Echoed from Robb Allen

Robb Allen @ItsRobbAllen
 
#GunControl is the belief that declawing the cat will protect it against other animals.
 
Let’s say you have a cat that likes to go outside and enjoy the weather. You notice that your cat is getting in fights with the wild cats roaming your ‘hood, so you do your part to reduce feline violence by realizing that if all cats were declawed, this wouldn’t be a problem.

So you declaw your cat. You can’t declaw the ones roaming the neighborhood because they’re wild, and thus not constrained to the rules you’ve laid out. Instead, you simply control the one thing you can, and that is your cat. Your cat is now at a disadvantage since the other cats aren’t going to declaw themselves nor are they going to see that your kitty is defenseless and thus will keep their weapons sheathed during a conflict.

This is how gun control works.

If the goal is to remove guns from the streets, it doesn’t because criminals aren’t going to turn theirs in, and there are already too many of them out there to get rid of (the other cats will keep their claws). If the goal is to punish criminals for having guns, that doesn’t stop them either since they’re already assuming the risk that plying their trade entails. The feral cats aren’t going to be dissuaded from fighting just because you tell them you’ll punish them more for having claws.

All in all, that’s a pretty damned good turn of phrase that holds up pretty well for an analogy (all analogies eventually fail because an apple isn’t an orange).

--I will use this analogy.

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