Do you ever find yourself arguing with liberals on the internet? Are you tired of people telling you about how awesome free healthcare is for the economy? Or how you should just shut up and pay your fair share because crack whores need iPhones too? Or how we should ban the super ultra-deadly assault rifle AR-15 shotgun Glock? Or been asked why do you hate old people, you cismale gendernormative fascist, hatey-McHaterton-hatey-hate-hatemongering racist?

Have you grown frustrated because arguing with the willfully ignorant is like repeatedly punching a really dumb cactus?

Well, I’ve prepared a handy checklist so you can accurately predict what your willfully ignorant statist will spout next! Have fun with this, as you can follow your friends arguments and play bingo with these. If you are new to internet debate, just find any kerfuffle on Facebook and see how long it takes for you to check most of these off. It is fun for the whole family!

This may come as a shock to some of you gentle readers, but I am politically opinionated.

Okay, never mind, but as one of the handful of politically outspoken conservatives or libertarians working in an entertainment industry that is overwhelmingly left leaning, at some point I became the voice of an angry generation. (in reality authors are about as evenly divided as the rest of America, but most of the ones on my side keep their mouths shut, but we’ll get to that when we detail Concern Troll Threats)

WARNING!

Left wingers who can actually produce a solid argument are to be treasured and debated fully (that’s sort of the point of debate). Unlike many of my liberal contemporaries, I don’t “manage” my blog comments until I have an echo chamber and my self-esteem isn’t predicated on how many sycophants pat my tender head while telling me how brilliant I am for standing up for some straw man cause de jour. I’ve got a bunch of regular left wing readers who can bring their A Game. I love them. Arguing with them, and honing my points against them makes my arguments stronger for the future.

Sadly, for every intelligent, articulate Eric Flint out there, most arguments against liberal group think results in a legion of poo flinging monkeys showing up.

This checklist is intended only for the willfully ignorant, banally stupid, sound byte spewers incapable of thinking through anything more complicated than a Facebook meme. The lowest form of debater is the pathetic crap sacks that can only follow this checklist.

WARNING 2!

If you are on my side, but this is how you debate, shut up. You’re making us look bad. Good arguing should consist of compelling rhetoric which is backed up with facts and logic. If your tactics are to shut down debate, you are an idiot. It should never be to shut down or scare off, but to WIN.

THE LEFT WING INTERNET ARGUING CHECKLIST

1. Skim until Offended
2. Disqualify that Opinion
3. Attack, Attack, Attack
4. Disregard Inconvenient facts
5. Make Shit Up
6. Resort to Moral Equivalency
7. Concern Trolling
8. When all else fails, Racism!

So let’s break this down so you know what to look for, and you can have a good laugh as people who have zero substance, critical thinking skills, or facts make fools of themselves!

SKIM UNTIL OFFENDED:

A poo flinging monkey never actually reads their opponent’s article (That could introduce them to dangerous badthink!). Instead they simply skim down the page until finding something that they can loudly proclaim you were offended by. Remember, being offended grants liberals super powers!

True Example: I would go through this big gun control essay, but the author said that he made a state legislator cry. What a terrible person!

Fascinating, since in that particular case it was because I was testifying about mass shootings the day after a mass shooting, and as I described how disarmed and helpless people had no choice but to hide and pray, she became very emotional… But hey, #1 is satisfied! No danger of badthink here!

This one is hilarious. For example, if you are responding to something from somebody who self-identifies as a democrat or liberal and you use the term, democrat or liberal, they’ll be offended that you are “using labels”. (note, you never see conservatives or libertarians who mind being labeled as such. Go figure).

Today I was arguing gun control, and I put a link to my exhaustive essay on the topic. One poo flinger was a champion of skimming, clicked the link, only saw the covers of my novels, and didn’t like that they were “men with guns and big breasted females” and that was enough to disqualify my years of experience on the topic. I think that might be a new record. Interestingly enough, authors don’t even get much input on covers, as that is up to the marketing people at our publishing house, but whatever, I’ve sold a friggin’ ton of books with those covers.

The thing to get offended by doesn’t actually matter. Remember, liberals are all about claiming victimhood, so anything that allows them to claim that sainted status equals victory.

DISQUALIFY THAT OPINION

This one is lots of fun. Liberals never want to argue ABOUT a topic. They want to argue about why your opinion on that topic doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter who or what you are, there is some reason that your opinion doesn’t count, and it doesn’t have to make sense.

Say that you are a man who thinks abortion is murder, well your opinion obviously doesn’t count because you’re a man! What if my wife said that? Well, her opinion doesn’t count because she’s biased because she has children. What if a childless woman said that? Well, her opinion doesn’t count because she’s probably religious. What if she’s an atheist libertarian who happens to believe that a fetus should be considered a human being and thus receive the same rights and legal protections as any other human being? Hurr… Derp… Don’t legislate my vagina! War on women! Quick, switch to another item on the checklist!

There are several subcategories to this one, as it is the most common tactic on the checklist.

Race, sex, culture, economic status. Say you want to comment on any social issue. Well your opinion doesn’t count because you’re not part of that race or culture or economic group. Usually the liberal you are arguing with isn’t part of that group either, but it doesn’t matter, because white guilt liberals are automatically exempt, and their soft racism allows them to feel good about themselves as they declare that other groups are too stupid to survive without their benevolent guidance.

How dare you say that gangster rap thug culture of single mothers on welfare isn’t the way to go! Your opinion doesn’t count because you didn’t grow up there. And if you did grow up there, well you’re not “authentic” or one of my personal favorites I’ve seen thrown around Twitter against black conservatives “house negro” which totally isn’t racist if it is said by a smug liberal.

The problem with that is that most poo flinging monkeys are white suburbanites, and when they try to disqualify you, and you stop them and say “but I’m not white” which is a problem for them. Obviously this is going to happen more and more as race is an artificial construct that really only matters so liberals can make you check a box on an EEOC form so they can continue to foist social programs on us. Since the poo flingers freak out when their opponent isn’t white, liberals invented the ultimate disqualifier of “privilege”.

