One of the ways the gun lobby has achieved cultural dominance (far beyond those who are NRA members) is via its relentless assault on common sense and the English language. Gun fetishists and their defenders are trained to inject these illogical, nonsensical catchphrases into every gun policy debate. This disinformation campaign has been so successful that often the news media — and sometimes even gun control advocates themselves — will slip up and repeat one or more of these statements, even when they should know better.
Here are some phrases you’ve probably encountered. (Note that many of them boil down to the same thing: denying that a gun is a dangerous weapon designed for killing and injuring.)
1. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
This is a classic straw man argument: It seeks to refute a claim that no one is actually making.
Nobody argues that a gun can kill someone all by itself. But the “guns don’t kill people” mantra assumes that someone is arguing exactly that. In fact, it doesn’t make sense to say this unless you are responding to someone who claims that a gun has the autonomy to kill people without a person operating it.
And since no one has ever claimed that, this response has never made sense — no matter how many people use it or how often. Not only is it a straw man, it’s a non sequitur.
So why do people use this line?
First, they want to push back against the idea that guns are dangerous. Realistically, though — a pillow can be a murder weapon, but if you walk into a room and see a guy with a gun and a guy with a pillow, which one will you be more concerned about?
Second, they’re trying to make their opponents look ridiculous — to make it seem as though we’re claiming guns are autonomous, even though we are not. It’s a form of gaslighting. (It does take some talent to stuff a straw man argument, a non sequitur, and gaslighting into seven words, but there you have it.)
Whatever the intent of the person making this claim — when I hear it, I can safely assume that the speaker isn’t listening to me, because they are responding to something I didn’t say.
And responding to things that no one has said is a sign of mental illness.
1a. Furthermore…
If I said, “Fentanyl will kill you,” any garden-variety native English speaker would know what I meant. It is a figure of speech.
Of course pills can’t do anything to you as long as they’re sitting in the bottle. You have to take them out and swallow them in order to be killed. And yet the phrase “Fentanyl will kill you” is perfectly understandable and acceptable in standard English.
A similar figure of speech is often used with guns. A news anchor might say, “Guns killed 45,000 people in the United States last year.” No one but an idiot interprets this as a claim that guns are autonomously roaming the streets shooting people all by themselves.
Word geeks can derive a few chuckles from intentionally taking a literal interpretation of language that was meant to be figurative. But I don’t get the sense that the “people kill people” people are joking around. Gaslighting in its more malevolent forms is an extremely serious business. They will say anything they can think of — no matter how illogical or ridiculous it actually is — to misrepresent their opponents and make guns seem more benign.
Fentanyl, at least in some ways, is much less lethal than guns — I’m extremely unlikely to kill you by throwing a handful of pills at you from across the room. Deciding not to take fentanyl is a simple matter of personal responsibility (where’s Nancy “Just say no” Reagan when you need her?). Furthermore, I guarantee you there are more fentanyl pills than guns in the United States right now, which presents quite a challenge to law enforcement.
But how many gun fetishists do you know who are proclaiming “Fentanyl doesn’t kill people; people kill people,” and calling for less regulation of fentanyl? (Unless you hang out with anarchists, drug dealers, or hard-core libertarians, I’m guessing the answer is “Not many.”) Rather, the right wing seeks to exaggerate the dangers of fentanyl — speakers at CPAC 2023 falsely claimed that it will kill you if you even touch it — at the same time they seek to minimize the dangers of guns.
2. “This mass shooting is a tragic misuse of a gun.”
No, it’s not. Shooting people with a gun is not misusing it. That’s what guns are for.
3. “Cain killed Abel with a rock. Are we going to ban rocks?”
First of all, no, Genesis doesn’t say how Cain killed Abel. People who use this argument don’t know their Bibles and nothing else they say about the Bible should be trusted.
Second of all, rocks have a number of practical uses. You can use them to build a wall, prop open a door, pound in a tent peg, grind corn, hold down the edges of a tarp, etc. Weaponry is just one application of a rock among many.
Guns, on the other hand, are built and intended as weapons, and are not suitable for any other purpose. They are fundamentally different from rocks and it makes no sense to compare the two.
4. “The Framers wrote the Second Amendment because they intended for citizens to be able to overthrow the government.”
No, they didn’t.
The amendment expects the “well regulated militia” to defend the state, not overthrow it.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress “[t]o provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; [t]o provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States.” You never hear the Second Amendment crowd mention that militias were supposed to answer to Congress.
In 1791, before the Second Amendment (and the rest of the Bill of Rights) had even been ratified by enough states to be adopted into the Constitution, citizens in Pennsylvania were already pushing back against the federal government in a tax revolt that became known as the Whiskey Rebellion. It went on until 1794, when President Washington eventually yielded to Alexander Hamilton’s advice and raised a militia of more than 12,000 troops, under the authority of the Militia Acts of 1792 — which “provided for the President of the United States to take command of the state militias [emphasis mine] in times of imminent invasion or insurrection” — i.e., the acts extended directly to the president some of Congress’s authority over the militias. (This extension of authority to the president was made permanent in the Militia Act of 1795.)
The point is, these troops were sent to Pennsylvania to put down the rebellion, not to take part in it.
At no point did Washington or Hamilton (or anyone else) throw up their hands and say, “Well, gee, those fellas in Pennsylvania have the right to overthrow the government in armed rebellion — we gave it to ’em with the Second Amendment!” And a Congress that passes a law providing for the president to take over militias clearly does not intend for said militias to be used to overthrow said president.
Interpretation of the “well regulated militia” clause has always been conditioned by Article I along with one Militia Act or another. It’s just that we haven’t had a Militia Act since 1903 — the one that established the National Guard. At some point in the past 120 years, gun fetishists forgot about Article I, the Militia Acts, and the Whiskey Rebellion, and started making up fairy tales.
5. “The Second Amendment protects against tyranny.”
See above. But also:
In 2016 a presidential candidate campaigned against the First, Fourth, Eighth, and 14th Amendments. He was elected anyway.
That president frequently sought to exercise dictatorial powers while in office. Although he was frustrated in many of those attempts, either by convention or by conflict with his underlings, he was abetted (and twice acquitted on impeachment) by members of his party in Congress. His presidency exposed the inadequacy of Article II of the Constitution for constraining a president with malicious intent.
This president violated human rights by separating migrant families at the southern border and putting parents and children into separate concentration camps, without sufficient plans to reunite the families later.
This president appointed Supreme Court justices who have already completed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, gutted the Sixth Amendment, ripped out the Establishment Clause from the First, and started carving up the 14th (except insofar as the 14th can be used to expand the Second). They are intent on redacting 70 years’ worth of progress on civil rights.
Upon losing reelection, this president and his cronies sought to stage a coup and overturn the election so he could retain power. They failed, but just barely, and are currently plotting to raise an “army” of “poll watchers” to interfere with elections, as well as trying to install state-level officials who’ll ignore the will of voters.
