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The point of an analogy is to illuminate some point of an issue by drawing parallels with an aspect of a more easily understood, unrelated issue. For an analog
by Frompo 10y ago
The point of an analogy is to illuminate some point of an issue by drawing parallels with an aspect of a more easily understood, unrelated issue.
For an analogy to be helpful it crucial that the two aspects being related share characteristics, and school shootings don't share many aspects with blackouts. A school shooting is highly localised, even if the location my vary; blackouts need to happen over a very wide area over an extended period of time to be of importance. A school shooting is an active act of killing, a blackout only increases the lethality of already present dangers.
Also, the concept of "negatives that legislation would attempt to prevent" describes things like racial discrimination, poor quality control of seatbelt manufacturers, improper handling of meat and chemical weapon sales to dictatorships as per your "the scale of the concepts doesn't necessarily have to match". Good luck getting much out of the analogy between the Northeast blackout of 2003 and selling weapons to Saddam Hussein.
- khedoros 10y agoSo, selling weapons to Iraq: What is your list of ridiculous, incidental things to restrict? The premise of the original analogy has two parts. First, something that they want to prevent. Second, cherry-picking things that don't necessarily matter to restrict, and create some nice "tough on crime" theater. Analogies are limited by nature. Every analogy has holes. The important comparison here is "crime/tragedy occurs" -> "legal system responds with near-random actions that may or may not prevent a recurrence of the same in the future, that subject-matter specialists claim will be ineffective".