Privilege is amazing. It is the new race card, because pick any topic and regardless of what it is or who you are, a liberal can say your opinion doesn’t’ count because you have privilege. What does that actually mean? Hell if I know. It is such a nebulous term that surely everybody has some form. It means whatever the liberal wants it to mean. It is the new Neo-Con.

So you are against some dipshit welfare program because you’ve seen first-hand how that culture of government dependence destroys the human spirit, well obviously you are privileged so your opinion doesn’t count. So wait, even if I was born into a family with dark skin and super crazy poor, and worked my way out of it rather than becoming a crack whore, I’m now too privileged to have an opinion? YES.  It doesn’t matter if you were born in a 3^rd world hell hole and were a boat person refugee, if you disagree with liberal group think it can only be because you have privilege.

YOU SOUND ANGRY: This is one of my favorite disqualifiers. Type up a 10,000 word essay going into a great deal of detail, with cites, and graphs, and research, and you could have done it completely dispassionately and some liberal is going to say “wow, you sure sound angry!” Boom. You’ve been safely disqualified. In reality, considering the shit we have to put up with, yes, I’m extremely angry, but I’m still right. What’s your point?

YOU KNOW TOO MUCH/TOO LITTLE: I love this one. My big gun control article was dismissed by many because I am an expert on the subject and was thus “biased”. I’ve seen doctor’s opinions dismissed on health care reform because they were “biased”. Gee whiz, wouldn’t you think that somebody who invested their life into a topic would have a strong opinion on it?

But this also goes the other way. Say you own a small business and think your taxes are too high? Well, you’re not a PhD in Economics from Yale turned democrat appointed Treasury Secretary, so obviously your opinion doesn’t count… So you can be disqualified for knowing too much or for knowing too little.

So how much do you need to know for your opinion to be accepted by a poo flinger? If you are conservative? The answer will either be too hot or too cold. If you are liberal? Well, then whatever you know is just right.

EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that I forgot one. The YOU SURE DID WRITE A LOT. Yes, because if you care enough to write something that covers all the pertinent information, that somehow proves that you care too hard, and thus your opinion should be dismissed.

ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK

The dumbest of poo flingers must find something, anything about their opponent and attack it rather than the actual topic or salient points. Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, nothing is off the table. I watched one on Facebook where one of my fans disagreed with a lib about Obamacare, and was attacked because of their profile picture “your kid looks retarded.” And yes, their kid was handicapped, but that’s what you get with caring liberals.

When you argue with a liberal online, no matter what you do, you’re doing it wrong. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. I make my living as a novelist. I get paid large sums of money to write books. I’m rather successful. But whenever I argue with a liberal on Twitter I’m not a “real” novelist. And because I write sci-fi/fantasy, I’m no longer allowed to have an opinion regardless of the long and varied career I had before that, which takes us right back to #2. I have witnessed this with many conservative or libertarian authors.

You’ll note that once any of my political posts go viral and it hits the lib blogs, there will be a deluge of posters all feeling the need to point out what a shitty writer I am (which is really funny since they’ve probably never read any of my books, but obviously, a conservative is going to write bad novels!)

And it isn’t limited to my field. I’m friends with some well-known actors. Same thing. Follow Nick Searcy or Adam Baldwin on Twitter for a few days. You’ll see. Doesn’t matter if you’re second billed on one of the top shows on cable, you’re a conservative, so you’re not a “real” actor. Doesn’t matter if you go to DragonCon and there is a line a thousand people long wearing Jayne hats wanting your autograph, you’re a conservative, so you’re not a “real” actor.

You’ll note that I just fisked a cartoonist. Note. I made fun of his ideas, his misconceptions, and his general idiocy, but I never made fun of his art, because the quality of his artwork is totally irrelevant to the worth of the ideas.

Another fun part of this one is the following scenario:

Liberal 1: Attack, attack. ATTACK!

Liberal 2: Attack attack, attack attack!

Conservative: Defend.

Liberal 1: How rude.

Liberal 2: Indeed, how rude.

Liberal 1: You Sound Angry.

DISREGARD INCONVENIENT FACTS

This one is really self-explanatory. It goes hand in hand with our next item on the checklist of Make Shit Up. So you see a liberal post something false. You post the truth. They ignore it. Say that you post a link to an article. They will find a reason to dismiss it. “The Drudge Report? That’s not a *real* newspaper!” So you post the same story from when the WaPo got around to finally copying Drudge a month later. They ignore it.

A subnote on disregarding inconvenient facts. You can be the leading expert in the world on some topic, but if you are arguing with a liberal then you will get “That’s anecdote, not evidence!” or “Link or it didn’t happen!” But the minute that you are quoted in Salon or Mother Jones, it magically turns into evidence. Crazy how that works. While arguing about Obamacare I could truthfully cite the regulations and hoop jumping I had to do for my company of 200 people, and how my equivalent at the company across the street was cutting all their 500 employees back to 28 hours a week because of Obamacare. That’s anecdote. A liberal comedian makes a video about how awesome Obamacare is with emotional music, totally evidence.

So let’s say there’s a new study showing that Japan has fewer violent crimes and fewer guns than America, so the liberals cite that these apples and oranges prove gun ownership equals more crime… They disregard the fact that we’re so socially different that you could flood Japan with AK-47s and their crime rate probably wouldn’t change, and then they’ll disregard any apple to apple comparison like El Paso’s crime versus Detroit’s’. Large cities, similar in population, both ethnically, economically, and socially diverse, only El Paso (right across the border from one of the deadliest crime cities on Earth) has lower crime, but more gun ownership than Detroit (right across the border from big peaceful Canada) with its draconian gun laws… Ignore. Or do Houston versus Chicago. What? I couldn’t hear you. Jamie Foxx was talking about his expertise in use of force laws.

MAKE SHIT UP

This one can get pretty crazy , but if they’ve made it this far down the checklist things are getting desperate, might as well go for the gold.

There are a few levels of this. The easiest one is taking the most absurd batshit insane person they can on the right and putting them as our poster child “Republicans don’t believe in dinosaurs and think the earth is flat and religious people hate science and homeschooling will make children into racist bigots who wage a war on women stay out of my vagina!” This is your usual straw man stuff. Fairly typical.

