A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.
B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.
C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.
D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.
E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.
F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)
G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.
H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.
I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.
K. Whatever stats they pull out of their ass are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”
L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.
M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist bullshit here)
N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.
O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.
P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dumb motherfucker who was stoned through every history class in high school.
Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.
R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!
S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.
T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.
U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.
V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.
W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.
X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.
Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.
Z. “You sound angry.”
I think you covered it all.
Except he missed “J”. 😉
Don’t forget the arrogant ass from the UK (Or other soon to be Caliphate.) where life is, according to them, all strawberry fields and frolicking unicorns. Lee Rigby never existed and you’re a racist for bringing him up!
And don’t forget the arrogant asses from [insert totalitarian nation] where life is — according to them — all rainbows and sunshine, and everything is better than in the U.S. So much better, in fact, that they …
… came to live here.
I’m not a fan of Tom Cruise, but his character had it right in Born on the Fourth of July: “I say, love it or leave it.” If these asses’ home country is so much better in every way, they’re free and more than welcome to go back there.
They don’t. (Except for Piers Morgan, and it’s the only thing I give him due credit for.)
Q.E.D.
It is easier to jump through the hoops to buy an AK in the Russian Federation than it is in California, New York, or New Jersey.
After you have owned a shotgun for five years, you fill out the paperwork for a marksman licence to add to your hunting license, make an appointment to show the FSB you own a gunsafe, and they sign off on your AK purchase.
Owning an AK in the aforementioned US states is currently impossible.
Why would you want to? There are far better guns. As in, almost all of them.
The AK-47 has two virtues, and two only. They are cheap to make, and hard to break. Other than that, they’re crap. Accuracy sucks, and shooting one is not a pleasant experience.
Except for all the American-made AKs that benefit from American gun culture/manufacturing.
I went through Air Force basic in 1980. We fired 50 rounds of .22 long through an M-16 rechambered for it. I was supposed to shoot more before going overseas, but it was chilly that day so it was cancelled.
I never held another firearm for the remainder of my six year enlistment.
Heh. You know that anti-gunners will miss most of the irony in this list.
After all, they don’t mean to punish the innocent and reward the guilty, it’s just that somehow all their Good Intentions get twisted around until they have that effect.
Every.
Single.
Time.
Corollary to G: Any pro-gun-rights person who was in the military is a Jackbooted Fascist Baby-Killing Stormtrooper!
———————————
The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.
The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.
I was going through some old memes the other day. Found one that says, “If the U.S. government is arming Ukrainians because they’re our allies, what are the implications when they disarm U.S. citizens?”
Now expand the first part to Mexican drug cartels (via so-called “botched” schemes like Operation Fast & Furious) and Islamic terror organizations (by leaving billions of dollars of military equipment and weapons free for the taking in Afghanistan). They really do trust foreign criminals and terrorists more than their own citizenry.
In the mid 80’s I was in the Navy. We were in the Med when Quadaffi’s clowns were playing games. We stopped in Naples for liberty. When I had the duty I was assigned to Shore Patrol to be security on the bus that went from Fleet Landing to two NATO facilities. I’m told to go to the Master at Arms to check out a weapon. I get there and I’m given a .45 pistol with the mag welded into the butt. I went down to the Marine area and checked my pistol out. The Gunny asked me what was up and I told him. He told me to wait and gave me a few more items that “would let me make enough noise until help arrived”. I stood my watch, with out incident and checked everything back in. I found out later that our State Department was responsible for us being unarmed. They would rather that we be shot or killed than our having an incident with an Italian civilian.
If the magazine was still functional, you could probably lock the slide back and load it through the ejection port.
Hey, one fuck-you deserves another!
“After all, they don’t mean to punish the innocent and reward the guilty, it’s just that somehow all their Good Intentions get twisted around until they have that effect.
Every.
Single.
Time.”
A wise man once said, “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
Another wise man said, “Foreseeable consequences are not ‘unintended.'”
