In Final Notice, were the arguments for gun control convincing to you?

Discuss the March 2019 Philosophy Book of the Month, Final Notice by Van Fleisher.
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Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
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In Final Notice, were the arguments for gun control convincing to you?

Post by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes »

This is a discussion topic for the March 2019 Philosophy Book of the Month, Final Notice by Van Fleisher. Please do not post in this topic until you have read the book.
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In the book Final Notice, were the arguments and advocacy for gun control convincing to you? Why or why?

Did reading the book change your opinion on gun control? If so, how did your opinions change and why?



For me, I believe people's attitudes towards gun control fall on a bell curve not a bimodal distribution. I believe my own opinions fall roughly at the peak of that bell curve. In short, I am a moderate on the issue, and I believe most people are moderates on the issue, despite common perceptions. (For an analogous situation, see this post on abortion indicating attitudes towards the legality of abortion also fall on a bell curve not a bimodal distribution). Reading Final Notice didn't push me more to one side of that bell curve. I've already heard countless good arguments for gun control and countless good arguments for legal gun possession. The indrect arguments in the book for gun control weren't anything new to me, so they didn't change my opinions about gun control one way or the other.
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Re: In Final Notice, were the arguments for gun control convincing to you?

Post by Bill harris »

Balls falling through holes and electrons passing through slits will form a pattern that indicate Gaussian Distribution. Oth, heartbeats will (hopefully) relate to Cauchy Distribution.

Now while these are real objects, opinions are not. We know this is true because one can always form a statement and/or to correspond to a predicted outcome. In other words, if i want to appear to have an 'average' opinion, I simply structure my question accordingly. Readers of Quine's "Two Fallacies" grasp this immediately; others, perhaps not.

So in this case, the real philosophical question is why anyone would want to have a log-normal opinion about gun control in what is clearly a murderous, barbarian society? Otherwise, this can be noted as smug conformism: one average german in 1942 suggesting that gassing is a far more merciful option than a slow, lingering death in a work camp, etc...
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