Sounds like you’re not part of the demographic that The Daily Show targets. Sounds like you also want to double down on discrediting this Daily Show segment on the fallacious-but-nearly-ubiquitous “good guy with a gun” argument by attacking how the show goes about discrediting it, rather than dealing with what the segment is saying. Even though, as I’m gathering, you disagree with what it’s saying. I’m still wondering if there’s a name for that feeble tactic (“When you can’t argue what what they have to say, just attack the way they say it!”).
Oh we certainly have to try, and people who make arguments about sexual dimorphism frequently suffer from a poor understanding of the concept and suffer from a naturalistic fallacy. Still, there are hard limits to being a human, and much that we still don’t understand. We spend an awful lot of time in denial about our capacity for free will and culpability in our courtrooms. That’s how you end up executing children.
You can’t blame Cory. He’s unfamiliar with what it’s like for us Canadians, and he’s generally not up-to-speed with these copyright issues.
######Yes, I know.
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I usually like the Daily Show, or at least I did when I watched most Stewart clips. But these kinds of segments have always been the worst.
Intelligence is not Wisdom. 
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So, obviously analogies are never perfect. But I wanted to point out the huge glaring hole in this one.
If owning a gun becomes stigmatized, then gun owners can easily get rid of their guns or hide the fact that they own guns.
If being black becomes stigmatized, black people who don’t kill or rob people can’t hide the fact that they’re black or stop being black to avoid being associated with the killers and thieves.
So the stakes are much lower for gun owners here for black people, and entirely because of the difference between the meaning of “gun owner” and “black”.
This suggests to me that the analogy was chosen for emotional rather than logical reasons. The comparison breaks down across the only axis that is relevant to the comparison, so it is useless for reasoning by analogy. It can only be useful from a propaganda perspective.
Outlawing guns versus outlawing being black are clearly two very morally different states of affairs. Let’s try to keep things in perspective.
Speaking of perspective, I think your perspective on this is too heavily informed by confirmation bias. You are highly, highly partisan on this issue. I’m going to be skeptical of your claims that the cautious, serious gun owners are more representative of the median gun owners barring hard data on this.
WHy do you suppose they did that? Do you think it might have had anything to do with the campaign contributions made by the NRA to those same politicians? I don’t think you’re assigning enough blame to the NRA.
Obviously if you could prevent people from getting guns, you could prevent mass shootings more effectively.
No, but ammunition is most certainly a subset of explosives. Are you down for banning ammunition?
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The only problem with that logic is their takeaway will be that they need a larger gun and some body armor as well.
Nobody who needs to learn from this video or anything similar to it will because “if I’d been there it would have been different!” The only way to show them is to literally do the same thing to them. Which I would love if it were a part of the gun purchasing process.
There is an American Medical Association study (sorry I couldn’t find the link just now) that looked at whether or not having a gun in the home increased one’s safety, and the conclusion was that if we lived in Mad Max world it probably would but currently having a gun in the home (locked up or not) the owner or another occupant in the house are more likely to be injured by the gun than it being used in self-defense.
The interesting statistic that fully 60% of US gun deaths are suicides (the study below mentions that from 2007 to 2011 there were 123,000 gun related deaths and of those 73,000 were suicides) Gun deaths also account for half of all suicides. Now you may think that you can’t stop someone from killing themselves if they want to, but consider that when Britain switched from a toxic to non-toxic cooking gas in the 1960s the rate of suicides dropped significantly. People often choose a method that is quick and most likely to work - rather than other more messy.
Gun control opponents often quote a study that says there is something like 2 million incidents per year where guns were in self-defense. I tried to find this study but I believe it goes back to a telephone survey of some 5000 people in the 80’s who were asked if they could recall an incident where having a gun made them feel safer over the past year. Obviously there could be wide interpretation - some people may feel safer just walking around with one, and clearly those who are opponents of gun control could easily say anything that backs up their own view.
gun related deaths vs legislation
Having said this I don’t oppose the right to buy guns and carry etc, I just don’t think that it should be so easy or that military style assault weapons be available.