Then you’ve got the propaganda accepted as fact. Here we are years later, the ACA is going into effect, and millions of us have already had to deal with it, we’ve seen costs skyrocket for three years in a row, we’ve seen the doom and gloom come to pass, we’ve seen the jobs switching to 30 hour work weeks, yet still, STILL you run into people on Facebook ignoring reality and telling you about awesome stuff the ACA is going to do, even though they are talking about hype from when it was getting passed, which never made it into the actual bill.

Then you get into things which are simply flat out lies. As a gun guy, pick any argument involving the technical and legal aspects of building, buying, or using firearms, as reimagined by somebody huffing paint.  But if you’re a liberal, and you just believe hard enough, then reality doesn’t matter, just how hard you feel about something.  I saw where one recently where a particularly dumbass sci-fi author actually told an audience in Australia that Stand Your Ground laws were to make it legal for white people to just shoot blacks whenever they felt like it…

Wow.

RESORT TO MORAL EQUIVALENCY

Find something, anything bad as done by a liberal? “Well, republicans did it too!” Did the president do something stupid? “It is Bush’s fault.” So? Was it okay then? No. Then it shouldn’t be okay now, hypocrite. And of everything on the checklist, this is the one that I’ve seen people on the right be guilty of the most often. Do republicans suck too? Hell yes. They’re pathetic (most often when they’re trying to be democrat lite, oh, freaking retire already, John McCain). So sometimes this is totally true.

But the interesting thing is that this goes hand in hand with Make Shit Up, in that oftentimes it isn’t even true, and they’re not the same on that issue, but it is parroted so often that it has become an accepted truth. Even well-meaning people fall for this trap. Though it can be fun when they automatically regurgitate “well, both sides are the same.” And you come back with “Okay, name one time the republicans have done that.” And they sit there and go “Uh…. Hmm…. Uh… Oh, look Jim Carrey made another gun control video!”

So it now looks like Treasury Secretary Geitner was briefed on the IRS specifically targeting opposition conservative groups prior to the election, so this scandal goes straight to the top. “Bush did it too!” they bleat.  No… No, actually he didn’t. And if he had, the stupid press would have done their stupid job and actually exposed it, rather than just being a propaganda mouthpiece for the administration, you dipshit. To ether party, you can’t whine about statist 1984 nonsense when the other guys do it, and then do the same thing bigger when you end up in charge.

But that check isn’t as big a deal, because elected democrats mostly suck, and elected republicans only half suck, so half the time it’s true.

CONCERN TROLLING

A personal favorite. There are two types. The classic Concern Troll and the Boycotter.

Concern Trolling is a tool to enforce the illusion of monolithic group think where the liberal responds like they care. They care so hard about you, poor misguided right winger, and they care that you are saying these horrible, nasty, awful, racist, mean, things. What will everyone think of you?  What would your friends think if they knew that you don’t like giving a third of your income to support crack whores? Why, they’d think you were a horrible person.

One of my favorites is “I read your article, and it like totally would have swayed me to your side, BUT the way you called liberal ideas liberal and talked about people who are liberals by using the word liberal just ruined the whole thing. You’d be more effective if you used no labels.” Or substitute whatever bullshit there you want, but the important thing is that this combines dismissal and offense, all wrapped up in the fact that they’re not a mindless poo flinger at all, but are rather motivated by how much they care about you.

Horse shit.

These drip with self-righteousness. But it is rather effective, especially on people new to the whole debating thing, or who are easily frightened and don’t want to rock the boat. You see this when you happen to be a relative or coworker of the poo flinger, and they try to scare you on Facebook. Because of course, nobody is a better arbiter of what is correct and good than people who subscribe to the same political philosophy which eventually spawns gulags, purges, and concentration camps.

The Boycotter is rather specialized Concern Troll that usually only gets used on those of us who have some sort of public persona, like entertainers or business people. Because the left absolutely hates dissent, they will try to squish anyone who gets out of line.

“I came to your blog/facebook/twitter because I’m SOOOO very interested in your book/movie/product, but then I found out what a horrible, awful person you are, so now I’m never going to buy any of your stuff ever again. You should totally never share your badthink again because it will totally scare away the legions of people like me and you’ll starve in a ditch.”

Uh huh… How about I just keep on producing the best quality work I can and keep on sleeping on a giant pile of money? The thing is this type is super effective. I’ve been shocked how many conservative Hollywood people I’ve met who keep a low profile about their beliefs out of fear of getting blackballed. For every openly conservative writer like me there are probably half a dozen who share my opinion who won’t talk.

That’s what the poo flingers want. Screw them.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, RACISM!

The most obvious one of them all, because if you are going to argue with liberals you WILL be called racist. It is inevitable. However that is good, because it means you just won. It is the final line on our checklist for a reason.  Just keep in mind that you’re in good company. Charlton Heston marched across the Selma Bridge with Martin Luther King, and he was smeared as racist for believing that the 2^nd Amendment applied to everyone equally.

The topic probably doesn’t even have anything to do with racism. Don’t matter. You disagree with liberals, you’re a racist. The clever poo flingers will snidely insinuate it, while the dumb ones will screech it at the top of their lungs. This one has been epidemic since we elected Barack Obama, and obviously the only reason you could hate a weak foreign policy, stupid gun control proposals, a shitty economy, a ridiculous bloated monster of a healthcare law, and the general corruption of our federal apparatus, is because you don’t like a black president.

You may not have had a racist thought in your life, but it won’t matter. A good author friend of mine was smeared as racist because he was against some stupid liberal nonsense even though he’s been married to a black woman for 20 years and has biracial children, and worked with every ethnicity there is during a career in the military.

I mentioned Nick Searcy above. He fights with liberals on Twitter for fun and has made it into an art form. At least a couple times a day, Nick will be called racist—usually for not being an Obama fan is enough—and he always posts the same thing. “Don’t tell my adopted son that because he’s black and thinks I love him.” Outspoken conservatives get uselessly tarred as racists so damned often that you can have the response ready as a cut and paste. Shit. I used the word tarred. I guarantee some liberal just thought that was racist (probably because they don’t know history).

