Man Bites Blog

A running theme of mine is that liberals are always advancing arguments for gun control that they would laugh out of the room if they were advanced for restrictions on abortion.

Ramesh Ponnuru points out one from Timothy Noah:

More legal guns therefore mean more illegal guns. More illegal guns mean more people get killed. The inconvenience this poses to the dead and their families, and to society at large, does not concern Scalia.

In the case of abortion, those who don’t like the procedure are supposed to acknowledge that people will get abortions anyway, and it’s better that they be “safe, legal” abortions than back alley abortions.

But in gun control, things are reversed.  Apparently, in this case, the existence of legal guns make illegal guns more common, since handguns aren’t intrinsically illegal, so the way to stop illegal guns is to make all guns illegal.

I’m not too heavily on either side of the gun control issue, though I think it’s worth noting that the right to bear arms is specifically mentioned in the Constitution, while the right to an abortion is not.

Reading this post from Matt Yglesias about how in spite of Heller, there will be no handguns in DC, I was reminded of the posts from the XX factor a couple weeks ago about there being only one abortion clinic in South Dakota, and Dana Stevens spinning a Cider House Rules type tale about a poor teenager who finds herself pregnant and travels to South Dakota’s one abortion clinic only to have to sign a paper that confirms what she’s actually doing.

It seems one could spin a similar yarn about a poor single mother living in D.C. who has been raped by an intruder in her home, and the assailiant has planned to return.  She would like to exercises her Second Amendment right to own a handgun to protect her from this assault, so she takes a half day off work, arranged for a baby-sitter, and takes the bus into Maryland to purchase said handgun, where she is informed not that she has to sign a paper attesting that handguns are dangerous, but that she cannot but one at all, since D.C. zoning laws do not allow for gun shops.  So she has to take the bus back to DC and cower with her children hoping that her assailant’s threats were groundless.

Now, I’m not saying this makes the case against gun control.  But they are both “constitutional rights,” and it seems that being completely prevented from exercising it is considerably more onerous than having to sign a paper.  But I don’t think you’ll see any D.C. residents who would like to own a handgun starring in any hypothetical stories from the XX Factor.