From: gurgle@netcom.com (Pete Gontier)
Subject: assault keys
Keywords: encryption key hand gun
Organization: cellular
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 16:38:58 GMT

Recently, I allowed myself to be drawn into a discussion about
handgun control. I should have known better than to post on a topic
that has been consigned to a Usenet ghetto. I might as well have
posted about abortion. But I posted anyway -- that was my first
mistake. My second mistake was to allow people to get me to
follow-up to their follow-ups which had little to do with the
original post. My third mistake was continuing to unknowingly
follow-up to several newsgroups which didn't care one whit about
the issues involved. I did claim recently in the EFF group that I
wouldn't be responding to any further postings on the subject, and
that I would try to respond to email. But that posting went only to
the EFF group, so most folks continued to follow-up from wherever
they were reading.

In this message I hope to be able to explain what happened so that
the experience-hardened gun pundits don't go totally unanswered. I
do this not out of an interest in the issue of gun control. My
interest in that stopped as soon as the discussion turned away from
its original topic. I am continuing to respond because 1) this
"argument" has taken a particular form which I despise, that of
failing to address the original claims and running off wildly into
the night about several other only tangentially-related claims, and
2) I love to hear myself talk. (Anybody who posts to Usenet in this
expository way, including most everyone who has responded to me in
this thread, can claim that they aren't posting in part because
they like to hear themselves talk. But they'd be lying.)

The origin of the whole thread was someone posting to one of the
EFF groups about how some politician or other was trying to draw a
parallel between data encryption keys and guns. Various people
posted on whether that made any sense. I posted that I thought that
encryption keys were dissimilar to guns in that keys were unlikely
to be found involved in accidents in which one little boy uses his
daddy's data encryption key to kill another little boy in the
process of playing cops 'n' robbers.

I suggested a ban on handguns, whatever else it might do, good or
bad, might also reduce the incidence of such "accidents". (In fact,
a ban on handguns might be a stupid idea given the overwhleming
amount of bad things that result in addition to the decreased
"accident" rate. I should have been able to leave that unsaid.)
Then came the flood. People seemed totally unable to understand the
scope of my claim. That was my fourth mistake -- I assumed that
people would be able to understand the scope of my claim from
context. (Unfortunately, people don't read entire threads. They
jump in in the middle and jump to convenient conclusions.)

Various people thought they showed how handgun control would never
work because criminals would still have guns. That's nice, but I
wasn't talking about criminals.

Various people thought they showed how if handguns were removed
from the hands of the citizenry, (government) "oppression" would
result. That's nice, too, but it's outside the scope of what I had
to say.

Somebody wanted to know if I thought that anything else legal
besides handguns that I currently have no interest in should be
banned. I named the smoking of tobacco (among other things). This
really brought out the crazies. All of a sudden I was a Nazi
opposed to basic personal freedoms. Nothing could be further from
the truth, of course. My point in naming the smoking of tobacco was
not to point out that I was in favor of a ban on smoking, but that
the question itslef was flawed. Why be interested in what's
*legal*? That's the *least* relevant measure of the "rightness" of
an act, because it is the measure *most* likely to have been
manipulated by politicians. But people decided that instead of
evaluating my comment in context with its question, they'd simply
call me a Nazi.

(Incidently, for Usenet debate newbies, whenever someone uses the
word "Nazi" or "Hitler", you know they're completely out of
responses and the other side is, right or wrong, winning.)

Various people pointed out that I didn't have the slightest clue
about the statistics, as if statistics were causality, that people
throw around in these discussions. That's true; I don't have the
first clue or interest in obtaining the first clue about those
statistics. On the other hand, the statistics about anything but
accidents weren't relevant to the topic.

There were various other irrelevant arguments which I don't have
time right now to address; if you think I've missed one, please
feel free to alert me to the fact via email.

---

Finally, we arrive at arguments that actually had something to do
with the topic at hand. (Although I tend to think they are present
only because *every* argument was present.)

Many of the statistics that *were* about accidents were supposed to
show that handgun accidents were insignificant because more people
die in car accidents or any number of other kinds of accidents.
It's true that plenty of other forms of accident claim more lives
than handgun accidents. However, that doesn't mean that we can
thereby ignore handgun accidents. Granted, it's a lesser evil and
should be a lesser priority. But that doesn't mean that it's *no*
priority.

In conjunction with these statistics, people often claimed that the
rate of handgun accidents is on the decline. That's a nice trend. I
hope it continues. On the other hand, the trend in itself does not
show that we ought to abandon efforts to save childrens' lives.

---

As I said in the EFF group, I won't be responding to this thread
via follow-up. Never in a million years would I subject myself to
paging through talk.politics.guns. However, if you would like to
take me to task via email, I will endeavor to say something useful
in reply. (I must warn you, of course, that I am going to be loathe
to respond to anything which concerns itself with the positions I
have labelled here as "irrelevant" unless your purpose is to show
me why a given position is *not* irreleveant.)
-- 
 Pete Gontier // EC Technology // gurgle@netcom.com
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns