Below is a list of 5 of the most frequently used taking points weaponized by the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association, Russian bots, and far-right assholes that care more about their MAGA-given right to play with their pew-pew’s than the lives of innocent people. For each argument, I’ve provided a counterargument you can use to shut them the hell up.
Even if you’re sure that none of the arguments being presented hold any merit, you should, at the very least, assume incompetence or ignorance, rather than malice. Perhaps both sides are working for the same goals with different tactics.
1. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to individual gun ownership
The First Amendment also has some regulation applied to it, such as a call for violence and the endangerment of lives as part of the speech. Like the Second Amendment, it too needs to be regulated.
But, to be honest, I think the arguments about the Second Amendment should come last, not first. There is a culture of firearms in the US and debating the nuances of the Second Amendment does not actually push to any relevant solution.
It’s more about the cherry on top, rather than the current rationale behind gun-control.
Seriously, that’s all it took. It’s total bullshit.
The gun debate did not start in 2008 but it’s cute that you think that.
I don’t know anything about this case, and you make a very poor argument as to why “ban on handgun possession in Washington, D.C. violated the 2nd Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms.” is a flawed reasoning.
2. The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to have any gun anywhere at any time because it says, “shall not be infringed.”
No one is trying to claim that everyone should be able to acquire a rocket-launcher and in fact, for the past three decades fully automatic weapons are banned with no group trying to fight this ban (that I am aware of).
the right of the State to arm and maintain a well-regulated militia — and arm citizens in direct service of these regulated and maintained organizations — shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment does not refer to the federal government or the various states. It can be argued that in order to have the right to bear arms, one must be a part of a group, organization, or militia but the claim that the government has given themselves the right to bear arms is quite ridiculous and would be a pointless amendment.
Let’s break it down:
- considering that the people who wrote the amendment believed that a “well-regulated militia” is important for the existence of a “free state.”
- considering that a militia is an armed group comprised of individual citizens, usually called upon in time of need
- And also considering that we agree that the Second Amendment dictates that those groups must have the means to arm themselves
- We are left with a reality that in order for a militia to exist and have the arms needed, the people who might form that militia should have the means to acquire the weaponry before a call is made.
The last part of the constitution explains the first part and not vice-versa.
The Second Amendment does not protect the right for every murderer that wants to strap on an assault weapon to load up and head on over to the local elementary school and start knocking on classroom doors.
This is why background checks are being done (poorly, at times) and there are conditions for a person to able to arm themselves.
3. We need to arm teachers to keep schools safe
I agree. This is stupid.
A better solution would be to employ competent security in school who can react to those situations. Of course, no one suggests that teachers should be forced to arm themselves like many suggest — only that they will be permitted to arm themselves.
While as few as 200 to 250 justifiable homicides are committed in acts of self-defense annually, over 35,000 people per year are killed with firearm
What about the 21,637 out of those 35,000 who commit suicide with firearms? What about the 500 who are killed unintentionally? What about the 279 who die for unknown intent? And based on the figures you posted, the number of justifiable homicides are actually 479 and not 200–250.
Including suicide with murder works to skew the numbers. Do you believe that a person who thinks about committing suicide and does not have a firearm will not resort to other means?
You portray the 35,000 as the number of people who die yearly because of “gun nuts” and criminals. Do you also intend to work to fight suicide? Do you care, other than using that demographic as a reason to disarm the population?
Sure, the NRA and the GOP can pull out a handful of stories about how someone fended off an attacker with a weapon. And they can pretend that this one case wipes out decades or research and lives lost, but the numbers just don’t add up.
Of course the numbers don’t add up. For them to add up, you will need to include gang-violence, understand suicide, and add the number of people who just needed to ‘cock’ the weapon to scare away perpetrators or having certain areas with high gun ownership being less likely to have armed perpetrators.
Statistics fail in this regard. They give you an overview of reality but tend to mislead when taken at face value.