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They’re only replicating experiments previously done (with far more competent shooters, no less) that came up with the exact same results. You may not like how it’s being presented, but it’s still valid.
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There’s a lot of cognitive biases at play because in America guns are there to provide a fantasy of control over one’s life, so any evidence that flatly contradicts that power fantasy can’t possibly be true. The no true Scotsman fallacy comes into play a lot. “Those other guys aren’t ‘responsible gun owners’ - I am! I’ve never [yet] gotten shot with my gun, so you know it’s true!” /twirls gun on finger, shoots self in foot
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Those might be valid. This is not, because there is no evidence of any actual honesty in this piece.
Ah, now you’re finally addressing what this piece has to say, instead of how it’s being said. And claiming, no less, that the entire thing is one long list of lies.
It should be easy for you to point out one or two of them; would you mind doing so?
Or wait, if you’re acknowledging that the piece replicates experiments that “might be valid,” then you’re acknowledging that there might be truth in the piece. While also saying there is no evidence of any actual honesty in it.
Anyway, I await your presentation of evidence of actual lies in it. . .
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It was ad hominem. It wasn’t just an attack on behavior in an abstract sense.
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Thank you, that term did come to mind, but “attack on the man [sic]” seems well, about the “man,” and not about his behavior. But I suppose it does fit, since what I’m pointing to is more an attack of the speaker than of the content of what the speaker says. I’m just wondering if there’s a term that’s more specific to attacks on how an argument gets made, as distinguished from who’s making it (hope that makes sense).
yep. Let me think about it…
It’s “shooting the messenger” as a style of logical fallacy.
or the fallacy fallacy or the poor argument fallacy
Probably a few names for it.
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You’re missing my overall point that: Generalizations and stereotyping is wrong. Showing evidence that supports your bias or stereotype doesn’t validate it.
One could hide being gay as well, but why should they have to? Are stereotypes of gays acceptable? If I generalized gay men as limp wristed sissy boys or lesbians as a butch softball players, and then showed you videos of some acting like that, does that make my generalization ok? Of course not.
Fun fact - there are in fact many, many legal black gun owners. Are they too gun-ho Rambos ready to
leap into action and take out a mass shooter? The instructor in the video was black. Does he fit the painting others want to paint?
Hard data? How about the hard data that there are at least 80 million gun owners in America, possibly up too 100 million have access to them per a Pew poll. And yet we only have 800 accidental deaths per year (some being suicides) and 12000 homicides. There is your hard data that no matter what their demeanor is, nearly all of them statistically are possessing and using guns in a safe manner.
A subset? So that would apply to what else, gasoline? Propane? Spray paint cans? Lighter fluid? Dry ice? Saw or grain dust? Or the dozens of other things that can be used to make something explode?
I disagree with your point. Generalizations are not always wrong – if that was the case then we couldn’t function as human beings because our cognition is largely predicated on generalizing patterns from specific instances.
You could see this if you stopped to ask yourself: “Why is it wrong to stereotype?”
Edit: I realized the “stereotyping” thing is a red herring. See my comment below.
Right, but you’ve now compared owning a certain kind of object to being a certain kind of person in two different ways. It is that comparison that I am saying is illegitimate. We cannot derive any deeper moral truths from this argument by analogy because the analogy is invalid on exactly the variable that is relevant to the moral judgment of why it is wrong to generalize or stereotype.
Generalizations and stereotyping are not just wrong. They are wrong for reasons. You’re making your point by eliding those reasons. I wanted to make clear that you’re begging the question by doing so.
Now, even if it’s absolutely true that blacks are more likely to kill or steal, it’s also still true that blacks who won’t do those things can’t stop being black. If it’s true that gun owners are more likely to be irresponsible, then gun owners who won’t be irresponsible can stop owning guns. Or own guns and not talk about it to people who would judge them.
Or, to address the comparison to hiding being gay, you could not hide owning a gun and simply accept the contempt of those who hate guns, exactly the same way that openly gay people have to accept the contempt of those who hate gays.
