“No wait, don’t turn off the faucet! We’ll just plug the tub!”

Frequently the conservatives attack liberals using the false dichotomy “all or nothing” argument. E.g. “If you idiots take away all our guns we’ll have no way to defend ourselves!”

  1. We don’t want to take away all your guns, just have common sense gun laws.
  2. And I know you’ll find this astonishing, we care about border security but don’t agree with the medieval “wall” approach.

Guns

The USA is number one in guns per capita! Right up there with Yemen and Serbia!  But we’re a first world ostensibly developed country.  US firearms-related deaths are near the top too.  The US famous world-wide for  mass shootings.

This suggests that one way or another we should try something different and one thing you can do is draw from approaches which have been successful in other countries.

One thing we could do is control the proliferation of guns.  Should you be able to buy and assault rifle at Walmart? We could try “no” for a while and see how things went.  I bet most of you would still be able to defend your home against anything but military SWAT raids.

A common refrain is “criminals will still find ways get guns!”  So why have any laws at all because criminals are just going to ignore them?  Well, those “law” things actually do reduce incidents significantly because, follow along here, only criminals break them.

The Wall

Border security and immigration control is a complex problem. Starting with a solution (“the wall”) and trying to make that solve the entire problem is simply ridiculous.  No successful business ever picks a solution and then tries to implement it without looking at the ROI (return on investment) for all the alternatives.  After surveying the options, the best ones are picked.

Over half of folks here illegally came into the country legally and simply overstayed their visas.  They came through airport and seaports or drove through border control points.  Drugs and people come into this country by various routes and methods.  Let’s look at the stats on those before we propose a one-size-fits-all solution which, in fact, in spite of being very expensive and symbolically horrible, likely solves only a fraction of the problem.  And will simply result in folks taking other paths.

But wait, instead of looking solely at plugging the tub, let’s consider how we might turn off the faucet.

People come to the US either to escape horrible environments where they are persecuted or can’t feed their families.  Or they come specifically because, even taking the lowest paying jobs here, they can make more money than they can back home.

So that means there are tons of American businesses or individuals that are happy to pay them.  Ever hire a nanny or a gardening service where the folks didn’t look like “they were from around here”?  But you didn’t ask any questions because the price was right?

With regard to drugs, that’s a particularly complex problem in part because we get all wrapped up in the morality of things and refuse to consider effective solutions for taking the money out of the drug business.  But the market is there and someone needs to service it.  We could tax it or heck, just let the criminals have all that money.  Maybe there’s a moral issue with giving criminals a pile of money, too, huh?

Quick Summary

These are complex multi-faceted issues and cannot be addressed with mindless solutions. However, it’s pretty irrefutable that if you can turn off the faucet you’ve got a lot less to worry about regarding plugs.