Or the ever popular to the leftist with apologies to the female readers, “having a defenseless women attacked is somehow more virtuous than having the same women apply 2 to the chest and one to the head solving her problem…..Permanently after the trash walked through the TRO.(Temporary Restraining Order)
There’s a meme there:
[Official document]: Temporary restraining order
[A gun]: Permanent restraining order
Saw a t-shirt on-line (which I can’t find now of course). The basically said that to a leftist it was more virtuous to be raped in an alley and strangled to death with your underwear than to carry a gun.
Being a pedant (software tester), what is point J?
See? See?!? Larry is just a dumb knuckledragger gun nut who can’t even put an alphabetical list together! He should have all his murder machines taken away and his dog shot, and his kids flashbanged!flash-based! Just goes to show gun nuts know nothing! Trust the science! Believe all women! Respect my pronouns, bigots!!
Except those Israeli women cause they’re all lying hos that were just begging for it!
Well said. My sarcasm detector seems to have fried.
“the Dracula Riding Godzilla ” … giving away a plot of a future Monster Hunter chapter?
Whay would happen if Dracula BIT Godzilla?
I so do NOT want to see Vampire Godzilla. Nor Zombie Godzilla, for that matter.
How would you go about chopping the head off a 50 foot tall dinosaur, anyway?
Sounds like a job for Voltron.
I’m pretty sure that was the plot of a Hard Magic story…
Lots of det cord.
If you use racist laws in your arguments does that make you a racist?
Asking for a modern gun banner.
Do remember the rule of “It’s Not Racism When They Do It!”
This is why a white trustfund baby can unironically Progsplain racism and oppression to a black conservative from a poor background- or even use some pretty downright racist slurs against them.
An AK can be built in a cave and CNCs now go on Black Friday sales.
I’d say you’d have to ban ammo, but I know where the farm supply is. (To be fair, I couldn’t make good ammo, but forcing people into this school makes them a lot more dangerous.)
I’ve seen half-decent 1911s and Browning Hi-Powers built in Filipino villages without electricity, entirely with hand tools, by people who may or may not be literate. No, they’re not perfect and they don’t quite have the consistency or tight tolerances of CNC-milled parts, but they work.
Historic Jamestown in Virginia still has their in-house blacksmiths craft flintlock muskets. By hand. You can buy them in the gift shop (with a blank barrel, I’m sure).
If that can happen, it’s simply impossible to completely disarm the American people. Not when a significant portion of the populace has the knowledge and equipment necessary to literally build functional firearms — both historic and modern — from raw materials and spare parts.
If you or I had to — or even if we were inclined to — we could figure out how to make good ammo, too.
I’ve never had the chance but I would love to tell a feminist, “Gloria Steinem did not make men and women equal, Col. Colt did!
There is one really important add that should be considered:
AA. Governments have never, ever, in all of history, ever confiscated guns then murdered their own citizens or used the power of armed government agents to oppress their own people. Never. Nuh-uh. Didn’t happen. Repeatedly.
Insert that as point ‘J’.
😉
Point ‘J’ has been confiscated. That letter looks too much like a gun… or a Pop Tart with a bite taken out of it, which, as we all remember, is equally lethal when brandished by a small child.
I always thought that Pop Tart looked more like the State of Idaho, myself.
Poor Idaho kids…. Can’t learn their own State’s history because the schools can’t let them be seeing or drawing guns left and right, even if you call it a “map”.
(I could say the same for Florida, which if you cross your eyes really does kinda look like a pistol.)
F. “might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh?”
Corollary: You don’t need more than 10 rounds because you will never get attacked by something like 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs
Guns aren’t there because something is likely to happen. They are there as a precaution, and a discouragement. One of the things they are meant to discourage is our own dear government. So what is likely to happen really isn’t important.
Is there an actuary on here who can supply an analysis of the likelihood of a government putting its citizens into cattle cars and such vs the likelihood of being attacked by a murder of Chechen terrorists?
I would actually be interested in seeing those numbers.
I’m pretty sure that you’d be hard pressed to find an anti-gun person who would agree that your list describes their position faithfully.
So it’s a straw man argument. A fun one.
It is possible to write a similar list, to which reasonable anti-gun people would agree. That would probably be way more constructive. But probably a lot less fun laughing over silly anti-gun hippies.
Every one of the arguments Mr. Correia lampoons in this post has been used by gun-control advocates. Not all by the same person, of course; but they have all been used. The people using them are generally too busy being self-righteous to notice that they are contradicting one another in flagrantly silly ways.