This former president and his party now seek to do further damage to the Establishment Clause, destroy the principle of free and fair elections, and turn the United States into a post-democratic copy of Orbán’s Hungary — a theocracy in which the outcome of every election is predetermined.
And the staunch opponents of tyranny, the Second Amendment crowd — where have they been in all of this?
Cheering that former president on.
The gun lobby wouldn’t know tyranny if it stole an election and took away all of their other civil rights — because unrestricted gun ownership is the only right they actually care about. (When they use the word “tyranny,” they’re talking about background checks and public health measures.)
So no, in the present case the Second Amendment is far more likely to be used as an excuse to aid and abet tyranny than to oppose it.
That’s one of the reasons it must be repealed.
5a. Furthermore…
What actually protects against tyranny is the Constitution as a whole and the rule of law. The U.S. military possesses the capability to reduce your house to smoking rubble and roast you alive inside of it, without ever giving you a target at which to fire your AR-15. Fortunately for you it is illegal for the military to do that.
And yet the party of “gun rights” doesn’t give a crap about the Constitution or the rule of law, as evidenced by the fact that it desperately wants to re-elect a criminal president who repeatedly asked his law enforcement and military advisors why they couldn’t just shoot protesters.
6. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Well, it’s nice when it works out that way, but as we have seen, it frequently doesn’t work out that way.
The three problems with this assertion are:
- Illogic and oversimplification. The statement assumes that when X is out of control, you can fix it by adding more of X. That’s rarely the case. Of course you can cite anecdotal evidence of shooters being stopped by other shooters, but where’s the empirical evidence? There are many, many variables in a shooting. The presence of a second armed person is just one of those variables, and there’s no guarantee of whether or how it will affect the outcome. Remember: for every one of the 19 kids shot dead in Uvalde, there was a “good guy with a gun” standing in the hall, doing nothing.
- Framing. The statement assumes that the “bad guy” already has the gun and is already on the scene. A far more effective way of stopping him is to prevent things from reaching that stage.
- Binary thinking. The “good guy/bad guy” dichotomy shows up over and over in what passes for reasoning among gun fetishists. But it’s completely artificial and subjective. People are more complex than that. People use guns against other people (or against themselves) for three primary reasons: fear, anger, and despair. And both “good” and “bad” people experience those emotions.
In their own minds, the vast majority of shooters see themselves not as “bad guys,” but as “good guys who’ve been pushed too far and aren’t going to take it anymore.” But as long as we dismiss them as simply “bad guys,” we think we can’t (or don’t have to) do anything about the various factors that lead up to a shooting. This is even true of some mass shooters: the January 2023 mass shooting at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, California, was carried out by a forklift operator who was upset about having to pay a $100 fine to one of the farms because his forklift was damaged in an accident. Reporting on the incident revealed terrible working conditions at the farms — but don’t hold your breath for any of those conditions to be improved. After all, the shooter was just a bad guy with a gun.
7. “Criminals won’t obey gun laws. They’re just going to get the guns anyway.”
- Well, then we shouldn’t have laws against killing your dog and raping your sister (or vice versa). Killers and rapists are just going to do their thing anyway. We shouldn’t have laws against drunk driving. We shouldn’t have laws against non-citizens crossing the border. And we definitely shouldn’t have laws against abortion.
This is an argument against all laws, not just gun laws. People who make this argument — with the possible exception of full-on anarchists — haven’t thought about it for five seconds. No law is a perfect deterrent, but that does not mean we shouldn’t pass laws.
It probably will be difficult to separate criminals from their guns, even with stricter gun laws. But that is no excuse for doing nothing. - If gun nuts truly believed that gun laws are ineffective, then they wouldn’t put all that energy into opposing said laws. There is no reason to fight something that can’t hurt you.
- And where does this argument leave the “law-abiding gun owners” we hear so much about? Do they abide by the law only when they happen to agree with it? Let’s get real: Ultimately, “Criminals won’t obey this law” is code for “I don’t want to obey this law.”
- The gun lobby has no actual interest in curbing criminal gun use, because criminal gun use is one of its most effective marketing tools. The more that people can be made to feel unsafe, the more guns they will buy.
8. “It’s my God-given right.”
God didn’t write the Second Amendment, and God didn’t install an arsenal in the Garden of Eden. Guns and gun rights come from people, not from God. Humans existed for millennia before anyone dreamed up firearms.
If you were willing to step back from this absurd conflation, we could discuss whether you have a basic right of self-defense, irrespective of the methods you use. But you’re on shaky ground if you try to attribute even that to God. The Bible is maddeningly inconsistent on this question; there are places in it where God actually tells people not to use weapons and not to defend themselves.
9. “Having a gun in the house makes me safer.”
No, having a gun in the house just increases the risk that someone will be shot in the house. And there’s no guarantee that the person being shot will be a “bad guy” who breaks in one night. It’s more likely to be someone who lives there.
Burglaries happen, but so do anger, abuse, divorce, depression, anxiety, despair, illness, and drug use — not to mention accidents and good old-fashioned carelessness. Perhaps it goes without saying, but all of those are far more lethal when combined with guns.
Having a gun might make you feel safer, because you think it will help you control any situation that may arise. But it can also make you overconfident — you take risks you wouldn’t take if you weren’t armed. And as soon as someone shows up who isn’t afraid of your gun — or who has a gun of their own — you become a target.
Remember, for 25 years Congress prevented the CDC from researching gun safety, so we don’t have as much statistical data as we should. But we do have some and it’s pretty damning.
10. “It’s for protection.”
See above. A gun doesn’t protect anything — it’s a weapon, not a shield. What it does is escalate the situation and increase the overall threat level. You’re just hoping that said increase will be to your advantage.
11. “It’s a tool.”
No, it’s a weapon.
Some tools can serve double duty as weapons. Pound nails … pull nails … crack skulls! Slice bread … slit throats!
Not guns. A gun has no purpose apart from putting bullets into bodies. You don’t have to pull the trigger to intimidate people with it, but the only reason they are intimidated is that they’re afraid you will pull the trigger.
12. “It’s a __________ issue.”
There’s only one way to fill in this blank without engaging in denialism and deflection. All shootings have one and only one thing in common; I bet you could guess what it is if you think real hard.
All developed countries in the world face similar problems, similar trends, and similar social issues. Only one developed country has a minority gun lobby with a firm grasp on its politicians’ cojones.
If you fill in the blank with “mental health,” I’m tempted to say that I concur. In point of fact, however, you don’t have to be clinically mentally ill to believe all these propaganda statements (although it probably helps). You just have to be brainwashed somewhat deficient in logic and critical thinking, and unwilling to consider data that contradict your claims.
(For those who think it’s a “mental health issue,” what would you say to a requirement that people pass a mental health evaluation before they can buy a gun? Anyone? Bueller?)