Gays haven’t become accepted because people learned that stereotyping is wrong. Gays became accepted because people came to believe that being gay isn’t wrong. And not everyone – just enough people that gays can mostly get around in society without having to hide their sexual orientations.
That’s not enough to conclude that nearly all of them are using guns in a safe manner. We would also have to know the probability that improper handling causes a death. It’s quite likely that the probability of an accidental death due to unsafe handling is so low that nearly all gun owners are unsafe but only a few cause deaths.
You’re also cheating by only counting accidental deaths. There’s also accidental wounds, purposeful wounds, homicides, and suicides. I think it’s clear that all of these count as unsafe uses of guns.
Well, you’re the one drawing the distinction between firearms and explosives. But one obvious difference between ammunition and the examples you give here is that ammunition was designed to explode through a rational process.
But if you’re not going to count ammunition as explosives, then I fail to see how you could count a pipe bomb as an explosive since it is based on essentially identical physical principles to ammunition – ignite a charge of powder to propel scraps of metal through the air very fast. This is the sort of thing that leads me to conclude you’re incredibly biased on this issue and have some trouble thinking clearly through some aspects of the problem.
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Yes, a person with no background in shooting, no interest in shooting and a determined interest in making people with guns look bad did poorly compared to police officers on a trainingcourse for police officers.
But the wrong assumptions here are many.
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It is almost always a bad idea for a CCW permittee to go “Looking for” the acive shooter. The gun is not there fro you to play cop/COD with, it is there so you can get home. This is the Zimmerman Mistake. Never go looking for trouble. If trouble comes to you you have an option.
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Active Shooter events are pretty damn rare. If we assume 1 active shooter for every event, and we follow the meme about “More mass shootings then days in the year” we still get <400 shooters/year. In a population of 310 Million+ that is a really small number. Compare it to the 70+ million gun owners it’s still vanishingly small. CCW permits are not primarily about being Rambo against an Active Shooter, they are about personal assault.
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Many CCW permittees pursue their own training beyond the minimums required to have a permit. Thunder Ranch, Lethal Force Institute, Gunsite, Suarez International and Front Sight all have thousands of alumni. Not to mention the CCW permitees who train and compete in IDPA and other shooting sports specifically to improve their gun handling and shooting prowess. And there are even more that take local classes, range time and unofficial training with Airsoft ant other tools. While the requirements to get a CCW are often (and should be ) relatively easy so that we are not barring the poor by requiring an onoerous amount of training, the typical CCW permittee does not stay at that level.
TL;DR is that yes, Jordan Klepper and any other Day 1 CCW permittee shouldn’t try and stop an active shooter event. However most CCW permittees are much more capable then Jordan Klepper. You want a fair assessment, send that NJ trainer into the course with the police. There is a much more representative Concealed Carry Permittee.
Let’s compare owning a gun to owning a slave. (This is no less offensive or less apt from my perspective than comparing owning a gun to being black.)
Surely it would be unfair to stereotype slave owners as being horribly immoral sadists who inflict pain for the sheer joy of it. For example, it seems pretty unlikely that Thomas Jefferson was a horribly immoral sadist who inflicted pain for the sheer joy of it.
Nonetheless, it is legitimate to place restrictions on owning slaves for various reasons, none of which have very much to do with stereotypes of slave owners.
The “stereotyping is wrong” angle seems like a red herring. The question is whether it is legitimate to place restrictions on owning firearms, what kind of restrictions, etc. The fact that at least some gun owners are irresponsible yahoos seems salient to the discussion of those questions.
Is mentioning the fact that some such gun owners exist equivalent to stereotyping all gun owners?
No. I’ve just now realized that when you brought up the “stereotype” angle you just muddied the waters. The real question is an entirely empirical one of whether there are a large number of irresponsible gun owners, whether they pose a public safety hazard, etc.
You think irresponsibility is not common, but others disagree. This is a legitimate difference of perceptions. It is not a case of stereotyping.
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