Reply #123: "I do advocate firearm control, but not by banning all guns."

[iverglas]

But again, that's at least very close to a straw person.

Anyone who advocates "banning all guns" is a distant outlier, far beyond the fringe of the discussion. No one could possibly defend that position. So any such person can simply be ignored. (Or, in this place, outed for the troll they commonly are.)

Distinguishing one's self from such a person, assuming there is one, is just giving weight to the straw person argument so often employed in service of the gun militant agenda. They have to be hypervigilant, they have to exercise their right to tote guns around in public, they have to fight every firearms control proposal, because somebody is trying to ban all guns!

In the case of reproductive rights, that is certainly the position I take: fight the bastards on every front, give not one inch, because they will be wanting the whole bolt. They don't want "reasonable restrictions on abortion", they want to outlaw all abortions. And of course there are no "reasonable restrictions on abortion", so I'm not going to pretend there are in some effort to placate them and hope they won't go after more. They will.

This is not the case in the firearms control discussion. I don't want to "ban all guns", nor does anyone actually involved in the firearms control cause in the US: no one does but the most ignorant/thoughtless fringe element, if it really exists. The "ban all guns" brigade is a bogeyman employed by the right wing and its gun militant brigade to rile up the troops. I prefer not to lend that effort any legitimacy.