Back in the olden days calling somebody racist was the liberal nuclear option. It was what they would use to instantly squash dissent, because most people are decent human beings who think actual racism is repulsive, so their opponents would recoil and backtrack, desperately trying to avoid giving perceived offense. The problem was that they overused it. It lost all its meaning. And people like me got sick of their shit and transformed it into a joke.

For years and years they kept calling people racist for things that clearly weren’t racist even if you squinted at them really hard, so now when real racism occurs it is lost amid the noise of poo flingers crying wolf.  The definition of racist turned into anybody who has won an argument with a liberal. They were so used to the word having such power that they pulled it out at every opportunity. 1/8^th black Peruvian Obama supporter who’d never done a racist thing in his life shot a young black man in a fairly obvious self-defense shooting? You’d have thought it was the second coming of Robert Byrd (D).

You think every law abiding citizen should have the right to have a gun to defend themselves? RACIST. You think Eric Holder illegally shipping thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels in an illegal effort to frame gun dealers to promote more gun control is bad? RACIST. Because obviously I only dislike felony gun smuggling when the Attorney General is black?  EXTRA RACIST. But what if those guns were used to murder hundreds of Mexicans, including innocent women and children? RACIST. Because obviously liberals only care about Mexicans when they are an easily exploitable near slave class with no rights brought across the border, and made dependent upon democrat social programs so that they can be used to fraudulently increase democrat voter turnout. HOLY SHIT I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW RACIST THAT IS!

And off topic, but that reminds me that I really need to write a blog post about the most racist term still in use, People of Color. Man, I hate that term so very much. It is just Colored People backwards, but of course, liberals are all about grouping people into easily manageable victim blocks and don’t really give a crap about the content of anyone’s character, so this shouldn’t exactly be a surprise. And they love individuality, as long as you totally agree with them, because otherwise, out comes the Check List!

THE MORAL OF THE CHECKLIST

I often get people who agree with me posting stuff like “well, you wasted your time on that doofus!” Ah, but you miss the point. You don’t defend your beliefs in the hopes of convincing the willfully ignorant. That’s a lost cause. The willfully ignorant aren’t to be convinced, they are to be mocked. Their flaws are to be pointed out until everyone around them realizes how full of crap they are. Remember that argument is theater, and your performance isn’t aimed at your opponent, but rather at the audience. If you choose to follow the Fisker’s Path, your goal is three fold.

Give ammo to the people already on your side.

Convince the undecided .

Allow your opponent’s to display their petty ignorance to the world.

EDIT 2: WARNING! Somebody suggested making this into  drinking game… If you do that, YOU WILL DIE! If you took a shot each time you saw one of these on Facebook you’d be dead in less than twenty minutes.  😀

EDIT 3: Some fun new ones were pointed out on Facebook that I forgot. These all happened in a single thread! They fall under Dismiss. If your profile picture has you holding a gun? Instant Dismiss! A PFM actually looked at my bio and pointed out that I only went to a state college! Dismiss! (by the way, if you are an adult and you are still listing going to college as some sort of achievenment you probably suck at life).

And a particularly vile one, if you are active duty military or your profile pic shows you in uniform, then you probably must have PTSD or a Traumatic Brain Injury, you poor Bush tool victim. Dismiss! That’s really disgusting, but not surprising.

EDIT 4: Read through the comments. Hilarity ensues as a PFM comes in, hits all the points, and then calls me racist. We’ve even got object lessons. 😀

This editorial was sent to me by a reader. Calling it an editorial is doing it a disservice, as it is really more of a letter to the boogieman written by a petulant man-child.

As usual whenever there is a mass shooting on the news, the ignorant come out of the woodwork to pontificate about a topic they know absolutely nothing about, setting up straw men and knocking them down, and matching wits with phantoms. This one was particularly obnoxious in its self-righteousness, but it is still fairly useful in that it demonstrates a lot of the defective logic that goes into the gun control side of things.

If you want a serious in depth discussion of pretty much every major point in the gun control debate, read this:  http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/  an article which was written based upon years of experience by a legally certified subject matter expert, which went viral, was read a million times in the first few weeks after it came out, and wound up on the national news.

(I’m going to refer to that link a lot, because it beats having to type out long responses to the same tired arguments over and over again)

Or if you prefer a bunch of emotional bullshit and logical fallacies, read Dear Gun Nuts by Matt Bors instead: https://medium.com/p/7fc34ed66268 an article which was written by a cartoonist who shot a .44 once (it was loud) and which will mostly be read because I linked to it here in order to make fun of it. Or you can save time and just read my fisking of it below.

As usual the original article is in italics. My comments are in bold. If you want to see his cartoons or graphs, they’re at the link above, but I’ll warn you that they’re about as clever as the article.

Dear Gun Nuts

 

I’d say I qualify as a Gun Nut. My full weapons/tactics/legal resume is in the first link above.

 

So, a few things.

 

After the first time I shot a gun, I couldn’t hear anything for two days. This is because it was a .44 magnum and because I was eight and not wearing any ear protection.

Speaking as a retired firearms instructor, your father is an idiot.

It’s a huge gun—the kind Dirty Harry used—and my dad had to help me hold it as I pulled the trigger.

Dirty Harry would have slapped your dad upside the head for not giving you any ear plugs.

The next day, he had to explain to my third grade teacher why the only thing I could hear was a loud ringing.

If the explanation didn’t start out with “Because I’m an idiot— ” it was insufficient.

There are right ways and wrong ways to go about your gun-having. (And your son-having.) My dad did do a good job of teaching me about gun safety once I was able to hear him speak words again. He even went and bought ear protection.

Wow. He’s father of the year. And as we’ll see as Matt’s essay goes on, he didn’t do much to teach his kids critical thinking skills either.

 Growing up around guns made me feel comfortable with them. So, gun owners, I’m not against you.

He says before he goes into an article about how gun owners evil and stupid.

