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Banned Pants

2018-02-27 18:37:17.261538+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

The "saggy pants" they wish to ban covers the exact same amount of skin as 2000+ other trousers not banned.

In case you haven't seen it, this is riffing on Marco Rubio's tweet about "assault rifles". Which... I think there's room for nuance on interpreting the 2nd Amendment, but my first reaction on a lot of this has been that the pistol grip on the rifle is exactly the sort of cosmetic affect that the mall cop wannabes that we'd really like to keep from having firearms are going for. And thinking about the classist assumptions inherent in my beliefs, I'm also thinking about how the difference between those two pictures isn't the amount of skin showing, but the color of it...

[ related topics: Photography Law Clothing ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-02-28 03:06:07.523965+00 by: TheSHAD0W

"Cosmetic affect". So you really are rooting for an "ugly gun" ban.

As for the "color"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaX3EM-fsc8

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-02-28 16:42:08.512073+00 by: Dan Lyke

I've been doing a lot of introspection on this: Yeah, the ugly gun ban is similar to wanting, say, a ban on vehicles that looked sporty. I wish there were better automobile crash data out there so that we could do our own slicing and dicing, but I suspect that if insurance companies paid for the externalities of people killed in collisions that wings and spoilers would be uninsurable.

Which would be a similar situation to California's definition of "assault weapon".

But I don't have the data to back that up.

And, yes I know that California's ban came after the Black Panthers started carrying, and that an armed citizenry didn't stop the Trail of Tears, or the WW II internment camps, or...

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-02-28 16:46:27.267602+00 by: Dan Lyke

And maybe, thinking about the automobile analogy further, it really is the case that by the time it gets to that level the culture is already too broken. And in thinking about what I actually know about collisions, it probably really is unlikely that singling out "those people" is where the problem really lies.

So, yeah, this is complex. But I stand by the pants analogy, even if I don't know what it means.

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-02-28 19:22:58.196347+00 by: Larry Burton

My bet is more people die driving Toyota Camry's than die driving Corvettes.

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-02-28 20:09:06.284787+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, probably not per vehicle mile traveled, but I bet that difference isn't actually that significant.

Which, as I think this out further is more grist for the "don't blame the object" argument.

#Comment Re: Banned Pants made: 2018-03-01 14:47:45.928552+00 by: Larry Burton

I keep looking at the 5,562 deaths in the Camrys and the 248 deaths in the Corvettes almost seems acceptable.

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