A Hidden Victory for Gun Rights The Weapons Effect argument

"Ordinary people" just can't control themselves.

Guns cause ordinary people to commit acts of violence and therefore they should be banned from the general population. In [the] essay by Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen, see below.

A Hidden Victory for Gun Rights | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

by Wendy McElroy

A significant gun-rights victory in the U.S. Supreme Court is being interpreted almost exclusively as a free-speech victory. Actually, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association ^[1] is both, and the mistake is understandable. But it would be a shame to deny encouragement to Second Amendment advocates.

Brown revolved around California’s 2005 ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under 18.

On June 27 the Supreme Court overturned the law, 7-2, and held (pdf) ^[2] that “video games qualify for First Amendment protection.” It found further that “government lacks the power to restrict expression because of its message, ideas, subject matter, or content” except in historically unprotected speech such as incitement or obscenity. “[A] legislature cannot create new categories of unprotected speech simply by weighing the value of a particular category against its social costs….” (Emphasis added.)

Brown is important to gun rights because the state used a key decades-old argument developed by anti-gun zealots in an attempt to expand unprotected speech to include videos and thus create a new category of law based on experts and studies that have been widely called into dispute ^[3].

Weapons Effect

The argument is known as the Weapons Effect: Guns cause ordinary people to commit acts of violence and therefore they should be banned from the general population. In their essay “Trigger-Happy: Re-thinking the ‘Weapons Effect’” (pdf), ^[4]Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen explained:

read on at above link.