For a while, the 60 percent of Americans who don’t own personal firearms had a hard time figuring out how to communicate in the jargon of gun people.

You still can’t. When you people try to speak “gun culture” you sound like a white upper class suburbanite attempting hard core gangster rap. It is just pathetic and everyone is laughing at you. You learned your jargon from MSNBC or the New York Times, sources which are about as reliable and unbiased as Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed.

But over the course of the last few dozen national conversations after mass shootings, we’ve all become armchair experts in arsenals.

Well, armchair expert. I’m an actual expert, which is why I can say with complete certainty that everything you go on to pontificate about in this letter is either flat out wrong or hyperbolically misleading.

Was the killer using hollow points or full metal jacket rounds? Big difference.

Nominally, but I say that as a guy trained on mass shootings and wound ballistics, not as a cartoonist who pulled a couple of terms off of Google.  My first link above goes into detail about ammo types.

Is there a collapsible stock on that Bushmaster AR-15?

And, pray tell, how does a stock that is adjustable a few inches for length of pull make that gun any deadlier? And Bushmaster is one brand of AR-15 manufacturer which is almost exactly the same as the gun produced by dozens of other AR-15 manufacturers. The AR-15 is the most common rifle in America. But Bushmaster sounds scarier than Stag, Smith & Wesson, Colt, DPMS, Armalite, POF, LWRC, Ruger, or many others because a Bushmaster is a type of snake… Or something…

Oh, he used Colt pistols instead of Glocks?

Wow. You were able to name two of the most famous pistols ever made? Including one brand has been around since the 1800s and another which is the most common handgun in the world? Did you just type the word pistol into a search engine? I bow before your armchair expertise.

Weird.

No. Weird would be having a mass shooting where the perp used a M1907 Roth-Steyr.

After every mass shooting—which is essentially all the time these days—

Actually, it isn’t all the time these days at all. Mass shootings are still statistical anomalies. (see my link above where I go into this in great detail) They get reported on a lot by a breathless media in the hopes of pushing a gun control agenda, when actually you are far more likely to be a victim of a regular crime, but you know that, because you’re the armchair expert.

gun rights advocates drag out the “more guns = more safer” argument.

Yep. Again, see my link above. This has been demonstrated time and time again, but why should we go with facts, reality, and crime statistics when we could get all spun up and emotional instead?

And yet: we’re still not safe!

By that logic, because people still die in car crashes, Matt wants to ban seat belts and air bags. Using the stats provided by even the staunchest anti-gun advocates, guns are used far more often to save lives than to take them. (broken record here, but the numbers are in the top link).

Despite having almost one gun for every man, woman, and child in the nation, peak safety has yet to be reached.

Interesting… His armchair expert education must have skipped the part where 12 out of every 13 mass shootings happen in Gun Free Zones, where every man, woman, and child (except for the bad guy who doesn’t care about the law or Matt’s tender feelings) is legally disarmed. It would seem that “peak safety” is certainly not found in Gun Free Zones.  

Now. You’re allowed to oppose gun control on grounds that restricting the ability to purchase a gun violates your second amendment rights and will leave you up shit creek without a Smith & Wesson when it comes time to overthrow a tyrannical government.

That’s really nice of you to tell me what we’re allowed to oppose, Matt.  

And I agree that many proposed gun control laws won’t do anything, especially patchwork ones put forward in response to mass shootings.

Yep. This is the smartest thing you’ve said all day.

But wait… Do you have evidence that ANY gun control laws accomplish anything? Go ahead and look, because if you can find some evidence the DoJ would love to see it, because they didn’t have any luck.

Most murders are committed with handguns and banning those is not even on the table.

Except for where handguns have been banned in America, and we’ve seen how that has actually worked out, since those places are all cesspools of violent crime and high murder rates.

Don’t forget, the mass shootings that force Matt to retire to his fainting couch are statistical anomalies. Most shootings in America are gang/drug/thug events. Last time I checked, the gun culture that Matt is addressing aren’t the ones shooting hundreds of people in beautiful gun free Chicago. The Gun Culture doesn’t tend to congregate in places where we can’t own, buy, or use guns, go figure, and the liberal dominated inner cities ran us out a long time ago with their annoying regulations. Yet, those places are still where people keep on getting murdered…  

That topic gets into the whole sticky wicket of drug laws, incarceration policies, economics, culture, politics, and race baiting democrats subsidizing the self-destructive thug life, and addressing all that stuff is really HARD. On the other hand, insulting law abiding gun nuts (who aren’t named T-Bone and who won’t pop a cap in you for dissing them) is super EASY.

At least Matt is smarter than the average low information voter who thinks that “assault weapons” kill zillions, and thus need to be heavily regulated, when according to the FBI only 367 of our 12,664 murders in 2011 were committed with any rifle, which means you’re more likely to die of autoerotic asphyxiation than to get murdered with an “assault weapon”.

Some dudes wrote the Second Amendment on piece of paper a while ago and we all have to live with the result of that.

There are a couple hundred other utopias that you can move to where you don’t have to put up with that dastardly “piece of paper”. Meanwhile, most of us are rather fond of our founding documents which put limitations on the ability of our government to infringe upon our rights and liberties.

But you know what we can do in lieu of new laws?

Oh, please do share. I’m giddy with anticipation.

Change our culture so fewer people die every year.

You should share this wondrous message in beautiful gun free Chicago or Washington DC. That should knock out most of our deaths right quick. Give T-Bone a call. I’m sure he won’t curb stomp your face in or anything.  

Gun people, we need to talk about your behavior a bit.

Because obviously, 90,000,000 American gun owners haven’t done anything wrong, so it is time to get all preachy at them. Americans love that shit.

First of all, can you stop saying video games cause violence? They don’t. Countries where people play way more video games than we do have lower rates of gun deaths. The thing about violent video games is they don’t feature characters going around killing people with video games. They use guns. Or Hadoukens or Babalities or stuff.

This is a straw man. Most gun owners don’t bring up video games after a mass shooting. The NRA president brought it up during a press conference last December and it turned into a joke because newsflash, gun owners play video games too.