13. “Responsible gun owners … not all gun owners … law-abiding gun owners … blah blah blah.”
- The most responsible thing you can do with a gun is refuse to own any of them. And have you ever noticed that when there’s a shooting, “responsible gun owners” are the first to deny responsibility?
- When laws are passed against drunk driving, or texting while driving, do we hear people complaining that such laws will only harm responsible drunks, drivers, and cell phone users?
- Responsible, law-abiding gun owners are among the 90 percent of Americans who want stronger background checks. Responsible, law-abiding gun owners already practice gun safety, and would not be harmed or inconvenienced by laws that require them to do what they’re already doing out of a sense of responsibility. Responsible, law-abiding gun owners don’t treat a gun as a status symbol or penis extension, and don’t care whether a gun resembles a military assault rifle or not, as long as it gets the job done. Responsible, law-abiding gun owners consider gun reform measures on their merits, rather than opposing them as a matter of simple Pavlovian knee-jerk reflexes. Responsible, law-abiding gun owners don’t try to warp reality by repeating the propaganda discussed on this page.
- Responsible, law-abiding gun owners obviously don’t commit mass shootings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a duty to help prevent them. Responsible, law-abiding gun owners are responsible for the shape of gun culture, gun marketing, gun laws, and the national conversation on guns — but they appear to be outsourcing that task to a gang of sociopaths.
- Do I expect responsible, law-abiding gun owners to agree that the Second Amendment should be repealed? No, but I do expect them to acknowledge that they have failed to prevent the onset of conditions that make the repeal necessary.
14. “Chicago blah blah blah.”
I’ve been to Chicago a few times. It’s essentially a border town. It’s a short drive from Chicago north to Wisconsin. It’s another short drive east to Indiana. Both of those states have looser gun laws than Illinois. Kyle Rittenhouse, who lived in Illinois, kept his rifle at his friend’s house in Wisconsin, possibly because Illinois law didn’t allow him to own it.
It is a fact that in a survey of guns recovered by Chicago police, nearly 60 percent came from out of state. But more importantly, perhaps, Chicago’s well-known handgun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010 in the wake of the Heller decision—which, as I argue elsewhere in these pages, will be the fate of more and more gun regulations now that SCOTUS has a solid 6-3 gun-nut majority.
Yes, that’s right: Chicago no longer has that restrictive handgun law that gun fetishists love to whine about. But it doesn’t stop them from whining. Reality has changed, but the propaganda has stayed the same—suggesting that the propaganda was never rooted in reality in the first place.
15. “Gun rights are the foundation of all rights. If they take away your gun rights, they can take away your other rights.”
That’s the classic “slippery slope” logical fallacy. But there’s a bigger problem here.
What the Republican Party and its Supreme Court justices are proving right now is that as long as they don’t touch gun rights (or worse yet, if they’re willing to expand gun rights), they can take away as many other rights as they please, and the gun lobby won’t say a thing. People’s civil rights are being abrogated in this country all day long, every day, and armed citizens are not showing up to defend them.
If the gun lobby cared about voting rights, for example, they’d have been calling for blood in 2013 after Shelby County v. Holder. They’d be freaking out over the fact that TWENTY-EIGHT STATES have passed laws that restrict voting since the 2020 election, and they’d be threatening to assassinate the politicians who voted for those laws.
Instead, crickets.
It would be more accurate for gun fetishists to admit that gun rights are the only rights they actually care about (see above).
16. “You’re ignoring defensive gun uses (DGUs).”
Yes, I am. And so should you.
DGUs are cases where a gun owner stops another person’s bad behavior by pointing a gun at them (but not firing it).
The trouble with DGUs is that there are no reliable statistics. There’s little or no empirical evidence. Virtually all DGUs are anecdotal and self-reported by the gun owner. Typically there is no way to independently verify that a DGU a) happened the way the gun owner says it did; b) happened at all. Gun fetishists’ estimates of annual DGUs in the United States range from 60,000 to 2.5 million or more, which indicates that they have no earthly idea what the real number is and are just making things up. Still, they’ll argue that the harm done with guns is more than outweighed by DGUs.
One study by criminologist Gary Kleck claims that 2.5 million DGUs occur annually in the U.S. It used the following methodology: Researchers phoned 5,000 male heads of household and asked if they’d scared off an intruder with a gun; 66 of them (1.32 percent) said yes. Multiplying that figure by the U.S. population (at the time of the survey) gives you 2.5 million. Two of the many problems with this methodology: 1) Not everyone is a male head of household. Interviewing one demographic group and extrapolating their response across the entire population means that you think an 18-month-old toddler is just as likely to brandish a gun as her 37-year-old dad is. 2) As Allan Lichtman has pointed out, you can get a small number of survey respondents to tell you pretty much anything. If you ask 5,000 people whether they’ve been abducted by aliens, 2 percent of them will say yes. Just because 66 male heads of household claimed to be involved in a DGU doesn’t make it true.
Another commonly cited DGU statistic comes from gun fetishists’ pet statistician, John Lott, who first claimed he got his numbers from “national surveys” conducted by “the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates,” but when pressed for details, suddenly remembered that he’d conducted his own telephone survey of 2,424 respondents … but lost all his data when his hard drive crashed … and he’d used University of Chicago students to conduct the poll … but he couldn’t remember any of their names. (When asked about his own role in the disappearance of Lott’s homework, Lott’s dog reportedly belched and went back to sleep.)
NRA publications will invariably contain thrilling stories of DGUs—the equivalent of Penthouse Letters for the ammosexual crowd. But if a publication will mislead you with all the other propaganda on this page, it won’t hesitate to mislead you with DGU stories. I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of Penthouse Letters was fiction, and there’s every reason to believe that the same is true of the DGU stories published by the NRA.
That being said, undoubtedly some DGUs do happen. Should we try to take account of them? I still say no unless they can be verified—it’s a bad idea to make policy based on anecdotal evidence. But if we were to consider DGUs, we should consider only those in which an innocent person’s life would have been in imminent danger without the gun.
That doesn’t include instances where the gun owner is the one who picks the fight (which turns out to be most so-called DGUs according to one survey analysis—see below), and it doesn’t include the garden-variety tales about scaring burglars off. I don’t give a damn how many silver spoons or wide-screen TVs or Lexus SUVs people have been able to hang on to because they had a gun. All the material goods in the world don’t mean squat next to one dead child.
And then, assuming we were able to sort out reported DGUs and identify the ones in which a “good guy” actually made things better by pulling a gun out, we’d have to decide whether those incidents should be canceled out by all the muggings and armed robberies and other crimes in which a gun was brandished but not fired. Shootings aren’t the only gun crimes; if we’re going to talk about DGUs we’ll have to talk about equivalent criminal gun uses as well.
