Writer’s Call for ‘Gun Culture Reckoning’ Taken to Woodshed

It’s kind of amazing to me how many people can say the same thing as a thousand other people and still seem to think they’re being profound. This is true almost anywhere you care to look, of course, and not just in the gun debate. Take any topic of conversation, and someone will utter something they’re convinced is groundbreaking, only for those who have been following the topic for decades to roll their eyes yet again.

And I say this as someone who says a lot of the same thing over and over again for a living, though I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m overly profound.

Recently, an anti-gunner writing an op-ed decided to be profound and talk about how gun culture needed a reckoning.

At Ammoland, David Codrea sort of took him to the woodshed over it.

“Gun culture’s reckoning is long overdue,” retired educator Greg Slyford writes Thursday in Fort Wayne’s The Journal Gazette.

“Reckoning” as in having “shall not be infringed” finally recognized? Predictably, no. (And let’s overlook that he presumes “gun culture” to be a monolith and stipulate he’s talking about Second Amendment advocates.)

Slyford has a different agenda, starting by relating how he considered the intent behind an anonymous mailing from a reader containing “Armed Citizen” stories curated by the National Rifle Association to be “a trifle scary.” The thought of citizens being able to defend themselves evidently elicited the inference that “This anonymous sender fancied himself or herself a patriot and a firearms lover. I mean a real firearms lover.”

“What’s wrong with that?” was left unstated and instead, Slyford shared regrets that “all the letters and op-eds I and others had written on this subject of gun violence … apparently had not broken through to my anonymous sender.”

Perhaps that might be because their arguments were not very compelling against real-world accounts of people just like you and me successfully defending themselves with a gun…?

Nine paragraphs into his screed, Slyford gets to his thesis:

“The central point we have been making for years is that we all live with entirely too much violence tied to firearms, therefore an undeniable part of the problem. Firearms are certainly an important piece of any meaningful examination.”

Agreed. There is too much criminal violence. But that hardly justifies “begging the question,” that is, using a circular reasoning logical fallacy where his premise assumes the truth of his conclusion, that the problem lies with firearms. You’d think a “retired educator” would know that, and wonder what he was teaching kids all those years

Codrea and I find it odd that the writer in question immediately thought armed citizen stories were “a trifle scary,” and not just because he used the word “trifle” unironically.

The fact that someone needs to defend themselves at all might be a bit concerning, admittedly, but the onus there isn’t on armed citizens or the NRA for sharing them to do something different than what they’re doing. The onus there is on criminals, who thwart gun control laws, to stop being criminals.

I get the author is convinced that somehow, firearms are the issue, but I’d turn his attention to Michigan over the weekend, where a man with a knife stabbed 11 innocent people and was only stopped when an armed citizen–one of those armed citizens whose story is “a trifle scary”–drew his weapon and stopped the rampage.

Of course, as Codrea takes the writer to the woodshed, there’s also a portion where the writer wishes oh-so-sincerely that we’d go back to some previous “understanding” of the Second Amendment, which, frankly, was absolutely bonkers. From the time of the nation’s founding until relatively recently, it was well-understood that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was an individual right, just like every other right in the Bill of Rights that mentions “the people” or some variation thereof.

Unfortunately, people like the writer tend to believe they’re onto something. As usual, they’re not. They’re just bloviating on the typical anti-gun talking points that have no foundation in reality, but that get repeated by people like the writer.

Editor’s Note: We won’t stand idly by while anti-gun extremists try to rewrite history to wipe away our Second Amendment rights.

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