I’m going to guess that our five-minute gun debate after a national travesty is already over. One the gems of this debate was this argument over at Fox News (via Crooks and Liars)

“He passed everything,” Gorka agreed. “Let’s be really clear about this. We could get a magic wand and the president could make all legally-owned weapons disappear in America, [but] jihadis will keep killing Americans on U.S. soil.”

Gorka pointed to an issue of Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine: “There’s a giant poster on one of the pages that says, ‘Use your F-150 to kill the infidel.'”

“They will kill us with whatever tools they need,” he shrugged. “Pipe bombs are illegal in America, it is illegal to construct a pipe bomb. What did the Tsarnaev brothers do in Boston? Did it stop them from building pipe bombs. It didn’t.”

“So, the idea that legislation or focusing on a tool, a weapon or an explosive is going to mitigate this threat or make it disappear, again, is fantasy land.”

This poor guy can’t even get the talking point right (cars and explosives are already highly regulated).

Anyway, it seems the claim goes like this. Unless addressing the legality of something completely eliminates the possibility that this thing will ever happen, it is worthless to try. Eliminating guns will not eliminate terrorism, so it is worthless to eliminate guns.

That’s no one’s argument, of course.

Fill in your own counterexample.