The National Crime Victimization Survey reported 481,950 nonfatal “firearm victimizations” in 2019—defined as “violent victimizations where the offender possessed, showed, or used a firearm.” (That number declined to 350,460 in 2020, probably due to stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Notably, NCVS statistics do not include homicides because they are based on interviews with surviving victims. The CDC reported 10,537 gun homicides in 2019—meaning that for every person killed with a gun that year, there were 45.74 people injured and/or threatened with a gun. (In 2020, gun homicides went up significantly to 13,620 even as nonfatal victimizations went down, resulting in a lower ratio: 25.73.)
The NCVS also tracks DGUs, and consistently reports them happening at a much lower annual rate (60,000 to 65,000) than firearm victimizations. Conclusion: Bad guys traumatize more people with guns than good guys do.
For further reading, there’s plenty to chew on here.
17. “What about cars? People are killed by cars too.”
- No, cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Or is that applicable only when we’re talking about guns?
- US car deaths in 2021: 42,915. US gun deaths in 2021: 45,037. I don’t have a crystal ball, but without major changes to gun policy I’d expect the gap to keep widening. The car-death statistic was a 16-year high; both trends have increased in the past few years, but the increase in gun deaths has been steeper.
- Car manufacturers constantly and enthusiastically innovate to find ways for their devices to kill fewer people. Gun manufacturers constantly and enthusiastically innovate to find ways for their devices to kill more people.
- Cars have all kinds of safety regulations. I’d be delighted to have similar regulations applied to guns. Wouldn’t you?
- Operator licenses required in all 50 states.
- Must pass written test to obtain license.
- Must also demonstrate ability to operate and observe safety rules to obtain license.
- Minimum age required for license.
- Licenses must be renewed periodically.
- Valid license must be in operator’s possession while operating.
- License may be suspended and/or revoked for failure to obey safety rules, even if no one is injured or killed.
- Operator may be cited and/or fined by law enforcement for failure to observe any of a long list of safety rules, even if no one is injured or killed.
- Law enforcement may also impound the device if operator fails to observe certain safety rules, even if no one is injured or killed.
- Device is required to have safety equipment installed, and use of such safety equipment is mandatory. Operator may be cited for failure to use safety equipment, or if safety equipment is not in working order, even if no one is injured or killed.
- All 50 states require device to be registered. Registration must be renewed annually for a fee. Operator must display evidence of registration and renewal on the device; must carry registration paperwork when operating the device; and may be cited or have device impounded for failure to register or renew registration.
- Sale or transfer of device requires a notarized document and must be reported to authorities.
- All 50 states require liability insurance covering use of the device. Illegal to operate device without insurance, even if no one is injured or killed. Operator must carry proof of insurance when operating device.
- Device approved for use only in designated areas. Operator must leave device outside when entering most buildings, or must leave it in a designated part of the building.
===============
All of the above are true of cars. When all of the above are also true of guns, then you may make arguments about gun laws that equate guns with cars.
17a. “Why aren’t you talking about all the people killed by drunk drivers?”
Because right now we’re talking about guns, silly.
Drunk driving deaths have been steady at around 10,000–11,000 annually for the past few years. Of those, about 60 percent are the drunk drivers themselves; the rest are vehicular homicides (passengers, pedestrians, people in other cars). So the vehicular homicides number between 4,000 and 5,000. If we carve up gun deaths in a similar way—leaving out accidents and suicides—we end up with 4 to 5 gun homicides for every vehicular homicide committed by a drunk driver.
And again, there are plenty of effective laws aimed at curbing drunk driving. Funny, there is a constitutional amendment (the 21st) protecting your right to drink alcohol, but somehow there’s no National Alcoholics Association demanding unfettered access to booze and a repeal of all alcohol regulation. Why’s that, do you suppose?
18. “People who want to kill will find a way. ________ can be used as a weapon. If we regulate guns, then we’ll have to regulate ________. Pretty soon everything will be illegal.”
When Tim McVeigh proved you could kill a lot of people with ammonium nitrate, all of a sudden there were new regulations on ammonium nitrate. When 19 hijackers proved you could kill a lot of people by carrying box cutters onto a plane, all of a sudden it became illegal to carry box cutters onto a plane.
This complaint is a variation of other complaints already listed here—but the fact is, legislators have been perfectly willing to enact sensible regulations to try to prevent everyday objects from being weaponized. In fact, they’ve been more willing to regulate such objects than to regulate guns. Arguably it’s easier to buy an AR-15 than it is to buy 40 barrels of fertilizer.
The idea that someone could be killed with a spoon does not obligate us to treat spoons and guns equally in terms of regulation. Some objects are inherently more dangerous than others. If you don’t believe me, walk into a laboratory and pour a liter of H2O over your face. Then repeat the process with a liter of H2SO4.
19. “The Holocaust happened after the Nazis took guns away from the Jews. Those Jews could have fought back if they had guns.”
Allan Lichtman recounts that during the heyday of the NRA, whenever a particular state or municipality was considering a gun control measure, an op-ed from a local politician or sheriff would appear in local newspapers. Invariably this op-ed would recount the story of some unfortunate crime victim—let’s call her Mrs. Jones—who was assaulted, raped, murdered, and forced to write bad checks, but who might be alive today if only she’d had a gun. The details would change from paper to paper, but the broad outlines would remain the same.
Lichtman quotes internal NRA documents showing that some of these op-eds were actually written by NRA staff, and placed in newspapers with the local officials’ names merely attached. Mrs. Jones might not have lived in the state or town in question. She might not have existed at all.
What we have in the Holocaust gun control story is a variation on the Mrs. Jones story, with German Jews in the role of Mrs. Jones. Because Nazis are involved, it gets twenty times more attention than any standard Mrs. Jones story ever could. The claim was first made in a book published in 2013 by Stephen P. Halbrook, an NRA attorney and right-wing gun policy researcher—not a historian or expert on the Holocaust. Notably, people who are experts on the Holocaust have not signed on to Halbrook’s theory. They point out that German Jews constituted less than 1 percent of Germany’s population before the war, and would not have been likely to prevail against the German army, no matter how many guns they might have owned.
Furthermore, we should note that outside of Germany, Polish Jews in Warsaw were armed, and resisted the Nazis as well as they could—but were eventually overwhelmed and sent to concentration camps anyhow. There were armed resistance groups—militias, if you will—in other countries occupied by the Nazis, but they didn’t prevent the Holocaust. And nobody pretends that these groups won the war by themselves, or could have won without the help of Allied troops.
There were, however, many, many people throughout Europe who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. You might recognize the more famous names, like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, but officially Yad Vashem has recognized 26,973 people for such efforts, both great and small. Guns play an exceedingly minor role in these rescue stories, if any role at all.
Finally, like all the Mrs. Jones stories, saying that Jews could’ve stopped the Holocaust with guns comes awfully close to blaming the victim: “If only you’d had a gun, this wouldn’t have happened to you!”
