How would a federal gun ban work? House to house searches?

[The Magistrate]

108. Where Your Argument Fails, Sir, Is That You Cannot Produce The Benefit

The social utility of movement, indeed, the absolute necessity of movement, is readily evident, and is something to set against a cost in lives.

You will be hard put to describe a comparable social utility, let alone a comparable necessity, that is bestowed by wide-spread possession of firearms in our society today, that could sensibly be argued to be worth the difference in firearms deaths per hundred thousand persons to be noted in comparing, say, the United States and Germany, or the United States and Australia or Canada.

We will leave aside, too, that when people suggest laws and practices likely to reduce the lethality of automobile travel, no great claque stands and shrieks this is just the start of a slippery slope to forbidding people to own automobiles. Half a century ago, in a smaller population, traffic fatalities were considerably larger than they are today, and the difference is largely owing to various regulations and alterations in practice put in place with the intent to achieve this.