It's time, once again, to play that sad and deadly game, "spot the irrational argument." Gun violence version.
As a high school and college debater, I was drilled in the uses of argument and persuasive speech, including how to spot an irrational argument. We should all bone up on it right now.
The number one problem seems to be "confirmation bias." It is a source of bad evidence, and distorted argument. This is when a person struggles to defend an illogical argument by any means necessary, because the speaker psychologically does not, or sometimes can not, accept the evidence as presented because it damages his personal world-view. To accept the argument would be too painful to contemplate, often because it cuts against the self-interest of the speaker.
Every right-wing Republican with a 100% rating from the NRA is subject to confirmation bias on guns. They have made a decision to align themselves with a group whose irrational defense of gun rights for all has made them catnip for conspiracy theorists and preachers predicting the imminent End of Days. A happy haven for angry white men living off the grid in cabins, plotting their revenge against Government.
Despite the fact that Republicans demand Obama take a stronger stance against terrorism, Republican politicians won't even pass a law to prevent guns from being sold to those on the nation's No-Fly List! The NRA is now the best friend an American terrorist could ever ask for; let's not forget that President George H. W. Bush had the courage to send in his NRA membership card in the 1980's, when the NRA began to preach not only for gun rights, but against government regulation of firearms, with an NRA letter calling federal ATF officials "jack-booted thugs."
Examples of irrational argument include the ever-popular "guns don't kill people, people kill people." So the answer is...what exactly? This irrational argument comes from a tactic called "changing the subject." Also known as a "straw man" argument because it is so easy to destroy the straw man. If the argument is "what will stop violence 100%" then we have no answers. If, however, the argument is "how can we make it harder for people to kill people, even if we can't stop violence 100%", then we have to agree that we should ban all assault weapons, because they make it incredibly easy to kill people.
A full-throated example of confirmation bias was in evidence on Morning Joe recently, when Republican House Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas was asked repeatedly about banning assault weapons, and his lame replies dripped of self-interest and confirmation bias. The tactic is always to shift the argument away from semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines and cop-killing bullets to an ordinary semi-automatic hunting rifle. Here's how the game is played.
After Willie Geist and Joe Scarborough both asked why on earth anybody would ever need to buy a Bushmaster, a weapon that can be fired repeatedly without reloading, Congressman Thornberry said this:
"Semiautomatic is my shotgun where I don't have to reload or cock it every time I want to hit another quail flying over."
I was so dumbfounded by this, that I re-wound my DVR and copied his quote down word for word.
Let me get this straight, Congressman; Americans should live in fear of being slaughtered by a shooter with a high-capacity semi-automatic weapon that makes it easy to kill a number of people within seconds, before anybody could stop such a shooter, because...you want to have the freedom to hunt quail without cocking your gun each time you shoot? Really? Is that where it is? Because maybe I want my freedom to down ten glasses of wine for my own enjoyment, and get in a car on a crowded freeway and hope for the best.
Freedom is never absolute. With rights come responsibilities. There are sensible gun owners and gun sellers who know this! But they are not interviewed on television. Instead, we get these Republicans whose political careers have depended for years on the support of the NRA.
In the same interview, Thornberry trotted out the same old same old irrational arguments; why pass laws when criminals won't obey them? This one is so clearly irrational a reasonably intelligent sixth grader, operating without confirmation bias, would flag it as bad logic.
The definition of a criminal is a person who ignores laws! Get it? So why pass laws at all? We pass laws because they are an effective deterrent for some, but not all. We pass laws to create a cultural environment that says "this is the nation we want to live in." And we therefore shape society one way or the other.
The only way to pass rational gun laws in this country is to purge the folks whose eyesight is blinkered by confirmation bias from our politics. Those whose arguments are so clearly irrational that there is no other way to explain their continued use other than pure self-interest, disguised by personal psychology through rationalization. No one will ever admit to confirmation bias. It is up to the press and the people to understand that a person can sincerely think they are defending a real belief, and go on TV day after day saying this stuff, and not realize the psychological trick they are playing on themselves, and the nation.