This story appeals to people who think guns are the solution to every problem, and to people who like the idea of using arms to resist a tyrannical government. That doesn’t make the story accurate.
And again, it’s ironic to hear the gun lobby talk about resisting Nazis. It may not be accurate to call today’s Republicans Nazis, but their party as of 2024 has embraced full-blown fascism. It wants to do the following things:
- Delegitimize its opposition and put their leaders in prison.
- Corrupt the judiciary. (The Senate majority leader in 2016 violated his oath to the Constitution in order to achieve this.)
- Ignore the will of voters.
- Fix elections so that only it can win.
- Enthrone an authoritarian strongman with dictatorial aspirations. (Members of the party, including the authoritarian strongman himself, attempted to overturn an election by coup in order to bring this about.)
- Take away rights and control people’s personal lives, particularly in the area of sexuality.
- Violate the First Amendment by combining religion and politics.
- Impose its will on the media.
- Punish corporations and individuals for speaking out against it.
- Use newspeak tactics to distort language, promote falsehoods, and sow confusion.
- Destroy public education and use private education to indoctrinate children with denialist propaganda.
- Get rid of people it considers undesirable—with tactics that have included breaking up families and putting people in concentration camps.
And the same gun fetishists who fantasize about armed Jews resisting Nazis because it echoes their fantasy of taking up arms against tyranny? Most of them support this tyrannical party, because they think it won’t threaten their gun rights. They repeat the Holocaust gun story as a warning that gun control is a preface to tyranny—but what’s unfolding in front of our eyes has made it obvious that tyrants don’t need gun control if they have the willing cooperation of gun owners.
20. “Militias could have prevented Japanese internment.”
See the above point about German Jews. In 1942 Japanese Americans were 0.09 percent of the U.S. population; in California, where most of them lived, they were 1.2 percent. They didn’t have the numbers to resist the government, even if they had all been armed. But a few additional points:
- With a handful of exceptions, the so-called militia movement and racism go hand in hand. Show me any “state militia” in 1942 that would have lifted a finger to help the Nisei. (In 1942 the majority of able-bodied men of military age in the U.S. were preparing to defend it overseas, not to attack it at home, and the majority public opinion [wrongly] assumed that Nisei were somehow connected to the Pearl Harbor attack.)
- If you’re not old enough to remember Nisei internment, think back to April 2018, when we learned that the U.S. government was separating migrant families at the southern border and putting parents and children into different concentration camps.
- At the time, was there EVEN A SQUEAK of protest against this inhumane policy from anyone associated with the so-called “gun rights” movement? Did any “freedom-loving Second Amendment supporters” speak out against this inhumane violation of basic human rights?
- “But,” you say, “those people weren’t citizens!” Indeed they were not — but here’s the thing: Non-citizens still have human rights and even some constitutional rights. And tyranny doesn’t become Not-Tyranny just because it is being exercised against non-citizens. If anyone in the gun lobby actually wanted to oppose tyranny in this country, 2018 would have been the time to do it. I daresay, without fear of contradiction, that whatever your attitude toward family separation was in 2018, you’d have held the same attitude toward Nisei internment in 1942, had you been present then.
- It’s hard to overstate how patriotic the Nisei were. The Army actually recruited soldiers out of the internment camps, and the young men who signed up became part of the 442nd, the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army. Even after being interned, the Nisei were more interested in serving their country than resisting it. Blaming them for getting locked up is ignorant, moronic, racist, and shameful.
- A vitally important argument (if not the foremost argument) against internment is that the Nisei were loyal Americans who posed no threat to the U.S. government. Arming themselves against said government would have destroyed that argument, not to mention destroying the Nisei’s own identity.
21. “An armed society is a polite society.”
- Politeness and fear are not the same thing.
- In 1950 the United States had 38,127 guns per 100,000 people. Today we have 120,000 guns per 100,000 people. The ratio has more than tripled. You tell me: Are we three times more polite than we were in 1950?
- Analysis of surveys conducted by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that “[m]ost purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal.” (See above.) Owning guns isn’t making people more polite; rather, it makes some of them think they can get away with being arrogant jerks.
- The statement about a polite society comes from a character in Robert A. Heinlein’s dystopian novel Beyond This Horizon, where the context is, shall we say, somewhat different than ammosexuals would like you think.
22. “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
I suppose this is what passes for clever wordplay when you’re 8 years old. But beyond being childish, it’s another straw man argument that misrepresents whatever gun control proposition it might be deployed against.
I haven’t come across a gun control proponent yet who had the stone cojones to propose simply outlawing all guns. There are a lot of reasons that such a thing simply wouldn’t fly, no matter how reasonable you or I think it might be. Even the rallying cry of this blog — repealing the Second Amendment — would not of itself make any gun illegal. The much-discussed federal assault weapons ban did seek to “outlaw” certain weapons, but it spent too much of its energy on cosmetics and not enough on function — so that even under the ban, it was legal to sell and buy weapons that held a lot of ammo and could be fired rapidly, as long as those weapons didn’t look too much like an M-16.
Anyway, the effect — and perhaps the purpose — of repeating this mantra is to misrepresent gun control advocates and their arguments. It makes it seem as though gun control is concerned only with outlawing weapons, when in fact it includes an entire spectrum of proposed measures. None of those measures amount to blanket gun bans, and many of them are concerned with keeping weapons away from people who are likely to use the weapons to harm themselves or others. Gun fetishists use statements like this one to try to drown out what their opponents are actually saying.
23. “God and guns…”
Religious freedom means that ammosexuals can worship whatever they want, in any way they want. However, the god they talk about should not be mistaken for the Christian God.
The Christian God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent—i.e., all-knowing, all-powerful, and impossible to hide from. Christians recognize that only God has the power over life and death, and they trust God to protect them.
The ammosexual death cult, on the other hand, doesn’t worship God; they worship guns, and engage in horrific rituals of human sacrifice every day to appease the object of their worship. There is a god in ammosexual theology, of course, but he’s a weak, wussified, limp-wristed pansy of a god who is powerless to protect anybody, which is why the ammosexuals look to guns for protection instead. The ammosexual god doesn’t save anyone; in fact, it’s the ammosexuals who think they will save him. Their pushover god is forever getting thrown out of schools or government or culture or society. He is a helpless damsel in distress tormented by the liberal dragon, and the ammosexuals’ wet dream is to ride to his rescue.
23a. “We need revival.”
Yes, if only everyone could know the love, joy, and peace of a personal relationship with Jesus — which you express by holding an AR-15 in your family Christmas photo, packing heat everywhere you go, and screaming for the blood of anyone who doesn’t look, think, or act like you, while you respond to injustice with “thoughts and prayers” rather than action — I’m sure all the shooting would magically stop.