In fact the only thing I saw mentioning violent video games in connection to this latest mass shooter was an interview with one of his friends, who said that the guy seemed really normal, though he did enjoy violent video games. However, this is the same interview which revealed the bad guy was also a self-proclaimed liberal and big Obama supporter. So, obviously a huge member of the gun culture there!

On that note, if you want to do something really super uncomfortable, go through all the mass shooters you can find and see where they self-identified on the political spectrum…  I did this back after the media was swooning in the hopes that Gabby Giffords had been shot by the Tea Party. You’ll find that far more of them would be a lot more comfortable occupying Wall Street than hanging out at the SHOT Show.

Hey, it’s time for a chart break!

Yes. There is a chart. Because obviously the only possible comparable data point between the crime rate of the giant, ethnically, socially, and economically diverse US with the tiny, relatively homogenous Netherlands, is that we both really dig Call of Duty.

A more interesting chart would be how many of these mass shootings took place in legally mandated Gun Free Zones. I’ll save you some time. Draw a capitol L.   

Now on to my second point: guns kill people.

Oh, and what a stunning point it is!

They are not made for pressing sandwiches or sopping up grape juice spills in the kitchen.

No shit? I’ve totally been making sandwiches wrong.

Guns are specifically designed to propel bullets through a person’s body at a velocity sufficient to kill them.

Which is odd, because when Matt was out getting permanent hearing damage from his father, he never specified that they were actually shooting people.

Saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is not an argument for more people having guns. You just said, sir, that people kill people. Guns are inanimate objects full of deadly potential. How do we help them realize their destiny to be peaceful, non-lethal objects and keep them away from people?

That is some convoluted shit right there.

Here, let me help you out armchair expert. Yes, we are fully cognizant that guns are dangerous and can poke high velocity holes into people. That is sort of the idea behind having a firearm as a tool. Guns are extremely effective at what they were designed to do, which is why when you really need one (like say for example, a bad person is really intent upon causing you grievous bodily harm) you really want to have a gun.

You pick the right tool for the job. If the job is to protect myself from a perpetrator with the ability and opportunity to cause serious bodily harm, acting as an imminent threat to myself or a third person, I’m not going to reach for a sandwich maker.

Lastly: You’re carrying around an assault rifle in public because…?

Because nothing makes a real American want to do something more than having a nosy busybody tell them that that can’t. The handful of Gun Culture guys walking around with a slung rifle at a political rally are the equivalent of the feather boa and black electrical tape clad dancing dudes at a gay pride parade. Both of them are saying “We’re here. Deal with it, bitch.”

I know you are not out on a killing spree, just a nice stroll, but it’s… sort of hard to tell?

Sure, I suppose if you go through life as a gutless pussy, then it would be hard to tell. For most of us we can see the person open carrying and ascertain by their activities if they
are up to no good or not. Odds are they are completely normal. If they intend to do evil and they start shooting the place up, then you can hide under something and pray to God that somebody from the Gun Culture shows up in time to save your pathetic ass.

And when I say the Gun Culture has to come save you, I mean the responders too. Once again, read the other link. The cops that can actually shoot well? The cops that end up as the firearms instructors? Guess where they fall? Yep. Gun Culture. I spent a decade working with that crowd. I can count the number of gun grabbing statists on one hand.  

Shootings that are stopped by regular folks have a much lower body count than shootings that are stopped by cops. That’s simply a matter of response time. (the big article goes into the psychology of mass shooters and how their fantasy bubble is popped) Either way, the best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. People like me just like to cut out the middle man and get faster service. That’s the difference between my culture and yours, Matt. We take responsibility for ourselves.

Insisting on carrying your gun in public is like asserting your free speech rights by screaming at everyone you see.

Here, let me help you out, Matt. As somebody who taught CCW classes and certified over 3,000 people to carry firearms, I’m not a proponent of open carry for purely tactical target selection reasons. However, I do understand why some people choose to open carry. It is a giant “Fuck you” to people like you, and that I can applaud.

No one is saying that isn’t “legal,” but we’re not looking at you like you’re Rosa Parks. More like a total douche.

I’m sure you know that feeling well, but luckily we live in America where you can’t simply ban people from an activity because it makes you squeamish.  

The fact that you are intentionally drawing police attention smacks of crazy privilege. The Black Panthers used to carry arms in public—usually didn’t end well for them. I’m a white guy who is not homeless and thus have a low risk of incurring police brutality, and even I know better than to involve police unless it’s utterly necessary.

Trust me. It’s mutual. The cops don’t want to deal with whiney, pathetic cowards like you either.

Boo friggin’ hoo. It was hard to read that paragraph through the salty tears of sadness. I’m sorry that people carrying firearms openly in public offends your delicate sense of white privilege.

Interestingly enough, that famous photo of the gun rights activist carrying the AR slung on his back at a Tea Party rally? You’ll note that the media always crops his head from the shot and focuses on the gun. Because he’s black. And that doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative.

Firearm technology is one of those things that really could have stayed frozen in time two hundred years ago and we’d all be doing fine right now, really.

I thought you assholes were all about Progress?

There would still have been plenty of opportunity to get our war on and defend our homes with single shot muskets you had to arduously reload by hand. The playing field would be even for criminals, do-gooders, and armies alike.

And a magic leprechaun might fly out of the sky on a unicorn and fart rainbows of world peace… However, your hypothetical bullshit goes right out the window as soon as you realize we don’t live in that world. We live in the real world, where technology advances, and things change.

We could still “get our war on” with single shot weapons, until we got invaded by a country that wasn’t stupid. Or in the words of the great philosopher Jack Handey, “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.”

Plus, it wouldn’t be fair if we were still in the days of single shot firearms, which is why criminals in those days usually worked in gangs. But you already know about the history and evolution of gun fighting, with all that armchair expert MSNBC watching you did.

And by the way, repeating firearms had already been invented at the time the Bill of Rights was written, not to mention several of the founders were inventors, warriors, and gun nuts, so none of this would have surprised them. They’d also look at your cartoons and high five each other that their 1^st Amendment still protects even the lamest forms of free speech.  