The straw is real enough; the fallacy is yours, in supposing that the intention is to build a man out of it.
This list is MEANT to be mocking and humorous satirizing the other’s point. It’s not a list to engage in deep discussion. He has posted dozens of articles on that. If you want to have his serious discussions, read one of those (many can be found on the Best of MHN list above). He also wrote a book about it. You can find that at bookstores and the link in the sidebar.
That aside, sometimes mocking is effective. Part of what made Dana Carvy’s satirical character “The Church Lady” so effective was it was mocking a real issue. It hit christians on a real issue: legalism and hypocrisy. Sure, it wasn’t every lady in Church, but it hit close to home for some, and that in itself sometimes bring reflection and change.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, #5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
There are basically no ‘reasonable’ gun controllers who are also mentally competent adults.
The gun controllers are either in general not willing to put in any mental effort, or they are not able to put in the mental effort.
Someone reasonable and willing to make an effort will look at various explanations of opposition motives, study the trades of various policy cases, and use those to inform their position in the situation where they are honestly willing to negotiate with their opponents.
Someone who is willing, but cognitively impaired will try to do some of these things, but fail because of some problem in their thinking that prevents them from completing some analysis or another.
If you sort Americans, select those who have a strong preference for gun control that they are inflexible on, and listen to what their words imply about their thought processes, by observation it is pretty easy to see which cases they did not consider, or which analyses they were unable to do.
There are some clear oversights usually present, either individually or in combination.
One oversight is failing to consider a key motivation for opposing gun control. If you fully interview even a hundred gun control opponents, you will at least once see mentioned the fear of government sponsored mass murder. Never properly considering this case is either deliberate, willful, and malicious refusal, or inability.
A mentally competent adult who properly studies the pragmatics of mass murder, is going to conclude that the death potential if such is carried out is actually pretty high. The historical realized deaths by mass murder include quite high fractions of population compared to other sources of violent death.
Looking at other historical sources of death data might possibly suggest that other sources of violent death are chump change in comparison.
One of the types of violent death commonly cited in support of gun control is spree shooters/spree killers. Virtually no gun control advocates have done more than a cursory study of spree killers, because they generally miss the same overlooked elements that everyone else misses or overlooks. Note also that numbers of spree shooter victims are still chump change compared to government mass murder, even juiced with the statistical mistake of aggregating them as ‘mass shootings’. Missed factors: 1. firearms are not the most effective tool for a single person to cause a large amount of casualties. 2. Firearms, especially concealed pistols, give an advantage to defenders that pretty much negates the attacker’s ability to choose the time and place, except for ‘gun free’ zones. (A lot of people actually get this one.) 3. There is a specific deviant thought process common in most spree shooters, and that is driving the pattern of behavior. 4. In cultures with less firearms access, there are still spree killers, and they use blades. Or fire. Seriously, we have the loan work ‘amok’, as in running amok, in English for a reason, and it is not because of US persons running amok. Generations back, Americans had some more intense contact with some of the cultures where folks run amok with blades. Traces of influence of this contact can be shown. 5. US spree shooters have patterns in indications, including those that would be known in advance, that the journalists, scholars, and police are carefully not discussing on the public record. These being one or more of i) recreational drug use ii) psychiatric medications iii) a history of being violent towards others iv) in a public school administered by psychologically abusive ‘educators’ v)family issues and not a regular church goer with conservative politics.
It has to be empathized that the statistical pattern of American spree shooters is absurdly extreme. Given that America has a lot of Americans from intact families, who attend church regularly, and prefer conservative politics, if spree shooting were purely random and representative, there should be a lot more conservative spree shooters. The significance of those statistics probably means something. It might mean that evil people turn away from God, and pick leftist ideology. It might mean that trying to worship and obey God, and that trying to accomplish conservative political goals, stabilizes people with serious issues.
It is also obvious from even a middle school level examination of the history of violence against blacks that police can and have used gun control capriciously in support of government endorsed mass murders of blacks. If there is widespread discussion of those aspects of American history where blacks were mistreated by conspiracies, you would have to account for this in your appeals for gun control.