Again, often the people proclaiming “revival” as the solution are practicing a hatred- and fear-driven religion that Jesus himself might not even recognize. It might be true that if more of us followed Jesus’s instructions to love our neighbors, love our enemies, turn the other cheek, and put our swords away lest we perish by them, that could reduce violence. That’s the kind of “revival” I might want to hear more about.
Religion by itself does not necessarily prevent or erase the traumas and stresses that lead people to act out with a gun. Furthermore, every survey or study you might care to consult on the matter shows that Americans are abandoning religion in droves. There are multiple reasons for this, of course — but the rank hypocrisy of juxtaposing the Prince of Peace with weapons of war might just be one of them.
Finally, elected officials who say this sort of thing (and many of them have) are (a) forgetting the First Amendment principle of church-state separation: the government can’t and shouldn’t try to influence your choice of religion; (b) neglecting their own duty as members of the government to shape law and policy. Why anyone votes for candidates who don’t understand the job is beyond me.
Don’t forget, MAGA evangelicals defended their endorsement of the depraved, criminal, and amoral serial adulterer of a 45th president by saying, “We’re not electing a pastor.” If that’s true of the president, it’s true of every other elected official. When your governor or senator or representative starts talking like a pastor, it’s time for that person to change professions.
23b. “The problem is people’s souls/hearts/etc.”
If you are the kind of person who engages in the kind of talk being refuted here, then you have a gun where you should have a soul. Your commitment to violence as a means of solving your problems is interfering with your spiritual development.
It was Albert Einstein who said: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage, and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.” On a smaller scale, it’s hard to simultaneously love your neighbors and prepare to shoot them. If America does have a “heart problem” or a “soul problem,” perhaps that problem lies primarily in people who don’t see the irony in the old song “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” or in people who are so deluded and deceitful that they classify a gun problem as a “heart problem” or “soul problem.”
Get rid of your guns and try to rescue your own soul before you preach to me about someone else’s.
23c. “We need to build a society based on mutual respect and understanding.”
Yes, we do, but such a society is incompatible with gun culture as we know it. Guns are what gun nuts have in place of respect and understanding. Get rid of the guns and we’ll talk.
24. “Firearms aren’t even in the top 10 causes of death. What about heart disease, cancer, blah blah blah?”
MY GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO CANCER SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED! YOU CAN HAVE MY CANCER WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!
But seriously…
Nobody’s figured out how to break into a school building and kill a 6-year-old with heart disease or cancer.
No toddler ever pulled cancer out of his mother’s purse and killed her with it.
And, thank goodness, there’s no pro-cancer lobby telling us the solution to cancer is more cancer.
You have a lifetime to make choices to try to prevent disease. You don’t have a lifetime to literally dodge a bullet.
When medical research showed that secondhand smoke could cause cancer in nonsmokers, public smoking bans went into effect. There is no Second Amendment for cigarettes — you do not have the right to inflict a disease on another person.
The CDC, by the way, doesn’t list firearms as a cause of death. It lists accidents, suicide, and homicide as causes of death, and firearms deaths would be spread across those three categories. So the complaint about firearms not being listed is just a wee bit disingenuous. (Besides, guns don’t kill people, remember?)
It is nice to see guns listed alongside other public health concerns, as indeed they should be. But don’t forget — there are billions of dollars being spent on research, prevention, and public health when it comes to cancer, heart disease, et al. Yet when it comes to firearm deaths, gun advocates bitch and moan about (and have actively tried to curtail) any efforts in the direction of research, prevention, or public health, and claim that the solution is more firearms. If more than 120 people a day in the U.S. were being killed by tigers, you’d be declared an idiot if you said, “Well, what we need is more tigers!” But that’s exactly what gun fetishists say about (people with) guns.
And somewhere in this blog we should talk about firearm injuries. One problem with focusing so much on death is that we forget about people who are shot but don’t die — even though they far outnumber the deaths. Many of them are permanently disabled or disfigured, or have to live with pain for the rest of their lives. They are victims too. But they tend to be ignored whenever we start talking about statistics.
25. “The U.S. isn’t even in the top 10 countries for gun deaths! You’re exaggerating the problem.”
Ah, yes. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
In fact, when it comes to the number of people killed with firearms in a year, the United States is No. 2, behind Brazil. (Numbers are from 2019; note that the number used here is lower than the CDC total of 39,707.)
But when it comes to the rate of gun homicides — i.e., take out suicides and accidents, and divide the remaining deaths per 100,000 people — indeed the U.S. wasn’t in the top 10 in 2019. Why’s that? We have a big population relative to the number of gun homicides. (It should be noted that the overall U.S. gun death total in 2019 was relatively low compared to just two years later.)
The countries that are in the top 10 — all in Latin America — include a failed state (Venezuela), countries with drug cartels (Colombia, Mexico), and banana republics with gang problems (Honduras, Guatemala). Each country has fewer total gun deaths than the U.S., but also a much smaller population.
(Side note: Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are both among the top 10, even though they’re U.S. territories, not countries. Why they weren’t counted as part of the U.S. when it comes to gun deaths I couldn’t tell you. Just another way that statistics can be manipulated.)
This is an example of what I like to call Fun with Numbers. The question is this: If we’re comparing the U.S. to banana republics and cartel havens, is that really the most valid comparison? The United States is a developed country — or at least we like to think that we are. How does our gun death rate compare to those of other developed countries?
Be warned that it’s very easy to tweak statistics like these. After Anders Breivik killed eight people with a bomb and 69 more with a gun in Norway in 2011, U.S. pro-gun “researcher” John Lott got a lot of mileage out of portraying Norway as some violent hellhole because that one mass shooting spiked the country’s gun death rate.
To this and all other attempts to minimize gun violence, an appropriate response would be “Fine. Go explain to the grieving parents why the death of their 6-year-old isn’t such a big deal.”
26. “They’re coming for your guns!”
I doubt it will come to that … but hey, whatever it takes.
Every other intervention will be tried first, but if that doesn’t work, seizure is indeed the last resort.
And if it happens, the finger will be well and properly pointed at a gun culture that championed rights without responsibility. Gun enthusiasts have the power to shape a gun culture that actually promotes, rewards, and reinforces responsible gun ownership — rather than just talking about it — and punishes irresponsible gun ownership. But they haven’t seen fit to do it.
Instead, they blame every gun problem on “bad guys” and then obstruct reasonable efforts to keep guns away from bad guys — red flag laws, background checks, national registry, you name it — while screaming that criminals won’t obey laws. The gun lobby is that house at the end of the block with 27 rusted-out cars and heaps of trash in the yard. If the owners refuse to clean it up, they shouldn’t complain when someone comes along and does it for them.
In fact, the “They’re coming for your guns!” line puts the lie to the whole “good guy/bad guy” dichotomy. The statement is never directed to bad guys (the ones at most risk for having their guns seized); it’s always directed to all gun owners, as if the difference between “good guys” and “bad guys” somehow ceases to matter when one is making this argument. Which suggests that at some subconscious level, gun fetishists aren’t very committed to the “good guy/bad guy” argument.