Instead, now guns are a multi-billion dollar industry and the only way to keep making money is to foster a climate of fear that drives people to purchase all sorts of tactical, military-style weapons no one could possibly need.

What a bunch of crap. This whole super evil arms industry bullshit keeps popping up as a meme. Having worked in the gun industry, they don’t have the marketing budget to “foster a climate of fear”. Gun nuts buy stuff that they think is useful, fun, or awesome. The only climate of fear part comes in when liberal politicians float new gun control proposals, backed up by ass kissing statists like Matt, and Joe Public runs out to buy stockpile guns before it is too late. There is a reason my gun shop had a picture of Obama up on the wall labeled “Salesman of the Year.”

One of the most powerful lobbying groups in America is the National Rifle Association and their name is apt: The NRA is an association representing rifles (and other guns), not you.

The NRA is a mushy lobbying organization that individuals in the Gun Culture donate money too. The main reason I’m a member is because they make a decent shield and they enrage people like Matt. If the NRA was half as badass as the media makes it out to be, I’d be far more proud to be a member.  

They’re playing you.

Thank you, Concern Troll! I keep forgetting that all liberals see the world in shades of victimhood, so if you choose to belong to the NRA because you believe in your right to keep and bear arms, then the only possible explanation is because you’ve been bamboozled by the awesome marketing powers of the evil gun industry!

The paranoia they’re pushing is designed to get you to put more of your money in their pockets.

Seriously, I laugh my ass off at this. They wouldn’t know the gun industry if it bit them in the ass. The ultra-monolithic industry exists only in the minds of the Piers Morgans of the world.

The men and women who make up the Gun Culture are the most independently minded folks you’ll find, which is why the statist ass kissers hate them so much. You know the biggest reason most of us who already have lots of guns continue to buy more? Simply because we enjoy pissing people like Matt off.

You probably don’t need to have so many weapons for self-defense. You can only really use one at a time.

Yet… if you can only use one at a time, why are you so dead set on not letting people have more? Why is there this bizarre fixation in the media whenever somebody gets arrested and they freak out about his “arsenal” (which usually consists of fewer guns than my children have) when the perp can only use one at a time?

Shouldn’t an armchair expert know that there are different types of tools for different types of jobs? And I can have various size concealed carry pistols for different modes of dress? And I can have different type guns for home defense? And I can have them in multiple locations so that I can reach them in case of emergency? (and I have an extremely large house!). And what about my wife and children? Shouldn’t they be allowed to have whatever tool fits them best as well?

Oh, but wait. It doesn’t have to make sense! This is about control and emotions! My bad. You say you’re okay with people having guns for recreation, hunting, and home defense, but that’s all a lie. You know it, and we know it.

And guns are sturdy products. They aren’t falling apart all over the place. Get rid of some of yours and go buy yourself a nice pair of boots. You’ll look great!

I have a nice pair of size 15 Danners. And I just applied one of those boots to your ass.  

Chart Break Number Two: The Dead People Meter

And here is a totally out of context apples versus oranges chart supposedly showing that more people have been “killed in domestic gun incidents since 1960” (looks like almost 1.4 million) vs. “Americans killed in all wars ever” (looks like about 1.1 million). Even if that was true, all it means is that Americans are super good at making war.

But wait… That would mean that an average of 26,000 people would have to die of gunshot wounds in the US every year, except during most of my adult life that number has been in the teens. Not to mention that I remembered that the US Civil alone was 625,000, so a cursory Wiki search gives us 1,321,612 American deaths in war. So then pulling up the crime stats, the only time our murders have gotten anywhere near that 26k was in the low 20s for a few years in the early 90s, and every other year was far lower. (and despite what the gun grabbers have been saying, has been DECLINING as more states have allowed concealed carry).

Faulty stats in a gun control essay? This is my shocked face.  But it is from PolitiFact! Which all liberals insist is totally true because it has Fact in its name!

If you take the positions of the NRA and add them up, you can see how the world would look if the gun lobby got everything it wants: Every American would have easy access to assault weapons,

First off, “assault weapon” is a made up propaganda term. See the very first link where I delve into the legal terminology in great depth. Second, other than a handful of states with democrat dominated legislatures, most of the US can have access to the scary black rifle type of gun Matt is thinking of, and we’ve got no problem with it.

And the gun that makes Matt wet the bed the moistest? The AR-15. Which is also the BEST SELLING rifle in the country. So this dreadful position has already been achieved. NOOOOOOOoooo!  

gun dealers would not be required to check the criminal record and mental health history of someone before selling them a gun,

Background checks have proven useless for stopping crime, and I’ve gone into that topic in great deal elsewhere, but hold on one second… My straw man detector is tingling… What is the NRA’s stance on guns for the mentally ill? Oh, wait a sec. That’s right. Almost all of our mass shootings have been by people who are mentally ill, and the system has dropped the ball so they wouldn’t show up on a background check anyway… But moving along our checklist of NRA sponsored evils.

the capacity of gun magazines could be near-infinite,

Except for that whole pesky physics thing, Captain Hyperbole…  But if anybody wants actual facts, read the first linked article where I delve into the tactics of magazine capacity, and how more rounds on hand is good not because you can shoot more, but because you are forced to manipulate less.  

 and it would be illegal for a city to stop people from carrying guns in public.

Because once again, Gun Free Zones are simply hunting preserves of the innocent. Criminals know this. When will you dumb shits get it through your thick skulls that bad people aren’t scared of your signs, and if they’re about to commit a couple hundred felonies including murder, they really don’t care about the additional misdemeanor gun charge.

This would be a country where you could literally buy an AR-15 at Walmart,

Hey, dumbass, I can walk into Walmart right now and buy a detachable magazine fed semi-automatic rifle.   So you already live in that country. You feel that, Matt? That’s freedom. Soak it up.

 immediately put on full tactical gear worn by SWAT teams,

And again, I’ve got a full set of Level 4 body armor and ballistic plates. Welcome to America. A country that you live in (I’m assuming).

