphold this idea.)" - Sure. Of course there is no loophole. If the antigunners truly wanted universal background checks, you could have them tomorrow: Simply open up the existing NICS website to all U.S. citizens to enter the personal information of the buyer and run the instant check themselves. That would immediately accomplish the goal of universal background checks. Every antigun organization (e.g. Moms Demand, Handgun Control, Inc., etc.) has opposed this proposal and instead lobbies for what Biden's ATF currently is trying to impose by fiat: Requiring all private transactions to be recorded by an FFL. The only purpose of such a policy is to create a comprehensive registry to enable later confiscation. So yes, I'm fine with opening up NICS for universal checks, but there is no legitimate purpose for a national registry, which is the true aim of the antigun lobby as demonstrated by their opposition to a universal check system that doesn't include a registry.
"I have never advocated for the banning of guns." - I did not say you did, nor is that relevant. All of the major gun control organizations have bans as part of their agenda, either explicitly or implicitly as evidenced by their policy proposals and tactics.
"Consider that my issue with Trump wasn't that he was/is a horrid individual, but rather the sociological costs his being president would cause. Unfortunately, it happened and now we have major damage to our social institutions which maintain the country." - I am no fan of Trump, but aside from his entertainment value the key benefit of his presidency was that it exposed the decay of our governmental institutions that already existed. Middle America, its work ethic, its social institutions, all still exist and maintain the country. The coastal elites who seek to rule Middle America from D.C. with an iron fist, they're anxious about Trump because he reveals their true authoritarian nature. They're no better than he is. Trump is a mirror.
Just make murders illegal.
The percentage of people that will commit a haines crime like murder is much lower than 0.1%. Just to make the math easy, lets say it is 0.1%. Why would you want that 1 person in 1000 to know that he can do anything and not have to worry about the 999 people stopping them with a tool that can end their life right now? If you are afraid if a gun, don't pick one up. Thr other 998 people will happily protect you from that one person. If you take that away, you have to hope the police are close by too.
the problem with that argument is that most gun deaths are suicides. Gun laws prevent that. the rest are mass shootings, armed robberies, police shootings, etc. Mass shootings won't be prevented by other people with a gun. Armed robberies also likely won't be prevented by other people with a gun (most people aren't going to buy a gun anyways, those who do (who would be robbed with or without gun laws) will still be robbed because a force equalizer doesn't matter if you can be incapacitated easily (even women with guns or the elderly with guns can be fairly easily incapacitated, if anything them having guns is cause for more violence to incapacitate them)). IN the case police shootings civilians having guns would be a disaster
@@aidandoylepolitics If people were allowed to make the choice to carry or not, the term "mass shooting" would change from one shooter shooting 3 or more people to 3 or more people shooting one idiot before they could shoot at another person. But because people are taught to be terrified of a gun by either cowards, conquerors or treasonous citizens. When everyone carried a gun, victims of gun violence were nowhere as plentiful as they are today. Take out the numbers of gun violence victims in the 5 cities with the strictest gun control and this country is among the ten countries with the lowest gun violence rates in the world.
@@aidandoylepolitics Gun laws prevent suicides? Perhaps they prevent suicides by gun, but the data to support the argument that they prevent suicides with substitute means is far less clear. Japan has draconian gun control laws and among the highest suicide rates in the developed world. Why has their de facto ban on citizen owned firearms not cured suicide there?
Mass shootings are statistically rare, but your bare assertion that they "won't be prevented by other people with a gun" is belied by the reality that indeed they have been prevented in places where citizens are allowed to carry for defense. Just two recent examples are the Sutherland Springs church shooting, where parishioner Stephen Willeford shot and killed the perpetrator, preventing further innocent deaths, and the Greenwood Park Mall shooting, in which good Samaritan Elisjsha Dicken killed the perpetrator, again saving numerous innocent lives.
"Most people aren't going to buy a gun"? Millions of American adults already own handguns.