The bottom line: If you’re the type of person who parrots the propaganda discussed on this page, then you aren’t someone who should be trusted with a gun.
27. “The majority of U.S. gun deaths are suicides.”
True. (Not the vast majority — 54% of gun deaths in 2020 — but still a majority.)
That doesn’t make it OK.
When I was a teenager, a man from my church stepped in front of a moving freight train … and survived. Later, while recuperating at home from his injuries, he shot himself in the head.
Kurt Cobain first tried mixing alcohol with pills … and survived. Later he shot himself in the head.
The point: Nearly all gun suicide attempts are successful. Other methods have higher failure rates. Take guns out of the equation, and even if the number of suicide attempts were to remain constant, the number of successful attempts will decrease — giving suicidal people more chances to survive and get the help they need.
Suicide prevention is just as important as homicide prevention, and knowing that most gun deaths are suicides does not make gun homicides any less horrible.
28. “You’re not an expert on guns, so you should stay in your lane and keep your mouth shut.”
The vast majority of people who say such things are not experts on medicine, public health, journalism, the Constitution, public policy, the law, or even simple logic. Somehow that doesn’t keep them from flapping their gums.
Sometimes this is just whining about semantics, as in whether or not it’s appropriate to refer to a 30-round magazine as “high-capacity,” or whether there is such a thing as an “assault rifle.” In that case, 30 rounds is 30 rounds, and a rifle is a rifle. Gun control proponents want to make them sound scary; gun fetishists want to make them seem benign, and so the two groups use different words. That’s just how it goes; both sides are trying to control the narrative. There is no reason for the gun control people to yield here; that would amount to allowing irrational nutjobs to dictate the terms of the debate. We’ve seen too much of that already.
Sometimes this is a complaint about how guns operate. It may be true that some technical knowledge about different types of guns and safety equipment is useful in drafting the finer points of policy. But basically, all you have to know is that guns are used to put bullets in people. If you disagree, your mission is to find any parent of a 6-year-old killed in a school shooting and explain to them why your knowledge about guns makes any difference.
In any case, when a person says this, they’re indicating that they’re not interested in a rational discussion of safety or public policy. They don’t want to listen, and perhaps they’re subconsciously aware that all their arguments about safety and policy are utter crap. So they try to change the subject to How Guns Work.
28a. “You can’t have a valid opinion on guns if you don’t know what AR-15 stands for … what a bolt carrier is … blah blah blah.”
A variation of the above. Tell me why it matters to a classroom full of dead kids.
29. “The Second Amendment is immutable! It’s bulletproof! SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!”
It’s no more immutable or bulletproof than any other part of the Constitution. Remember the Three-Fifths Compromise, or the election of senators by state legislatures? Even an amendment can be overturned: the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th.
The Fourth Amendment, which protects your privacy against unreasonable searches and seizures, includes the phrase “shall not be violated,” which sounds vaguely familiar. And yet, as Edward Snowden informed us, the federal government routinely violates your privacy when you use electronic communications. We’ve all just gotten accustomed to it.
30. “Federalist Papers blah blah blah.”
The Federalist Papers are a major basis of my argument here. Federalist 29, written by Hamilton, claims that a militia will make a regular army unnecessary. Federalist 46, written by Madison, claims that a militia could easily defeat a regular army.
Those claims might have been persuasive in 1788. They might even have been true. But they are no longer persuasive or true. The regular army is here to stay, and the militia wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance of defeating it. In the long run, Hamilton and Madison didn’t get what they wanted. Their rationale for a militia is no longer applicable and is no argument for the preservation of the Second Amendment.
The Constitution needs to reflect reality — not a pipe dream that didn’t work out.
31. “Machine guns existed in the 18th century and the Framers knew about them.”
Gunmakers in the 18th century and even earlier certainly experimented with repeat-fire weapons, and one such experimental weapon, the Chambers gun, was indeed demonstrated to the U.S. government in the 1790s. The problem with these experimental weapons is that they were unreliable — they didn’t work well enough for military use. You can call the Chambers gun a “machine gun” if you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a commercial failure.
The Militia Acts of 1792 required all free white men between 18 and 45 to own a firearm for use in the militia.* The text is very specific about the type of weapon one was supposed to have (either a musket or a rifle), as well as the ammunition and accessories one was expected to have — down to the amount of powder in one’s horn, the diameter of one’s gun barrel, and the weight of one’s musket balls (not to mention the bearskin caps on pistol holsters!). It makes no mention of repeating firearms. There is no doubt or debate about the weapons the Framers expected the militia to use, and “machine guns” are not included.
*History suggests that no, not all Americans ran out and bought guns just because the Militia Acts told them to.
32. “The Framers were infallible, omnipotent demigods who foresaw developments in gun technology.”
No, they weren’t.
The Framers didn’t foresee the United States having a regular army, but we have one anyway. The Framers didn’t foresee the Civil War — or if they did, their infallible omnipotence wasn’t enough to prevent it.
Advancements in gun technology were made possible by dozens of individual gunsmiths and inventors working independently over decades, with major help from the Industrial Revolution. Such complex developments are incredibly hard to foresee.
What the Framers did foresee was the need to change the Constitution from time to time:
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” — Thomas Jefferson
33. “You’re so angry. Someone as emotionally unstable as you shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun.”
A classic example of the ad hominem fallacy — attacking me instead of my arguments — but it is nice to see the pro-gun crowd admit that some people shouldn’t have guns.
Perhaps the people who aren’t angry over senseless violence — at least, not angry enough to do anything about it — are the ones we should be more concerned about.
34. “Hoplophobia.”
Another ad hominem attack. Hoplophobia is the irrational fear of guns. Such a thing may indeed exist, but let’s be clear: the whole idea of armed self-defense relies on a rational fear of guns. In other words, when someone points a gun at you, you are meant to fear for your life because you’re aware of what a gun is and what it’s used for. So the gun enthusiast’s rationale for controlling others with guns depends on us being afraid of the guns; yet they want to accuse us of being irrational for having that fear.
In any case, phobias are diagnosed by mental health professionals, not by people getting into arguments. I may not have a monopoly on rational thought, but neither does the gun crowd.
34a. “You’re afraid of inanimate objects.”
This remark simply combines the hoplophobia accusation with the “Guns don’t kill people” argument. It’s a nakedly false statement, of course: concern about guns always involves their use by people.
35. “Supreme Court blah blah blah. YOU LOSE, LOSER!”
(Yes, this is exactly the level of discourse one gets from gun fetishists when they start getting hot around the collar.)
Look up the “argument from authority” logical fallacy sometime.
It’s true that the gun lobby’s effort to rewrite the meaning of the Second Amendment has been wildly successful — so much so that a majority of Supreme Court justices now endorse it. All the more reason that (a) the Second must be repealed; (b) it won’t be easy.