The far right likes to use funny numbers to pretend they have “evidence” that more guns are the solution to gun violence. Don’t be intimidated by it. It’s total bullshit. The earth is round. Climate change is real. And guns are designed to cause shootings, not stop them.
The claim of “far right” is ridiculous. The gun debate is not really a partisan issue and many on the left are against gun-control as proposed by the progressive ideology.
While you cite “the GOP” and “the NRA,” I can cite “sensible gun-control” that are rarely (if ever) sensible. Most of the ideas have no merit in reality and will do nothing to prevent the next mass shooting and will just disarm those that should not be disarmed. Most of all, none of those ideas are based on “evidence.”
4. We need guns to protect us from crazy people.
Yes. Unless you are suggesting that a person who goes around shooting up a school or runs amok with a firearm is doing so while having a complete control over his faculties.
The use of words like ‘ablist’ to make it shameful to suggest that the people who are the perpetrators of mass shootings are perhaps not entirely sane is not actually a good argument.
these folks are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than the perpetrators.
You ignore the groups who make those people into victims and just bunch together everyone under the label of ‘ablist.’
mass shootings carried out by people suffering from mental health conditions account for only 1% of gun homicides annually.
The people who use mass shootings as the reason for gun-control are on the political left, not on the political right, or anyone who argues that the people who shoot up a crowd are actually insane (which they are).
On the other hand, the majority of mass-shootings involve a male with a history of domestic violence.
How many of the mass shooters came from a stable home with a father in the house? Is this the point that people should start feeling shame from being white and/or male?
And frequently, their female counterparts and family members are listed amongst the casualties. And legally, beating your wife is a crime, not a mental health issue.
Beating your spouse is a mental health issue. Especially in the cases you describe. Don’t try to make the reason for the mass shooting something that is part of “the Patriarchy” — that’s just stupid.
Similarly, more Americans are killedevery year in the United States by white male right-wing extremists than by any other type of organized terror group.
That has nothing to do with the topic, other than follow your ideology attack on CIS, white, hetero-normative, male Patriarchy nonsense. It also ignores pertinent information to reach that number. Next time, show a link to the data, instead of a news article. News articles are not qualified citation — unless you are willing to accept news articles from Breitbart and other similar sources.
For example, both were very active in passing gun possession restriction in response to the Black Panthers asserting their Second Amendment right to self-defense. Conservatives denied Martlin Luther King, Jr. a firearm after he applied for one following the bombing of his home.
I see you brought a current example. Well done.
They also have had no problem standing by silently as black and brown people are gunned down by police officers for nothing more than giving the impression that they are exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Hyperbolic much? Count the number of cops who wrongfully killed a black person in the last decade and I’ll give you just as many examples of cops wrongfully killing a white person.
I also find it telling that you try and protect the criminal elements in the “black community” in order to gain points over conservatives. If you’re interested in talking about racism, let’s talk about the black conservatives who are being labeled as ‘coons’ for not supporting the leftist agenda of self-flagellation. Let’s discuss how the left refuses to address any problem in the black community because once upon a time there was slavery and Jim Crow.
Rather than allowing the Gun Party to clear a pathway for white terrorist organizations and their affiliates to continue to committing mass murders while criminalizing people of color and scapegoating people with disabilities, we need to call bullshit on this Jim Crow song and dance.
Same nonsensical narrative of self-flagellation. A narrative that has nothing to do with the topic and everything to do with saying the right words so people could believe you to be “on the right side of history.”
Those that care what people a century from now will think of them and let that lone fact dictate their actions are the people who have a very weak moral center and letting the popular narrative to dictate it.
MAGABot: But Planned Parenthood!
Informed Human: Planned Parenthood isn’t a Second Amendment issue. Stick to the point, Kellyanne.
Neither is race and political affiliation but you have no problem leaning on those talking points to shame people into submission.