"Those who do will still be robbed because they can be incapacitated easily." First, the perpetrator needs to know whom among the group of targets is armed in order to know whom to incapacitate, so your argument doesn't apply to concealed carry, which is the most common form of carry. Second, if multiple citizens are concealed carrying, the perpetrator is far more likely to be injured or killed when attempting to disarm one of the citizens. Third, your alternative of disarming the targets renders them even more easily incapacitated, not less. So if your argument is meant to support a conclusion that more gun control laws are better, it's woefully unconvincing.
The moral case: you have a right to property and freedom aka you have a right to defend said property and life aka guns are freedom and property
He’s right!
Excellent arguments. And yes, I will find the government culpable. Will not sympathize when police shootings occur if a ban is put in place, because I will have to assume they are simply reacting to govt overreach.
Show the slides
I'd frame the innocent person
Wait but what about the counter example? If a state doesn't enact gun control and then a criminal kills a citizen, wouldn't that be the same as if the accomplice were to hand the killer his knife to kill the victim? If that is the case, then obviously this framework is flawed as there is no right action the government can make.
Large Fried Raviolo I think you could exchange gun with knife, illegal weapon, etc. and Huemer‘s arguments may become more appealing.
No. In your example the state is taking no action to aid in the death. Such, they might see a knife but choose not to intervene by taking it from the criminal.
In the Huemer example the state is taking an active step.
The state has no duty to protect you according to the state itself.
@@JChang0114I don't think this argument works in the context of a government. If the state does nothing at all to stop murders, is that morally benign? No. Even if you believe individuals have no positive duty to protect others from crime, the state surely does as this the foundational justification for its very existence.
The term "gun control" was chosen to elicit emotions to avoid rational discussion. The concept of "control" is closely related to "order". Order is the opposite of chaos, socially, e.g., an orderly society is a civil society, controlled by rules and laws.
Connecting gun ownership with gun control is an attempt to convey the idea that control of ownership is orderly, civil, and therefore a social good, moral. This is disingenuous, divisive, a phycological/epistemological trick to avoid a reasoned argument defending gun prohibition.
The goal is to attack private ownership, while ignoring public ownership, to deny self-defense while promoting elite privilege.
In the end, only govt. employees will have fire power, deployed by an elite, for an elite, without physical resistance..
This is tyranny.
Precisely. Even in NJ, where we finally can conceal carry, it costs hundreds of dollars to obtain. Just another obstacle they put in place to persuade anyone that’s not wealthy to just not deal with all the hassle
You could just as easily make the opposite case. Using the term "control" emphasizes the downside of the law, namely that it inherently restricts liberty, and so we should be more neutral terms like "gun reform" or "gun regulation."
I think this demonstrates the futility of arguing over terminology. Any term will have someone who objects to it and wants to use another phrase more slanted toward their side. You'll never find a phrase that suits everyone, and then you never get around to discussing the content of the issue. It reminds me of the debate between "illegal" and "undocumented" immigrants. We're talking about the same thing! Let's just settle on whatever word and get to discussing what our immigration policy should look like.
@@whitesoxMLB The problem with undefined words (terms) was demonstrated by the Socratic Dialogues over 2,000 years ago and persists today. If we can't agree on the meaning of words, we can't communicate. That is how debate works. The problem starts with people who use words that they don't understand, that vary within their minds, and create internal confusion. They can't think. They are cognitively impaired. They can't argue. But, they try and become frustrated, more confused, easy to manipulate by experts in verbal tricks, modern day sophists, "politics as usual". Eventually, social unrest grows until social collapse.
"...just settle on whatever word..." = skipping definitions and killing communication.
@@1voluntaryist There's a difference between arguing over denotation and connotation. "Illegal immigrant" and "undocumented immigrant", for example, denote the same group of people. We can pick either of those terms, be in agreement about who we're discussing, and argue about what to do with them.