Three recent SCOTUS decisions went the gun lobby’s way — Heller, Chicago, and Bruen — each one wackier than the one before it, so one can understand why the gun nuts are excited.
But no Supreme Court decision will necessarily stand for all eternity, and nobody in their right mind supports every such decision or thinks the Supreme Court is infallible. Dred Scott*, anyone? Plessy v. Ferguson?
In fact, there is significant overlap among those who cheer decisions like Bruen and those who celebrate the overturn of Roe v. Wade — because gun worship is so pro-life. Or something.
Opposing this or that Supreme Court decision is a perfectly normal thing to do. Everyone does it. If you believe a decision is wrong, you have the right to say so, and to work to overturn it.
In the case of the present Supreme Court, there are also valid concerns that the Court is destroying its own legitimacy. In fact, most Americans — 58 percent — now say they disapprove of the Supreme Court, which is a 20-year high. Crowing about any of this Court’s decisions makes you a member of a rapidly shrinking minority. SCOTUS may not be the trump card that you think it is.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t forget the amount of skulduggery the Republicans (and, in some cases, the justices themselves) undertook to load the Supreme Court precisely to obtain such decisions:
- the Senate majority leader betraying his oath of office;
- electing an incompetent wannabe dictator to the presidency;
- the suspiciously timed Kennedy resignation;
- applying the “nuclear option”;
- making up “rules” about SCOTUS appointments and breaking them later;
- a SCOTUS justice failing to disclose lavish gifts, a real estate transaction, tuition payments, and influence-peddling from a billionaire donor;
- that same justice’s wife plotting to steal an election;
- another justice whose debts magically disappeared and whose record of accused sexual misconduct has yet to be seriously investigated;
- a third justice leaking important decisions;
- fanning the flames of partisan division that may yet destroy democracy; and all the rest.
Every day there’s more evidence pointing to the conclusion that a number of justices — and indeed, federal judges in lower courts — are bought and paid for. It’s one thing to say that your ideas are endorsed by the Supreme Court when the Court is functioning as a truly independent judiciary. It’s quite another thing when the Court is merely the judicial wing of the gun lobby.
*Funny enough, I did encounter a gun nut who tried to use Dred Scott (1857) to claim that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights, because Chief Justice Taney, in his infamous argument in that infamous case, claimed that one reason Scott, a black man, wasn’t a U.S. citizen was that he’d then have the right to carry a gun. There are good reasons to dismiss this claim as specious, not the least of which is that the Scott decision, which helped kick off a civil war and is widely considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court, was overturned a mere 11 years later by ratification of the 14th Amendment.
36. “Sharks and lightning both kill more people than school shootings. You’re overreacting.”
There may have been years in which more people in this country died in shark attacks or lightning strikes than in school shootings. But 2022 was not one of those years. And the current trend isn’t very promising.
Apart from the basic falsehood of the claim, the two logical fallacies at play here are red herrings and cherrypicking. Sharks and lightning are red herrings because they have nothing to do with school shootings; they are natural phenomena with established methods of prevention. To my knowledge, no shark has ever attacked anyone inside a school building, and likewise a school is usually a good place to shelter from lightning.
Sharks gonna bite because that’s what 450 million years of DNA tell them to do. If you do not wish to be bitten, don’t go where the sharks are. Lightning has been hitting the earth for even longer than 450 million years. If you do not wish to be struck, stay indoors when it rains, preferably in a one-story house or a building with a lightning protection system.
School shootings are not natural phenomena; they are not driven by DNA or electricity; they are carried out by people with guns. We could prevent them, but our politicians refuse.
The other problem with this argument is cherrypicking: why are we discussing only school shootings? We’re at the point in the United States where we have more than one mass shooting a day. Most of them, thank God, are not in schools, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked.
Finally: As ever, the heartless bastards (and they do exist) who use arguments like this one are welcome — nay, should be required — to explain to a roomful of grieving parents why their kids are just statistics and they shouldn’t overreact.
37. “When some drug-crazed loony breaks into your house, you’ll wish you had a gun.”
Yes, threatening me with violence is such a great way to score points in a debate. It also proves that gun fetishists aren’t sick, depraved, and evil.
38. “We already have 50,000 gun laws in this country. More laws aren’t gonna fix anything.”
If a given gun law is ineffective, that’s most likely because it was designed that way. Pro-gun lawmakers are dedicated to watering down gun bills and loading them with loopholes.
39. “Stop being so emotional.”
Ad hominem. We’ll stop being emotional when the shooting stops.
40. “If you ban guns, what are you going to do about the guns that already exist? I’ll be one of the millions of angry gun owners waiting to take out anyone who comes for my guns.”
Yes, “If I can’t have my way I’m going to turn violent” is exactly the argument we expect from responsible, law-abiding gun owners. I don’t believe I’ve met a gun nut yet who could resist making a threat of violence in one form or another. That it’s the same argument used by emotionally disturbed fourth graders is, I’m sure, just a coincidence.
A wholesale gun ban is extremely unlikely, but, Lord willing, should it ever come to pass, it could simply state that whatever firearms you have in your domicile must remain there, unloaded and secured. Leave the house with one and you’re fair game. Break any other laws and the police can come clean out your collection while you are in jail. Et cetera. Bans can be written so that they’re enforceable without door-to-door gun collection.
41. “Shootings are the price of freedom.”
No, they’re the price of fear, selfishness, ignorance, anger, apathy, and greed.
42. “The safety of my family comes first.”
- If you’re concerned about your family’s safety, then you might want to rethink the idea of having lethal weapons in your house, since those weapons are more likely to be used against members of your family then they are to be used by members of your family against an intruder.
- Of course we all want our families to be safe. The idea of protecting your family sounds very noble and it’s not easy to say anything against it. However, this phrase when used by gun enthusiasts is invariably an expression of one of the gun lobby’s foundational and enduring fictions: the myth of the rugged individual.
To the gun lobby, gun ownership is the ultimate expression of self-sufficiency. The gun owner vows to protect their family without any help from law enforcement or politicians. Why should they need any help when they’ve got a gun? The rugged individual myth grew out of romanticized tales of cowboys and pioneers, and has been reinforced by a century of Western movies, at least 60 years of Republican politics — and gun culture.
But for all that, it’s still a myth. In reality, people who “settled” the West always helped each other, and depended on the government for their 40 acres and a mule or their grazing rights.
And a bunch of rugged individuals who refuse to cooperate with or care for others outside of their nuclear families is a crappy way to build a society. It’s OK that your family is important to you; it’s not OK if other families aren’t. To contribute to a healthy society, one has to move beyond selfishness and us-vs.-them thinking — which means one has to stop listening to the gun lobby.
43. “I choose not to live in fear.”
Of course you’re living in fear.
That’s why you have a gun.