MAGABot: We need guns for hunting and competitions!
Informed Human: The Second Amendment does not grant you the right to play sports or kill your food with explosives. Why are you trying to blow your food up anyways?
No one who talks about the Second Amendment even cares about hunting and competitions. They talk about self-preservation and the right granted in the constitution.
MAGABot: Criminals will get guns if we ban them or not.
Informed Human: Well shit, yo. I guess we should just stop with all the hospitals and doctors and whatnot. Cuz, damn — if we can’t cure all diseases and heal all wounds, why the fuck bother with any of them?
“Aspirin won’t help my broken leg”
“Let’s add morphine, then”
If you accept the premise that removing firearms from law abiding citizens won’t change the reality of gun possession of criminals, then what exactly is the reason to disarm the law-abiding citizens?
MAGABot: We need guns to protect us from the government.
Informed Human: The government has nuclear weapons and missiles. Are you going to shoot the missiles? How many times will you shoot the missile? I am here for this.
Yes, because the government will drop a nuclear missile on itself.
Why do you think despots first order of business is to disarm the people? After all, they can just drop a nuclear weapon on themselves.
MAGABot: You don’t know what AR stands for so shut up, Snowflake.
Informed Human: Right. So, actually, I do. It stands for ArmaLite Rifle. But even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. All I need to know is the fact that it is the favorite weapon of mass shooters. It inflicts damage that makes it useless for hunting and self defense in small quarters. It was recently used by a white supremacist with a history of domestic violence to blow orange sized holes into 17 innocent teenagers.
The difference between a semi-automatic and a fully automatic does matter. The fact that “assault weapon” is a classification that does not exist, along with “fully semi-automatic” also matters.
It seems that the anti-gun crowd has no idea about firearms in general and the AR-15 in particular. Being a favorite weapon of mass shooters also have no bearing on the topic. If most people with a DUI conviction drive an Audi, should we ban Audi?
You know that a few months ago a “good guy with a gun” stopped a mass-shooter with an AR-15. Do you even care when it doesn’t farther your own agenda?
And I know that if someone that is more concerned with the proper name of the weapon used in mass shooting after mass shooting than the fact that the children are being blown to pieces with them — then I’m not the one in this conversation that has to worry about being a fucked up individual.
No one cares about the name of the weapon. Just the ignorance of the people who argue that the AR-15 is an Assault Rifle because of the AR in the name. The AR-15 is a semi-automatic firearm. What would you do after banning the AR-15? Would you ban the next weapon on the list who becomes favorite amongst criminals? Would banning the weapon stop mass shootings if this weapon did not exist?
And that’s really at the heart of this whole battle: protecting people v protecting political interests.
Yes, this is exactly what you are doing now.
Our job is to remain focused and remember — folks trying to find excuses to defend the murder of children in the name of 16th Century grammar, sportsmanship and Nazi meritocracy are seriously fucked up.
There is nothing wrong with 16th-century grammar. Only with your dislike of the document itself and your effort to shape it to mean something that agrees with your ideology.
The talking points that you have used in your piece tells a much clearer story about your morality of defending the murder of children. You don’t seem to care about the children or their murderer as you don’t care to find the root of the problem and just like to shout about gun-control that is anything but “common sense.”
These assholes are literally killing our children. And there is no stupid philosophical argument that they can present that can or should prevent us from stopping them.
You seem to like standing on the graves of children in order spout your idiotic talking points. I remember the time when it was the right who were blamed for using children to further their agenda.
That starts with arming yourself for the gun debate. And if you’ve read this far, that’s exactly what you’ve done. Now take these arguments. Weaponize them. Turn them into action. Shut. Their. Shit. Down.
So far, all your arguments were vacant of any logic and you actually think you present some ‘gotch!’ arguments that deflate the pro-Second Amendment crowd.
Why bother, though, as you can just call your opposition children murderers, racists, and ablists in order to shame them into submission.