It's these arguments over connotation I find pointless. People who say that one term or other unfairly sounds too pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant aren't helping at all to clarify the meaning of words or facilitate dialogue. They're just refusing to communicate until the other side agrees to use the phrases that are nice sounding for their side.
If you wanted to argue about "feminism," for instance, I'd just ask you to define what YOU mean by feminism and then discuss it with you using that definition. Getting sidetracked by who has the "true" definition of feminism would be unhelpful.
I think the state complacency argument as formulated is weak and a little insulting intellectually. Consider the argument that if I don't give my child a gun when they go to school then if they get stabbed while they're at school I might as well have held my child down while the stabbing occurred. I wouldn't say this is a serious attempt at an argument, I struggle to imagine anyone not agreeing that there have to be reasonable bounds on culpability for indirect consequences of actions and these would need to be unpacked for this argument to be established at valid. Note I'm not saying there isn't an argument for state complicity, just that if one exists that argument should be the principle argument put Huemer puts forward and not this one.
I don't think Huemer believes half of the shit he defends - he just enjoys making abstract logical arguments that go against the grain.
Consider two options.
Option A: Cause an old woman to break her hip.
Option B: Cause a long list of things to happen of varying moral values, including an old woman breaking her hip but also other things like saving a cat from a tree, curing a migraine, etc.
Are those equally wrong? I would say not. Option B may be net good or bad based on complex weighting of values that reasonable people may differ on.
I think this demonstrates the flaw in Huemer's first analogy. Even if gun control does involve one element that is exactly as immoral as Huemer suggests, it's still unfair to compare it to an action that aims exclusively at causing that negative effect for no justifiable gain.
except for a stupid amendment there is no absolute right to own a gun.
Once I learned my masters wanted to disarm me, I knew it would never be an option. over my dead body.
Amen & Amen. The case for gun control is morally indefensible.
it's not that you dont just want criminals to own weapons, you just dont want any person who could become criminal in a a fit of rage, or intoxication to own them
Do governments ever kill innocent people? Surely your statement applies to people calling themselves a government as well.
@@charliedurnford3277 Government staff owning weapons are required to fullfil a number of regulations, including not drinking on the job, regular shooting training, proper use of force and are also much smaller in number than the general population.
Judges also kill or condemn innocent people, that doesnt mean that we should have no judges or that anyone should be able to judge trials.
@@manudehanoi Governments have killed more people than private individuals. Governments having a monopoly on guns presents far greater risk than private gun ownership. I’m sure you understand that most genocides have been committed by governments. If your argument is that the public should be unable to own firearms *just in case* they may choose to something criminal one day, then that argument applies to governments 100 fold.
@@charliedurnford3277 1) I dont think the US government has killed more americans than the US citizen
2)what's the last exemple in history you can recall of citizen resisting their own government successfully ?
There is difference between gun control and gun prohibition. There is the claim that any law restricting gun purchase is wrong. It is wrong to prevent anyone for any reason to buy any weapon.
The words in the constitution of the USA do not mention guns. The word is arms. So, one should be able to own missiles and nuclear weapons without restriction in order to defend oneself against any imaginable threat. I live in Canada. I enjoy the fact that I do not need to worry about some nut who has a gun will decide to "defend" themselves while I am out shopping for groceries. Only in the USA are arguments against gun control taken seriously. Just about everyone else in the world has grown up.
Dumbest thing I've read in like 3 weeks. How's your right to speech and assembly going on over there, Maple?
"The words in the constitution of the USA do not mention guns. The word is arms. So, one should be able to own missiles and nuclear weapons without restriction in order to defend oneself against any imaginable threat." - Yes. If one can afford all of the rare materials, machinery, and know-how to build one, go for it.
"Just about everyone else in the world has grown up." - They've "grown up" until they need someone to rescue them from a mess, usually of their own making. Then they're all too happy to see men with guns come to defend them. Only among the naive who believe their society is uniquely impervious to authoritarianism are such arguments for gun control taken seriously.