I have SWAT armor, because I used to sell body armor to police departments, and I once had a big fellow cancel his order, and there aren’t many other 6’5” customers with a 56 inch chest, so I kept it. I love dealer cost. Most states have no law whatsoever against regular people having ballistic vests. When I taught basic pistol classes I would often wear a Level 2 concealable under my shirt just in case I ended up with an unsafe doofus like Matt’s dad at the range.

and stroll into a school for your parent-teacher conference with another fully armed adult. Practical!

This one already exists too. In my home state, concealed carry permits allow for carrying a firearm into a school. I carry a gun to parent teacher conferences, and since my kids’ teachers care about actually protecting their charges from crazy people, I can compliment her on her choice of concealed sidearm.

Yes, Matt. We have guns in schools in my state. MIND BLOWN. I’ve also gone before state legislatures and onto national news programs and talked about how and why volunteer school staff who are trained and equipped with concealed handguns are an excellent deterrent against school shootings. All it takes is a few tweaks to state law and you can have a cheap and effective speed bump against school shootings, tomorrow. And in my other article I go into exactly how this works safely, logistically, legally, and especially tactically as it directly effects the target selection and psychological response of the bad guy.

But oh no… We can’t have that. Screw effectiveness. Forget things that actually work! Because armed people make a gutless man-child like you feel icky inside. So why don’t you spew more nonsense about how nice it would be if you could magically reverse centuries of technology and human nature and other impossibilities, all why continuing to insult the character of the very people who you count on to protect you?

Shoot. All those scary things about this hypothetical NRA country, and you already live here! Tag a hit off your asthma inhaler and calm down. It is going to be okay, Matt.

You think I’m anti-gun. I’m not.

You don’t want people to have too many, and you don’t want anybody to have any that you find scary, and you don’t want people to have too big of magazines, and you don’t want them to actually take them anywhere where they might need them, and you want them kept in safes, and you don’t ever want to see them… Yeah… You’re totally not anti-gun.

 I think of guns like I do cars. Go ahead and own one. Waste your money on something fancy!

You know, the last time I pulled a gun on somebody in order to save an innocent man’s life, I came away feeling that was money well spent. Go figure. Ever since my wife pulled a pistol on a would be rapist, she’s never complained about all the money we’ve spent on guns.

On the topic of cars, since Matt is bloviating about deadly assault rifles, which are basically normal rifles that look scary, he probably thinks if you put a spoiler on a Honda Civic it transforms it into a high performance race car.

But the scenarios you are preparing for aren’t going to happen.

Says the dude writing an essay in the wake of a mass shooting…

Yeah, crazy scenarios totally never happen, until they do. I also have a fire extinguisher handy because it is the best tool for that job, even though my car is never going to catch on fire, except for that one time it did.

You aren’t going to save the day by shooting a terrorist in the grocery store.

Reductio ad absurdium. Sure, you probably won’t have a terrorist in the grocery store, but right down the road from here, we recently had a mad man slashing people with a knife at the neighborhood Smith’s grocery until he ran into a permit holder with a gun.

Remember, the big flashy mass shooting events are statistical anomalies that dominate the news, which armchair experts like Matt like to glom onto, as they go on to pick and choose what local crime events count.

 We need fewer guns so fewer people shoot their feet off, kill their girlfriends, kill themselves, and go on shooting sprees.

You know who is really super good at teaching gun safety? The NRA… Yes, that same super evil corporate mega-conspiracy of Dick Cheneyian Illuminati Bilderbergers swindling the easily bamboozled working man, is also the single best resource for teaching gun safety. In fact, that’s mostly what they do. (they certainly would have taught your father about the importance of hearing protection).  

As for fewer guns, now we’ve wandered back into happy rainbow unicorn land, where you can magically wish evil scary bad guns out of existence. We can see how well this has worked out in the various gun free paradises of the world. If you are going to use magic solutions, why don’t you just skip the part where you annoy the shit out of us, and just make all the bad people quit being bad instead?

You can have guns for hunting.

That’s mighty white of you, Matt. But let’s be honest, those scare you too. And since the only difference between a “gun for hunting” and an “ultra deadly assault rifle” is a few cosmetic features (and the fact that the hunting rifles is usually MORE powerful), we all know that you assholes will be along to regulate those as well.

And before you tell us the obligatory Nobody Wants To Take Your Guns! Here is a handy compilation of some of the many people on your side, who do in fact, want to confiscate our guns. http://coldservings.livejournal.com/51731.html

You can have them to ward off Mexican drug lords or whoever is going to storm into your house.

Wow. Terrorists at the grocery store and Los Zetas at your house? I’m glad I don’t live in Matt’s neighborhood. Of course, since he’s an armchair expert Matt is surely aware that most criminal encounters will be against run of the mill rapists, muggers, and violent assholes who just enjoy hurting people. If you carry a gun because of those regular and understandable threats then that doesn’t sound unreasonable, but people like Matt work in a world of magic and emotional exaggeration, which is why those dipshits need to spin it to sound like we’re expecting Die Hard.

Keep them there, in a locked safe.

Because when you need a gun, you need it right fucking now….

And if we by chance ever need a well-regulated militia for a revolution or zombie apocalypse, by god, we’re going to be really happy you were born with a micro-penis.

Yes, my penis has proven completely incapable of accurately launching a 230 grain lead projectile at 850 feet per second, and is thus totally inadequate for self-defense use, so I carry a .45 to compensate.  Thank you for your concern.

Nothing shows you mean serious business like closing a political argument by talking about your opponent’s dick. Quick question though, all of those hundreds of female students that I certified to carry concealed weapons, were they compensating for their tiny vaginas?

I’ve always been confused by that, but since Matt brought in the pop psychology, here is our word of the day: Hoplophobia. Meaning the irrational aversion to weapons. And to use it in a sentence: “Some may say that Matt suffers from Hoplophobia, but I think it is more likely he is simply too immature to accept responsibility for his own safety, and so projects his weakness, cowardice, and feelings of inadequacy onto others… Or he might just be a moron. Flip a coin.”