weapon

I wrote a post last week about some of the mystifying and thunderously stupid arguments the stooges of the NRA use. I have since run across several others news items that I think are relevant.

These RWNJs keep repeating their mantra “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Here’s a story from a good guy with a gun that didn’t follow the mythology and ended poorly for our hero.

An astute blogger noticed that the NRA may have gotten their talking points from Archie Bunker.

And God wants everyone to have an assault weapon if this RWNJ is to be believed. Yeah, I think that’s right out of Browning’s 13:16.

I’ll begin with the guy who’d just holstered his gun when the mass killer walked into view:

It was 2005, at the Tacoma Mall in Washington state. McKown had been chatting with friends when gunshots rang out. Everyone hid; but McKown had a pistol. For years, he’d carried a legal concealed weapon, with the thought that someday he’d protect others. Now it seemed that moment had come.

Gun drawn, McKown scanned for the shooter. But the gunshots stopped. Unsure what had happened, McKown tucked his pistol back under his coat – just as the shooter walked right in front of him.

“So anyway, I’m standing there like Napoleon Bonaparte, with his hand, you know, in his jacket,” he recalls. “So I said, ‘Young man, I think you need to put your weapon down.’ “

That moment of vulnerability gave the other guy just enough time to shoot McKown. The bullet hit his spine, and he found himself unable to aim his own gun.

But let’s let Archie Bunker rebutt my arguments:

And so much for Jesus and his sissy liberal crap about turning the other cheek …

The author, David French, interprets the Christian Bible as granting everyone a right to self-defense. He suggests that this, if true, means that God’s will is that people have access to guns, as they are the means for self defense:

In fact, Jesus’s disciples carried swords, and Jesus even said in some contexts the unarmed should arm themselves…What does all this mean? Essentially that gun control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society. All rights – of course – are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a heavy burden of justification.

Even if French is right about the Christian view of self-defense (though Jesus did have choice words about “turning the other cheek“), it’s a logical fallacy to say this implies anything about restrictions on access to guns. Saying that people have a right to defend themselves if attacked isn’t the same thing as saying they should have a right to possess any conceivable means of defending themselves – presumably, French is fine with banning grenade launchers. The burden, instead, is on French to prove that universal background checks or limitations on assault weapon ownership somehow prevent people from defending themselves; to prove, in other words, that gun regulation is actually a restriction on the right of self-defense proper rather than a crime-prevention statute.

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