Victim disarmers still sellin' the snake oil

The victim disarmament crowd (that's "gun control" stated more honestly) apparently still has what it takes to bowl over the minds of the uncritical, and manages to retain a near-stranglehold on some popular national media. This past weekend's Parade magazine, for example, had the same sort of "file photo" article that has been around since before most of us were born.

It's of the same formula you've come to roll your eyes at reflexively. A quick review:

The title. "Despite Recent Violence, Gun Laws Are Softening". Heavens, nothing like "gun laws softening" can possibly see print without being related to "violence" or "crime" or something else that suggests causality. Worse, it implicitly suggests that victim disarmament is somehow about statistics, crime, or safety, which is the biggest fiction you'll ever hear on the subject.

The lead-in. "Thirteen killed at an immigration center in New York. Eight at a nursing home in North Carolina. Five in a house in California. These were among the 57 people killed in mass shootings in a 30-day period this spring in the U.S. Meanwhile, new laws are easing restrictions on guns." This is a technique called waving the bloody shirt, and disarmers practice it relentlessly. It is intended entirely to pull at your heartstrings and prepare you to agree with whatever point the writer is about to come to--anything to make these horrible things stop. Its greatest asset, as a persuasive technique, is that it completely absolves the waver of the need to prove anything, and this alone probably explains why it is the primary tool of the Brady Bunch (who historically have had a bit of a problem with credibility--their near-continuous rebranding and even renaming is no accident).

The structure. The article has the patternistic structure you know so well. After the companion title/lead-in attack, there is the viewpoint of the "other side", behind which you can hear the dark, foreboding music suggesting some combination of sociopathic lunacy and evil incarnate. Who could even think such a thing? You'll note few if any statistics here, and whatever quotes are offered will tend to be dry, plaintive and uncompelling. In this case, playing the part in the black hat, we have an NRA spokesman who offers milquetoast verbiage that could only speak to those who need no convincing in the first place. (NRA has become really, really good at that.)

But it is darkest before the dawn, and the light begins to shine in with the white hats on the way. "Statistics", assumed to be both accurate and relevant, are trumpeted to quickly dispel or marginalize anything that the black hat has said. Here, we have the steel-trap certainty of such incontestable statements as "disastrous", "wouldn't necessarily", "almost certainly", followed by one of the deadest horses in all of public policy: comparative homicide rates of different nations. Ah, the raw causality! Only a certifiable idiot wouldn't see the connection.

And then, on the whitest of white horses, in comes our savior, instant expert on matters of our salvation. His quotes are hard-hitting and sexy (this is Parade, after all), and leave us with the Final Word On The Subject. In this case: "It's what happens when a person gets mad and has easy access to a gun. Someone is shot over a game of dice. Had the gun not been in their hands, no one would have died." Here endeth the lesson.

You've seen this before. The TV show The Simpsons covers the basic manipulation technique perfectly in the episode Homer Badman.

And the thing is, it's really bad snake oil

I have never been able to figure out what is so compelling about this sell job; even the slightest application of critical thinking dismantles the whole thing. Just for starters:

How many of those quoted mass-shootings happened in gun-free zones? How's that workin' out?
What of the failure of the thousands of gun laws that have come before? (Let me guess: "This time for sure!")
Explain how someone who would commit murder would be anywise deterred by a malum prohibitum.
Explain again how individuals are incapable of fending for themselves, and even saving more lives than they take?

As well, why anyone is actually willing to put up with arguments as insulting as the disarmers', is a pretty spectacular mystery. The whole concept of disarmament, after all, is predicated on the idea that your life is not your own--that you do not have the right to protect it by any means necessary; that you must beg the permission of the state for that privilege. How insulting is that?

We are constantly given the hard-sell that regular people (that's you and me, mind you) are so stupid, so reckless, so close to going over the edge into homicidal mania, that for everyone's safety we must, em, "hire" an external party to disarm us all at the points of their guns? (And how about that third party, too? It's government, of course, the institution responsible for more death, butchery and oppression than any other in the history of mankind. What could go wrong there?)

Ironically, this is usually sold on the basis of some sort of performance (reduction of crime, improvement of safety, etc.), which immediately reveals it as the red herring it is, since any sort of credible data prove rather conclusively that disarmament does not, has not, and will never perform as advertised. (Were this true, the very places hardest-hit by "gun crime", invariably with the most draconian "gun control" available already on the books, would be the safest places on the planet, and no rational person can claim that this is the case.) So, there is no benefit, and yet peaceable people are denied the option of doing what every other species in the history of the planet has never questioned--defending their lives with whatever tools they deem necessary. This is the very definition of lose-lose.

This deters the disarmers in no way--when confronted with such inconveniences as history, relevance and the data they say they care about, their answer is to resort to the ad-hominem and waving of bloody shirts.

So let's see...to sum up:

Disarmament schemes do not work. (Well, not to benefit the peasantry anyway. Could there be another purpose?)
Disarmers do not really care about the statistics they spout; else they would actually consider alternatives should the numbers prove them wrong.
Disarmers would force the law-abiding to be defenseless at the point of the state's guns.
Disarmers would rather further empower a police state than to see peaceable individuals have enforceable sovereignty unto themselves.

Wow, I'm just really not seein' the appeal here, but then I cannot exactly claim to be hip, either.

On the third hand, perhaps there is something to be made of Parade's own opinion poll on the matter. It appears that, as of this writing, despite the clear intent of the article to shill for the Brady Bunch, the response to the question "Should states loosen restrictions on guns?" is running 94% "Yes" to 6% "No". Now doubtless the disarmers can find all sort and manner of reasons why that is meaningless (they always do, unless the numbers are what they want), but it is interesting to note nonetheless.

Likewise, there is a population out there that may simply refuse to disarm, no matter what. It may be currently trendy to call them kooks or extremists, and certainly Uncle Sam doesn't much like the idea of their growing ever more vocal, but this does not mean that they do not exist, nor that what they have to say is automatically wrong. Heck, what these people want more than anything is simply to be left alone to live in peace. We've seen such people before.

Nobody should have to beg permission to defend his, or her, life. Nobody. If any right can be considered a natural right, this is the one, and no amount of snake oil, red herrings, or waving bloody shirts can or should change that.