Okay, this is my last second
amendment column for a while (I PROMISE!!!) but I just heard a news report this
morning that I need to comment on. The cognitive dissonance it set-up in my
mind was interesting because the speaker seemed to be completely oblivious to
the logical false equivalence he was drawing. The double-standard it drew on
was so deliciously dissonant that I had to rewind it to make sure I had not
imagined it!
Nope! I hadn’t!
Listening to a story on CNN
Radio, I heard a couple quotes that a gun enthusiast used to explain his
feelings were delightfully inconsistent with each other. To be fair, this guy
was a moderate as gun enthusiasts go – he was arguing FOR universal background
checks. He was against the idea of registering guns. And it was in discussing
that point that the first of the two quotes that came-up was made:
“I’m not going to tell the government that I own a gun. What business is it of theirs?”
This seems innocuous enough and
(although I disagreed with it the moment he said it) in and of itself it is
logically defensible, I guess. But what he said just seconds later made the
objection that I made mentally when he said the first comment. His second statement
came in response to a question about why large-capacity clips for their guns SHOULDN’T be outlawed just because there
is no reason any law-abiding citizen would need
one:
“Why do cars go 170 MPH? You can’t legally drive that fast! Are we going to outlaw any car that goes over 75?”
Again, the second argument is a
bit specious, but, taken by itself, it might
sway some people the problem is when you take them together. In the later he
seems to be equating guns to autos. But in the first he is opposed to
registering his gun with the government. Does this mean that he drives an
unlicensed car? He doesn’t – one would imagine – registering his car, why is the
gun any different? Surely, the government has no more reason to care that he
owns a car than it does that he owns a gun – the opposite, I would imagine, is
true.
Wherever you are today, I hope
you enjoy the logic (or illogic) of the world around you!
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