Back to the Old-Time West

“The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” So chants the NRA and their supporters. There is little evidence for the truth of this claim, but it does have the “virtue” of taking us back in time to the Old West. The history of that experiment indicates pretty strongly that towns eventually became safe havens by asking everyone to surrender their guns on the way into town.

Another classic NRA yarn is, “people kill people, not guns.” That is entirely true, of course, but it is also irrelevant. It is a classically weak argument because it completely fails to acknowledge the total causal chain. When we look at the causal chain, we see that a gun was in between the person who killed and the person who was killed. Granting that some people use their bare hands, some use knives, and some use cars, there are a huge number of homicides in which a gun was in the middle of things. But the argument is used to convince us not to look at guns but rather to look at people. That’s fine, of course; we should look at people, especially violent and mentally unstable people. However, we don’t look at guns with the idea of disciplining guns; we look at the ways in which guns get into the hands of violent and unstable people. That is what legislation is about, and the NRA “argument” does nothing to address that issue except trying to distract us from seeing the point.

Yet another NRA tactic is to convince people that the government (if not Obama himself) is almost at their front doors hot on taking away all their guns. The fact that people (some people, that is) seem to believe this is completely amazing. But they do believe it with religious fervor and are stock piling ammunition and weaponry and keeping it close to the front door. There are no facts to support this claim so why do people believe it. It’s effectiveness relies on widely held hatred of government, especially among so-called conservative people. (Why they are called “conservative” when their mission is complete destruction of the Constitution is beyond me.)

High schools and colleges should teach critical thinking, but that is the reason (partly) why Conservatives do not want to support education.