“The concept of ‘necessity’ is almost always dangerous and insidious in political matters. Asking whether vanilla is necessary for a specific cupcake recipe is very different from asking whether guns or tobacco or beer or soda or cocaine is ‘necessary’ for a person’s life. People place different values on different things, and it is supremely arrogant and insulting for a person to look at a particular product and think that he can decide for the rest of humanity whether it is ‘necessary’ to own.
It is true that certain guns are not ‘necessary’ for human beings, in the sense that without them people will immediately perish, but the same can be said of almost anything. Art and dancing and tennis, for example, are not necessary for human beings in order to stay alive. Does that mean that they can be brushed aside as inconsequential trivialities that the fat governor can and should take away from us?” – Mark R. Crovelli