The gun debate is one of those things where both sides are trying to take advantage. I’d call it a game if the stakes weren’t so high. Both sides make arguments, and the other side tries to punch holes in them.
This is reasonable and natural, even if I don’t like how the other side carries out their part.
Still, fair is fair, I suppose, and free speech means they have a right to say idiotic things. That’s just how it has to be.
But it doesn’t mean I leave the level of stupidity I encountered on Facebook recently alone.
Oh boy. Where do we start?
First, that’s not what reductio ad absurdum means. It means taking an argument to a ridiculous extreme in order to discredit it. It’s saying that without gun control, there will be mass shootings in every school next Thursday or something. Reframing the argument into something else so it will sound absurd isn’t remotely the same thing.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about this so-called argument, because this is stupid.
I tried to see if this was someone mocking the left, but it’s a real channel that seems to be serious about “fake news” or whatever, and not a particular fan of the political right. In other words, I think this guy is serious, and if he cranked this out, well…he’s got serious problems.
See, the issue here is that there’s an entire framework from the discussion removed.
If someone blamed their umbrella for getting wet, we’d point out that they’re the moron who didn’t use it. Inanimate objects have no volition of their own, which means they have to be operated by a human.
We don’t blink at saying an umbrella keeps you dry because it’s understood that it’s opened by a person.
Yet guns are routinely blamed for acts of violence, which is why we point out that the issue is people. The absurdity here isn’t that people defend guns when they don’t defend umbrellas; it’s that whoever this dipstick is seems to think this is a compelling argument.
It’s not.
Once someone starts blaming umbrellas for getting them wet, we’ll start telling them who is responsible, just as we do with guns.
In the meantime, I have to say that as anti-gun arguments go, this one is particularly moronic. It’s a surface-level attack that’s allowed someone to think they’re clever, all while being eye-rolling to anyone it’s trying to attack. This feels like something a high schooler who read his first book about informal logical fallacies would try…three months after reading the book they didn’t really understand.
If this is the best the anti-gunners have, I like our chances, because even with a massive media army at their beck and call, it’s going to be hard to sell a line like this to the American people unless they’re all so brain-rotted from social media that they simply regurgitate what they’re told anyway, and if 2024 taught us anything, it was that the public isn’t that far gone.
Perhaps whoever created this should crawl back into whatever hole they discovered informal logical fallacies in and actually study them for a bit, first.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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