The last of the major oversights that I will list here, is failure to understand why other people might have cause to distrust you. (Left distrusts right motives, because left are theory obsessives, and see in the right their theoretical prediction of what causes right behavior. All observations are adjusted to match the theoretical prediction, and the left forecast from theory is that conservatives will kill a lot of people. ) Conversely, right observes individual incidence of policy preference for gun control, and for other left policy goals, and does not interpret the other left policy goals in the way that the left understands those goals. Right wingers have a theory describing specific left wing politicians, that interprets the gun control in the context of other preferences that politician has for policy and for behavior. Right believes that the emotional intensity fo the left politicians on gun control is a combination of a disordered mind with malicious intentions. More ordinary gun control advocates are refusing to engage with this perception, and hence unable to address the trust issues. Or the more ordinary gun control advocates are unable to grasp that this perception exists, nor come up with any way to establish more trust.
One of the fundamental and key issues to just about every policy debate in US politics is that there is more or less a bimodal distribution of perceptions. This is mostly downstream of a bimodal distribution of religious practices. On the one mode, you have those Jews and Christians who practice their faith as if it were a true faith, according to the standards of Judaism, or according to the standards of Christianity. On the other mode, you have the socialists, communists and other collectivists/statists. These groups do not trust the other groups.
(Much left policy is campus communists. By one of the campus communist definitions for facist, the campus communists are facists. The analysis that shows this as a result of the non-ergoditic nature of human behavior is one that campus communists are carefully trained never to do. The left predicts that the anchor of the behavior of Jews and Christians is really the ‘ideology’ of ‘facism’. This is maybe like speculating that a dude in Japan burning incense before a Buddha is really a card carrying NSDAP member, primarily motivated by Nazi ideology.)
An obvious counter argument to my claims here is that the level of thought I am claiming as ‘due diligence’ for a single policy issue is actually equivalent to a master’s thesis. I would have at least four counter-counter arguments to such claim. 1. Most graduate programs would discriminate against a student wanting to make such an argument. The status quo of much scholarship is downstream of discriminating against conservatives in favor of idiots. Good luck finding any program that would accept you studying this. 2. It is not my fault if ‘educators’ running primary, secondary, and tertiary schools have trained you so badly that you are a cripple, and cannot do really basic tasks. Thirty percent of US pop has that level of degree, it is not hard, only expensive in time and effort. This is a basic level of preparation for decisions much less consequential than nation wide policy. 3. Chesterton’s fence. 4. You probably should not argue that someone should prepare a more rigorous argument if you are not able to meet the most rigorous level of the arguments that have been previously been provided by that person on that topic.
Complaining about Larry’s summary essays on gun control has as price of entry in rigor a) buying his book b) reading it c) properly taking notes while reading it d) doing your own full and comprehensive research into the various points that you identify.
For example, Phantom here occasionally relays the anecdote of his spending part of graduate school reading the then available in the literature gun control studies. His summary summarized is that there are some interesting coincidences in weak methodology, funding sources, and refuting papers in the literature. If you were to argue that those papers were actually sound, you probably should have at least read them. This is probably equivalent to testing one element of Larry’s claims in that book.
Perhaps go get some crayons, and go fix what you learned in school from the pre-school level, until you are equipped to talk big people topics with the adults.
If you are instead unwilling, take your lying mouth elsewhere until you are willing to speak truthfully.
“you’d be hard pressed to find an anti-gun person who would agree that your list describes their position faithfully.”
Only because most of them are dishonest. They certainly don’t care about dead school kids (there’s other low hanging fruit they could address to save lives).
“That would probably be way more constructive.”
Constructive? I gave up trying to reason with the Left decades ago. We are way past the point where talking is going to resolve anything.
My groups are pretty tight. And you?
If the size of my gun is to compensate for the size of my uterus, then how large a gun am I supposed to carry when pregnant?
Does the phrase ‘sixteen-inch naval rifle’ ring a bell?
REALgun users always respect their equipment and personal hygiene
…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/man-cited-for-diaper-full-of-bullets-at-new-york-s-laguardia-airport/ar-AA1lR8Ix
Alternate M. “I’m a Life Member of the NRA, BUUUUT…