New Mini-blog Series: "That's not an argument": Issue 1: "Criminals won't obey gun bans/why have any laws at all then?"

I wanted to give the blog platform a try one more time now that Minds has revamped their platform, after being thoroughly fed up w/ the clusterfuck that was the old format. Anyway, moving on:

I wanted to try a new mini-blog called "That's not an argument", where I take something (stupid) I heard recently, & (try to) quickly & concisely deconstruct why that is not (a good) argument. So here goes:

Argument: Criminals won't obey gun bans. (Seems pretty logically solid - criminals are criminals b/c their defining characteristic is *breaking* laws).

- Counter-arguemnt (that's not really an argument): "then why have any laws at all (like against murder) since criminals won't follow any of them?"

Why that's not an argument: Murder is "Malum in se" - wrong/evil in itself. If murder were decriminalized (or, more feasibly, in a situation where there isn't an institutionalized body of justice to enforce laws against it, such as in deep wilderness), decent people who aren't inclined to murder aren't suddenly going to start doing it "just b/c there are no laws enforced against it".

The keeping & bearing of arms is, on the other hand, aside from being a natural human right, is not inherently immoral or unethical. It is only circumstantially "malum prohibitum" ("wrong only because it is prohibited") where there are arbitrary put in place infringements against people's rights to defend themselves.

This is why we have laws against things that are "Malum in se" - murder, rape, theft, fraud - b/c in a lawless vacuum, decent people wouldn't do them anyway, but the criminals would. Of course, the typical Leftists, being low in trait orderliness & conscientiousness & thus being bad at regulating themselves, project that same low opinion on everyone else around them & think that their fellow man can't function like mature adults w/o the heavy hand of the Nanny State dictating their every move.