Quote of the day—Brian Doherty

Certain anti-gun folk seem to sincerely believe that the only reason Second Amendment advocates want to have a gun, or want other people to have the right to have a gun, is because guns are so great at killing people; that a gun not used to kill someone isn’t really worth having. But it isn’t true.

Brian Doherty
June 22, 2015
Gun Rights Advocates Don’t Just Want Guns in Order to Kill Criminals (Believe it Or Not!)
A much-hyped new Violence Policy Center study grossly misses the point about guns’ value in self-defense.
[Doherty points out the straw man almost all of us have encountered with the anti-gun people. It comes in various flavors, such as

  • The only thing a gun is good for is killing.
  • Guns are designed to kill.
  • If you own a gun you must want to kill something.

No matter how many times we correct them they keep coming back with the same or essentially the same straw man. And we keep pointing out the data, as Doherty does in his article quoted above, that successful defensive use of firearms seldom involves killing anyone or anything.

So why do they keep attempting to use this straw man when each time they get what appears to be a full mouthful of reality shoved in their face? I believe it is because their minds don’t operate in our reality. They live in their own imagined reality.

I’m reminded of something Richard Feynman observed in one of his books. I think it was a musician friend was teaching Feynman music and Feynman was teaching the musician physics. After a few weeks the musician told Feynman, “When you say you know something, you really mean it.”

What this means to me is that there a lot of people who believe knowledge is a personal thing. One person’s beliefs, knowledge, and opinions are just as valid as anyone else’s. This is emphatically not true. But yet I am certain there are a great many people who believe this. These people cannot understand facts and logical trains of thought. You can no more teach them logic than you can teach colors to someone blind from birth.

Personal interactions with these people should elicit your sympathy. Their public claims of relevance should be greeted with mockery.—Joe]

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10 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Brian Doherty

  1. Empathetically true for those who feel it is true; emphatically true for those who know it.

  2. Don’t discount projection. When someone makes a flat statement about the intentions of a group of people they they have no personal knowledge of, what else could they be using but a mirror held up to their own intentions? So, when they say “They can’t be trusted with a gun.” what they mean is “I cant be trusted with a gun.”.and when they say “You’re all racists.” what they mean is “I make my decisions based on skin color so everybody else must do the same.”. Given the above, isn’t it interesting how often the usual suspects accuse, with complete conviction but no evidence, folks on our side of being psychopaths or sociopaths? Just a thought.

  3. Knowledge is a strength. The ability to perceive, discern and thus discriminate between truth and falsity is a strength. This is the foundation of real authority.

    The game that’s being played on us, at all levels, seeks to discredit and marginalized strength, and replace real authority with the “authority” of intimidation and brute force.

    Usurpation. Emotions provide the leverage with which we may be separated from our own, inherent perception of reality. It just not FAIR, for example, that the perceptive, the smart, the strong, the healthy and the creative should having things better than other people. It’s an inequity. An injustice, and so and on and on. Just take a little emotion, spice it up with a sense of injustice, stir it up, let it simmer, serve it up hot, and the Dark Side can rule the world forever. Those who today proselytize about guns being only for killing are the same ones who’ll stand aside while millions are killed in ethnic purges*.

    That’s pretty much all there is to it. Everything else is tactics. Once you see the game, much of what was once confusing and frustrating becomes clear and simple.

    *You want to understand how the Holocaust could happen in plain view of the whole world without anyone stopping it? Look around you.

  4. Pingback: Weekly Gun News – Edition 5 | Shall Not Be Questioned

  5. Your points are fantastic, Joe, unfortunately I find they land squarely in the gulf between us.

    Yes, a Pardini target pistol is not going to be used for killing animals in hunting, or likely be somebody’s bedside house gun, and certainly the target guns they make would be a BITCH for concealed carry.

    Still shoot a bunny, deer, or person with one and a .22 will kill them RFK dead, and it doesn’t matter the platform.

    So instead I point out that self defense IS legal in the united states, and the law recognizes deadly force, and further every nation I can think of (including the UK where self defense is essentially impossible by our standards) has legal provisions where somebody can kill another human being in the name of self-preservation with no criminal repercussions.

    Yes in America (even Massachusetts) I can shoot an attacker that is directly threatening my life, and in the UK you would need to kill the attacker with your bare hands or improvised weapon that was NOT on your person at the time of the attack (at least how I read their stupid laws).

    So this is ALL of humanity that says there may come a time when it is legal for you to kill another human….and they are speaking out against that.

    They are anti-humanity.

    Hell we know antis don’t do much thinking for themselves. This one gets WAYYY inside their OODA loop.

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