Applied Modus Ponens Abuse

When discussing anything(foxes, guns, Ecstasy, let's call it 'Problem A'), at some point in the flow of discussion, some muppet always pops up and argues the toss as follows:

Problem B > Problem A by a huge margin, hence we should ban B, banning B is ridiculous, ergo, we should tolerate A.

Problem 1) Modus ponens (if -> then) is only one directional, that is, when it rains I take my umbrella, but taking my umbrella doesn't cause it to rain.

Problem 2) Horseriding is not Ecstasy, gun ownwership can not be compared to traffic accidents, and foxes cannot be compared to dogs either. The only thing all those have in common is that someone is taking a risk and all those events have the potential to produce more or less mangled people. Making a milkmaid calculation involving yearly traffic accident tolls as the benchmark is going to end up in no-one doing anything about problems ever, because statistically, accidents are nearly at the top here, and of course life being the terminally fatal STD that it is, occupies Nr. 1 in the death charts. (deal)

Problem 3) As for tolerating things we don't like... sometimes it's correct to prevent something, at other times, the same action is simply meddling. There is no magic rule that covers everything, other than: 'Thou shalt use common sense'.

Problem 4) Adding problems together in an effort to cancel them out is always an exponential affair, because in this kind of calculus, problems don't subtract, they multiply.

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