Guns Don’t Kill Americans, Stale Bad Arguments Do

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This is satire, right?

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It is, though at this point it is so close to what the right is saying it takes a couple paragraphs to be sure. The final line is “Honestly, what today could be more star-spangled American than the sight of young people marching into Sunday School with a Bible in one hand and a 9mm in the other?”.

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Yes. Jonathan Swift style, but like @chenille says it’s hard to tell these days.

[ETA: yeah. . . this photo still blows my mind.]

nuts_big_guns_bfoimdaqhm6nrh3puhbfqeba5a

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The part that made me reasonably sure that it was satire was this:

As for kids under the age of ten who would be too young to carry weapons in school – because that would be plain silly – we would probably have to construct watchtowers and high barbed-wire fences, like the kind they had in World War II concentration camps. Smaller schools might not have the resources to fund additional security, but in those situations we could have older students man the towers. And then maybe we can bring back the Uzis.

The part at the end about guns in one hand and Bibles in the other did not strike me as obviously satirical.

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Bring the Mass back to Mass Murders!

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That’s run by the son of religious grifter par excellence Rev. Sun Myung Moon. He got shut out the family’s main right-wing cult scam so he made a new American one based on this appropriate totem. Of course he was present at the 6 Jan. insurrection too.

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Poe’s law says that it’s not satire without the /s

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Bob the Angry Flower - The 2nd A

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Claim: Ownership of firearms for sport or subsistence hunting and industrial pest control are protected by the Second Amendment.

Unless one thinks that the gophers or deer or other animals have nefarious designs on the free state defined by the U.S. Constitution, this argument can immediately be dismissed as ridiculous. This claim is usually made as part of an attempt to demonstrate how gun control advocates (presumably urban-dwelling liberals and progressives) are out of touch with the Real America™ of hunters and rangers and farmers. It is also used by the manufacturers of military weapons type as a marketing and political cover term (e.g. the industry calls the AR-15 platform, which was originally designed for military use, as a “modern sporting rifle”).

Some gun-strokers will try and defend this claim by noting that, in the early days of the U.S., the arms borne by militia members were used for hunting as well. While based in truth – the modern distinctions between different types are firearms were more hazy then – this position ends up undermining their frequent claim that the arms referenced in the Second Amendment must primarily be weapons designed for military use.

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Claim: Americans need free access to AR-15 and other semi-automatic platform rifles that can take large-capacity magazines so that farmers and ranchers use them as “varmint rifles” for to control pests like prairie dogs, raccoons, coyotes, gophers, feral hogs, etc.

This claim is generally used as a distraction tactic by ammosexuals, providing them with an entry point into technical gun-wanking. This kind of pest control is sometimes conflated with sport hunting, even though those are very different activities. Arguments for controling the use of such weapons in these situations with mandatory industrial licenses and/or insurance are rejected on the basis of extremely shaky Second Amendment grounds. The general conclusion from people with actual experience on farms and ranches and target shooting seems to be that these weapons are not great pest control tools; more on that in this topic:

ETA: If pest control is an actual requirement, the solution is stringent industrial licensing.

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Claim: the Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to keep firearms for household self-defense from burglars and home invaders and other criminals. Or, y’know, to stand your ground at Applebees.

Unless the attackers are always assumed to also be attacking the republic as defined in the Constitution, this is another bogus argument.* It is sometimes used by ammosexuals as a “crocodile tears” argument to show how economically comfortable liberal and progressive gun control proponents are out of touch with minorities and poor people who live in bad neighbourhoods (also tying into their standard argument that “moar gunz” is always the answer to crime).

On a related note, the Second Amendment also does not exist to allow aspiring pulp novel and movie action heroes and people insecure in their masculinity to amass weapons for collecting purposes or as fetish objects.

[* ironically, one often made by the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on 6 Jan., 2020]

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See also Jim Jefferies’ piece on Gun Control (Part 1, Part 2), the rebuttal to this argument (“defend my home”) can be summarised:

  • You’re much more likely to use a gun on yourself than on anyone else.
  • If your gun is available for use in defensive situations, then it’s available for abuse in other situations, like if when your kid finds it.
  • If you keep your gun securely locked away separately from the ammunition like you’re supposed to, then it’s no good if someone does come through the window.

And the hypocrisy is summed up as

You have guns because you like guns. That’s why you go to gun conventions, that’s why you read gun magazines. None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a security door going “fuckin’ yeah!”.

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Also, there just were not that many different styles of arms in those days, muskets and long rifles for the most part. They were general purpose tools then, and the technological advances since then, like for many other tools, means that you have many more specialized choices. The tradeoff that they’re a lot less useful for the tasks they are not specialized in.

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Claim: Hire more school police officers to protect students.
vs
What happens when this is done…

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