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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (599802)2/3/2011 6:19:25 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (2) of 1583850
 
There are similarities, but I pointed out some very important differences.

Nuclear weapons are far less discriminate. A better analogy would be people carrying around hand grenades and setting up demolition charges, for self-defense, and even that would be rather faulty.

Also nuclear weapons don't do much in terms of defense. They deter (like guns) or they can be used to initiate an attack or retaliate for one (again like guns), but unlike guns they aren't very good at defense. They typically would not stop an attack (at least a nuclear attack, they could stop a conventional attack).

Another difference is that even though non-proliferation efforts for nuclear weapons are difficult, they have so far worked better than attempts to disarm criminals. Nuclear weapons are complex devices, the more primitive forms of them are pretty large, and they need special materials. Guns are far simpler cheaper and more common. Guns are easier to make (even without large scale manufacturing, you don't need a factory to make a gun), easier to hide, easier to smuggle across borders.

But your analogy is solid in some ways. For example we need to have nukes, partially because other potentially dangerous countries have nukes. Similarly its good that a decent number of law abiding citizens are armed, because many criminals are armed.
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