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.
