Yesterday, I wrote that the most important thing to do in the midst of this anti-gun mania is to keep your cool, think rationally, and avoid appeals to emotion.
Today, Joe Scarborough says that “Friday changed everything” and that “From this day forward, we can never be the same again.” He goes on to indicate that he no longer believes in the right to sell powerful weapons, or even in the right to produce violent movies.
A reasonably skeptical person might ask: what has changed? Did Friday’s shooting cause some rift in the space-time continuum, so that human nature is no longer what it used to be?
Before Friday, I saw no reason to believe that gun control could eliminate guns any more effectively than drug prohibition has eliminated marijuana or cocaine. How did Friday change that? Did it make government omnipotent, able to monitor every kind of human interaction and stop any kind of prohibited dealing in its tracks? If so, did it make omnipotent government suddenly more desirable than it was on Thursday?
Did it make it so that people will simply acquiesce in prohibitions of goods that carry an independent consumer demand? Did it suddenly make guns (or marijuana, cocaine, meth, and whatever else) undesirable to all the people who found them desirable on Thursday? Can black markets for prohibited goods no longer exist, after Friday? And will criminals no longer access black markets to find prohibited items?
Will the threat of armed citizens no longer deter criminals from committing crimes after Friday? Is it no longer the case that armed citizens, even if they don’t succeed in actually stopping a shooting, are at least better positioned to stop one than unarmed citizens? Or, did the police on Friday suddenly stumble upon some instant teleportation technology, so that they can be on the scene as soon as the criminal starts shooting, making private gun ownership unnecessary?
If these arguments were valid on Thursday, why are they invalid on Friday? As far as I can tell, all Scarborough’s argument amounts to is: “I used to support gun rights, but then I saw too many shootings, so now I support gun control.” That’s not a real argument; it is just an appeal to emotion that fails to address any of the concerns that gun-rights supporters have. But just because Scarborough has fallen prey to emotionalism doesn’t mean the rest of us should.
Emile
bdouglass
Benjamin David
Chuck O'Shea
Edmund Babbitt
joeptak
Kelse Hillery
Lucie
John David
prsancho
Radagast
The Lancastrian
wmsamuelbradford
Well I must say that this shooting has changed my views as well. I was a strong gun rights supporter and gun enthusiast, but I cannot abide any longer allowing people to purchase weapons, that by all rights should be class III, easier than a driver’s license.
I used to make all the typical arguments against gun control, but they just ring hollow. I appreciate what you are arguing for, but sometimes an event like this cannot be ignored.
You are aware that all rifles combined are used in only 350 homicides a year with so-called ‘assault weapons’ being used in little more than a hundred. Handguns are used in 8,000. Please explain your logic. ‘Assault Rifles’ were not even used in the incident with the most deaths, Virginia Tech, handguns were.
In truth I question whether you previously believed anything of the sort……..smacks of phoney seminar poster ‘I used to believe but I became enligtened’ nonsense.
When did I mention assault rifles? All I mentioned was that guns are easier to acquire than driver’s licences.
I live 5 miles from the Aurora theater, however. Its difficult to describe how that shooting affected the community. That person did use an AR-15, and shot 72 people. If that weapon was listed at class III it would have significant reduced the chance of that massacre. No class III weapon has ever been used in a crime to my knowledge. Its an example of gun control that works, and works well. No bans would ever be necessary with that solution, by the way.
No one is “ignoring” anything. Just because bad things have happened doesn’t tell us anything for or against gun control. The real question is whether things would be better or worse with more gun control. Just because loose gun control is correlated with some shootings doesn’t mean that it caused those shootings, or that there wouldn’t be more of them with stricter gun control. So, changing your mind just a shooting event happened is sloppy thinking.
Here’s a shocker, I agree with Kelse on this. This has actually made me more in favor of the 2nd amendment than before, however not for bringing on school grounds. I continue to see crime in the news, and any history of prohibition or the War on Drugs will show it’s not the all powerful answer we would like it to be. Instead I think we’re barking up the wrong tree so to speak. I think the much seen i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation piece on the Huffington post site.
Last half a sentence of the last post got left off:
… has a much better answer than the gun laws people are talking about.
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