> They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is.

The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things.

Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law.

But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing.

> Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally.

You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.

Appeal to grossness is fallacious. Describing a different situation and claiming it is the same while not having congruent properties is an abuse of abstraction. The substitution method for logically reasoning by analogy is only as strong as the similarity between the situations. This is why I consider the argument refuted when I show that there isn't alignment between Theft - a gross crime - and participation in a betting market, something that people enter into by mutual consent and with hope. The lack of congruence makes the argument fundamentally lacking in validity.

For more on why this I find this to be bad reasoning by analogy see things of this nature:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCri...

When the argument moves to the appeal to the law it is also fallacious, for there is not one law, but many. That law is different in different places: in this case in particular it is not the case that the law is universally against betting markets. There are places where it is legal. Moreover the law changes over time. Even in our locational context when you vary time you will find that there were periods in which betting markets were not illegal.

Even beyond that the law regularly allows nuance when it encounters interaction with political concerns: to kill for your country in war is legal, but to do the same outside that political contest is not. To enforce justice in the context of law enforcement is not legal except by those who are appointed. Yet to do so unappointed is not. In democracies since every person is appointed to be a part of the political body such that they vote to influence policies they all have a mandate that allows them to engage in politics - this supersedes the usual laws for much the same reason that a policeman because he has a mandate as a policeman has the right to do things that would be illegal for non-policeman to do.

I want to point out something that seems worthy of attention to me to hopefully reduce your confidence in the strength of the argument. When the argument you advanced says things like this:

> Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?"

The argument did not build up to them. It is not justifying them. They are non-sequiturs. It reads as if it thinks the reasoning is very strong and obviously correct such that it comes across as quite dismissive, but just because an argument contains a word like convincing doesn't mean the structure has the property of being convincing.

To stress how tortured the arguments analogy is - there are gross crimes for which it is legal on the basis that they are used to understand things. What is called homocide when it kills someone outside medical research and what is called the crime of animal cruelty when it is done outside medical research is not equivalent when it is done in the context of medical research.

Admittedly this is not an argument against regulation, but then - I never said it should be unregulated - I asked why we allow the oppression of political discussion in this circumstance.

That the argument includes things like "nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles" and asked obvious questions does not convince me of the position that the argument asks me to take on. It convinces me that people ought to ask those questions instead of assuming the answers. Except - it doesn't truly do even that, because I consider the claim that no one has ever asked the obvious questions to be a false premise.