I had a interesting face to face discussion with an anti-gun person yesterday. The details aren’t particularly important but it set me to thinking—a lot. They were very new to the topic, had zero factual basis, and yet thought up quasi-rational arguments on the fly. They were entirely novel and amazingly good for having been formulated in the previous few seconds.
I have been doing this for 20 years and they only spent about 30 seconds working themselves up before attempting to tear into me. The outcome was as one-sided as you might expect it to be.
It took me a long time to go to sleep last night and I spent a lot of time thinking about our debate. Going over it caused me to come up with a new approach to anti-gun people or people that haven’t given much thought to the topic.
We have frequently talked about offering to put “This home is gun free” signs up for our opponents. But I think this is too subtle for most people. The implications just aren’t obvious enough.
If someone is going to advocate for no guns or restricted access then they should be willing to carry a sign, take pledges, etc. that says, “If attacked I won’t resist”. When they drop their kids off to play at a friends place they will ask them to renew their pledges to not actively resist if some animal (either two or four legged) tries to attack their child.
The absurdity of the idea is now apparent. They will protest. And you are now in a much stronger position to point out that restricting access to the best self-defense tools available is also absurd. It’s only matter of degree.
A log time ago I temporarily worked with a man who had the most absurd argument against gun ownership I have ever encountered.
He said that since people are mostly irrational that we shouldn’t use logic to support RKBA!
Sounds like some of the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged.
Oleg Volk has a variation on the “gun free home” poster that might make the message clearer: http://www.olegvolk.net/newphotos/lifesavers/doors.jpg
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I actually had a woman tell me she would rather see her entire family raped/murdered than PU a gun because guns were evil
This person is more rational than that.
It was when I pointed out that women have the most to gain from having guns available to equalize things against a larger aggressor that they, literally, RAN away saying, “I can’t deal with this right now. It’s too upsetting.” Their previous claim was that any potential benefits would be minimal because men were mostly likely those to own guns and use them in defensive situations. Hence any benefits would be minimal because the attacker and defender would be relatively closely matched.
Quasi-rational. Full of fail.
Why would any woman want to dumb herself down to a man’s level to “equalize” things?
SEXIST!
😉
LOL. Ubu, your internets are in the mail!
I think I would tell such a person, “Darwin does not look kindly upon your type.”
It is your right not to defend yourself or your loved ones and remain or become a victim…Pleas keep that right to yourself and enjoy it as best you can…..at the same time , I will keep my rights, to myself ..as we both agree not to restrict each others creator given rights,,………..Thank you very much…….imho
I think Marko had a similar point when it came to using firearms to defend private property. He pointed out that very few people would disagree that deadly force was appropriate when defending a million dollars worth of private property from destruction or theft. The only problem is that once you have agreed that money, at all, is worth defending, then we are just talking about gradations of degrees.
On a completely unrelated note, it would appear the most recent Jetpack update kind of broke the links at the bottom of the posts on your main page. I am using Chrome on a Vista machine, and clicking on them is basically impossible.
On the broken links. Yup. Other people have been complaining too.
The same morons have no problem with banks and armored cars having armed guards to protect the money, or with the elites having armed guards to protect their gated mansions …
“It is your right not to defend yourself or your loved ones”
Indeed, if people just stopped there, who would have a problem? You might pity them, but that’s all.
But no, the great majority of these folks don’t stop at deciding not to defend themselves, they want to send other men with guns (never do they volunteer to do the deed themselves!) to take away your ability to defend yourself.
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