Well, we already have laws that make the possession of heroin illegal. They are broken all the time. With regards to the original point about silly laws that prevent us from spending our money and free time in ways that don't harm others, if person A is walking down the street and person B illegally uses heroin on the same street, person A is not likely to be harmed. You can't really say the same about person B and his/her machine gun.
You have established that person B is not going to follow the law in any case. So if there is a law in place preventing person B from possessing a machine gun, person B is still going to acquire a machine gun and use it illegally and person A is still harmed.
You haven't solved the problem by moving the solution further up the chain, but you have prevented responsible, law-abiding folks from acquiring a machine gun.
Laws against possession of heroin and laws against possession of fire arms work the same way with a lot of the same externalities. So it is odd that you would point to the failure of one to advocate for the other.
I'm always in favor of the first amendment, but this is one context where outlawing the firearms does make a difference. There is a significant lower penetration of firearms in Europe period since almost every European country bans possession.
That does not mean that someone who really wants a machine gun cannot get one - but that it takes a lot more effort to get one. Effort that many deranged and unstable people are not willing or able to dedicate the effort to see to fruition. Even in the age of anonymous online exchanges gun import rates are puny compared to firearm availability in the US.
I think it is sound psychology to believe if you make it really hard to get something that an irrational actor will be less likely to pursue destructive behavior. The difference between firearms and drugs is that drug users are recurrent customers and can form an underground economy, the sociopath with a machine gun is often a one time shopper. Seems more economics than anything else as to why it is more infeasible to maintain a firearms black market at scale comparable to the drug market, regardless of ethics.
> I'm always in favor of the first amendment, but this is one context where outlawing the firearms does make a difference. There is a significant lower penetration of firearms in Europe period since almost every European country bans possession.
Did you mean second amendment? Or do you mean that the pro-gun lobby does not have a right to free speech? If it didn't have implications beyond gun control, I might even support it. It is really sad that the only people in the pro-gun lobby are industry shills. Anybody who deviates ever so slightly from the official message gets effectively shut down by the lobby as not being one of them.
This argument is certainly logically sound but maybe it is ok for law abiding citizens to be prevented from owning machine guns. Also, lets prevent them from owning missiles, nuclear weapons, and deadly nerve gas.
But where does one draw the line? Cars can be deadly weapons too! And plastic forks! Maybe it's somewhere around "objects whose sole designed purpose is to kill large numbers of humans in a short period of time".
Isn't there a base level evolutionary incentive for everyone to have as few objects like that near them as possible?
Well, we already have laws that make the possession of heroin illegal. They are broken all the time. With regards to the original point about silly laws that prevent us from spending our money and free time in ways that don't harm others, if person A is walking down the street and person B illegally uses heroin on the same street, person A is not likely to be harmed. You can't really say the same about person B and his/her machine gun.