This argument in my opinion is fundamentally flawed. How about the people that die by gun accidents? Isn't it also the responsibility of the state to protect them by gun control?
No. In moral philosophy, the distinction between causing harm and allowing harm is significant, with the latter being the lesser of 2 evils.
No.
What kind of tyrannical bs would that be?
@@rexfeatherstone3977
No.
That's not the issue here, the issue is that the state shouldn't micromanage your life and the utility of freedom and autonomy.
why on earth is Huemer, an ethical vegan who argues for the rights of animals to keep their lives, saying that hunting is an innocent reason to own a gun
@@markscheifele8925 huemer does not merely argue for high welfare, he argues for animals' right to life. Idk why you started arguing for gun runs, I don't have an issue with gun rights
Jordan He says that because it’s not a crime. He probably doesn’t actually consider it innocent
@Jordan he mainly disagrees with factory farming. Hunting as a legitimate source of food isn't really opposed by most vegetarians.
@@Jordan-wn7kf He doesn't argue for animals' rigths to life, he even explicitly rejects doing so to make his case more commonsensical. His claim is that it's wrong to cause enormous amounts of suffering on animals for the sake of trivial benefits for humans. Additionally, among philosophers there's debate about the moral difference between suffering and killing. Some claim that it's unjustified to make animals suffer, but justified to kill them painlessly. Others thinks both are unjustified (e.g., McMahan).
Maybe a slip of the tongue.
the more I hear michael speak, the more I think what a poor moral philosopher he is.
you could drive a truck through his logic and reasoning
I've been watching and listening to his recent discussions on metaethics, and I share a bit of your sentiment.
Haven't watched this video in its entirety though.
@@t.d.2016 I been listening to him on moral realism lately.
he doesn't seem, to me, to have any logical arguement supporting this position, and seems to have very bad arguments against his position.
very interesting overall - I've no formal education in this area but have very different views
Never understood the right to own guns it’s stupid and counter productive to the argument, they’re not a necessity and the whole purpose of guns is to harm they are designed to harm, self defence is such a weak argument, that implies that your whole world view is that your in danger 24 hours a day, the only reason that would be the case is if you ironically have a relaxed system to access weapons, and the infatuation Americans have over this subject and on a parallel they’re incoherent belief in religion
I'm glad that you presumably find yourself in a position where you never have to seriously worry about your family being safe from violent crime. Please recognize that there are a great many people less fortunate than you in that regard. People live, work, and navigate high crime neighborhoods on a regular basis; places where security and police response is either poor or non-existent; or they are connected with dangerous people who pose a threat to them.
Designed to harm for self preservation which is the most fundamental right there is without which you have no other rights.
All I'm hearing is that you don't want the weak and vulnerable to be able to defend themselves and you want the bullies to be uncontested.
I take it you own no fire extinguishers in your home, since the chance of one's home catching fire is roughly as remote as one being a victim of a violent crime? You can simply rely on the fire fighters to show up, just as you would insist others wait for the police to arrive to defend them from the criminals.
And for women and the elderly, who without a handgun will be at the mercy of physically stronger male assailants, just a "good luck, godspeed" and a pat on the head?
This is absolutely the stupidest set of arguments I've ever heard in my entire life.
Why hold a position so weak you feel the need to lie?
@@BrianMasonP ??
Or perhaps you are too biased... :)
how about a counter-argument?
Funny, pointing out that the benefits of gun ownership FAR EXCEED the harms seems a very sound argument. Pointing out the HUGE non-compliance to laws, which means those laws are ineffective in accomplishing the goal of the laws, seems a very sound argument. There are MANY other sound arguments that support gun ownership. Perhaps the most sound argument, I have a right to self defense, guns are a means to self defense, my owning a gun HAS ZERO impact on your rights.