Barry Snell, a student newspaper editor at Iowa State, has written a long, but very thorough piece, with links to tons of evidence that disputing the arguments of the anti-gun people.
Facts don’t seem to be important:
I’ve discovered that one cannot be expert enough about guns. Indeed, when it comes to the gun issue, opinion rules.
Thomas Sowell pointed out in A Conflict of Visions that the world is divided between people who make decisions based on consequences and those who base them on motivations.
… The reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it.
Since consequences tend to be factual, confession is really only important if it’s all about motivations.
As I’ve remarked in my meme about What Makes Macroeconomics So Hard, what passes for expert opinion is pretty weak in many quarters;
… [Making] the common plea, “We need to get some experts to solve this problem!” for any public policy issue that comes along, which is a good thing. But when it comes to the gun issue, gun expertise is completely irrelevant to the anti-gunner … That a pro-gun person might actually know a lot about their hobby or profession doesn’t stand up against the histrionic cries of the anti-gunner.
We need to stop belittling the second amendment. It’s a very big deal:
Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because anti-gunners always talk about 90 percent of Americans supporting this gun control measure, or 65 percent supporting that one, as if a majority opinion is what truly matters in America. We don’t trust anti-gun people because you think America is a democracy, when it’s actually a constitutional federal republic. In the American system, the rights of a single individual are what matters and are what our system is designed to protect. The emotional mob does not rule in America.
…
Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they keep saying they “respect the Second Amendment” and go on about how they respect the hunting traditions of America. We don’t trust you because you have to be a complete idiot to think the Second Amendment is about hunting. I wish people weren’t so stupid that I have to say this: The Second Amendment is about checking government tyranny. Period. End of story. The founders probably couldn’t have cared less about hunting since, you know, they just got done with that little tiff with England called the Revolutionary War right before they wrote that “little book” called the Constitution.
Get the message: the reason this individual right was added to the document governing our collective government was precisely so that the majority couldn’t impose its will on the minority on this issue.
My position on abortion is more pro than Snell’s, but I still like this argument:
Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because when it comes to their “We need gun control to save the children” argument, many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion. Because you know, a ban on abortion would save a child every single time. I’m personally not rabidly against abortion, but the discongruence makes less sense still when the reason abortions are legal is to protect a woman’s individual rights. That’s great, but does the individual rights argument sound familiar? Anti-gunners think that for some bizarre reason, the founding fathers happened to stick a collective right smack dab at the top of a list of individual rights, though. Yeah, because that makes sense.
I think we need to do a lot less cavalier squawking about rights, and more serious thinking about positive rights — that require someone to do something for us — and negative rights — those that require only that others leave us alone. Despite the name, those negative rights are a lot more basic to our happiness, and a lot easier to enforce. That’s why busybodies dislike them.
Full Disclosure: I don’t own a gun. I fired them a few times in Boy Scouts 25 years ago. I’m not a member of the NRA. But, like George Carlin, “I have this funny thing I do called thinking”.
