The Mock 'N Troll Hall of Fame
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an argument is a good guy with an argument.
Dear Reader,
I love to debate. Breaking apart and reassembling an argument, testing its premises, crashing it into other arguments just to see what happens- this gives me endless. Not everyone likes debate. That is okay. Debate is fundamentally adversarial. To many, disagreement or competition means ‘fighting.’ For them, correcting someone’s facts or identifying the flaw in their argument is ‘insulting them’ or ‘making them feel dumb.’ Undoubtedly, a disagreement frequently devolves into ad hominem attacks, tribalism, or other heuristic trap, but this is not because debate itself requires it.
I am not one of those people who claims that because we do not teach cursive, Kids These Days™ will never be able to make it. That said, one aspect of education from centuries ago up until relatively recently was a focus on The Classics. I understand that there are problems with some of the curriculum - memorization of Latin tables or the dates of particular battles is not exactly critical to moving through the modern world - but scrapping it entirely was a mistake. Rhetoric and logic, are dismissed as ‘soft science’ or ‘humanities.’ Unless you seek it out, the only time you will be required to work through a proof is 10th grade Geometry. But I would rather hire one person who can separate the signal from the noise or identify a logic fallacy than ten automatons packed full of rote memorization.
When I studied for the LSAT, I did so primarily by reading The Economist and listening to a podcast called ‘LSAT Logic in Every Day Life.’ The host would take a soundbite from the news and ask if it stood up to scrutiny, or if the premises justified the conclusion.
I would like to do the same thing - identifying some of the common arguments that we see and working through the logical implications. Ones that are made in bad faith and have terrible effects will be included in my new feature: The Mock ‘n Troll Hall of Fame.
The Hall will honor arguments that have achieved excellence in ubiquity, hypocrisy, and fallacy. The Selection Committee will show its work by demonstrating how a particularly trollish argument works and prepare you to mock it.
There is a lot to be said about gun ownership, safety, regulation, and crime. Books have been written about the historical development of these arguments, the place of guns in American culture, and the political impasses that they create. I am going to just focus on one argument at a time. Given recent events, and yet another explanation brought to you by The Onion, the inaugural class will feature arguments from the gun debate. Today: “The Only Way To Stop A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun.”
Truculent carpetbagger Wayne LaPierre was in a tough spot on December 21, 2012. This was not because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of donor money the NRA President was using for his personal wardrobe and vacation, those chickens would come to roost later. Nor was it the being duped in a Russian Sparrow operation, being so shady with contracts that contra-shredder Oliver North was shocked, or the blood feud with New York’s Attorney General. He was in a tough spot because a week prior, a man shot and killed 26 people -mostly small children- at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Among our thousands of mass shootings, Sandy Hook stood with Parkland and Columbine as defining an era, even though they were not as fatal as many others. The NRA could not simply do its normal playbook of raising money by claiming that ‘they’ are coming for your guns while copying-and-pasting the ‘thoughts and prayers’ message from the last time.
LaPierre delivered our first inductee at a press conference to address the calls for gun control. The phrase was no doubt focus-grouped - Frank Luntz was polling NRA members at this time; this smells like his. The argument already felt familiar. The archetype of the vigilante who just takes law into his own hands is a recurring part of our media, from Dirty Harry to Death Wish to Taken. The hardboiled Mickey Spillane novels featuring Mike Hammer. The Punisher has been adopted by gun-nuts. The American classic Die Hard is about a resourceful guy with a high pain-tolerance foiling an entire terrorist plot because he was in the right place and right time.
There are a few heuristics that this phrase relies on. The first is the simple rhetorical device of parallelism. Because we know so many truisms that bear this structure - ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’ or ‘a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, etc,’ something that fits this mold tricks us into thinking that it is a tried and true piece of ancient wisdom rather than a cobbled-together PR stunt. You see this in the ‘Where We Go One We Go All’ nonsense of Q - the line is from a forgotten 90s film- they didn’t even go with the Dumas formulation from the Three Musketeers.
Another is the ‘Us v. Them’ problem. This is the same thing you see playing out with Westerns or in Pro Wrestling - we are part of ‘the good guys’ and there is a ‘the bad guys’ out there. There are White and Black Hat hackers. The No True Scotsman fallacy helps us avoid the inconvenience of things that do not fit the mold. This argument relies on ‘us v them’ thinking that, ironically, most mass shooters have themselves when they carry out their attacks.
When you extrapolate a proposal to the point at which the results are clearly contradictory to good sense or the intent of the advocate, it is a reductio ad absurdum. This is normally a trick to undercut the argument being made by the person opposing an argument, but here, the absurd results are being proposed by the advocates themeselves. “What, do you mean that you want Ms. Frizzle to be strapped on the Magic School bus?” “Of course!”
This idea is also absurd based on the two other pressing issues of the discussions of the gun debate - urban gun violence that is not a mass-shooting event and police shooting of unarmed black men. Drug dealers in other countries have turf battles too. They don’t have the same level of fatalities from gun crime. People in bars and on the street get into escalating fights in bars also. We are talking about introducing many more guns into the stream.
Arming people will increase the stochastic risk of a given situation. Of course you can’t predict that every bar that allows open carry is going to end in a shooting, let alone on a particular night, nor can you point to any shooting by a highly motivated shooter and say that but for the absence of the law, it would not have happened. But you can certainly say that the more guns you introduce into public spaces, the more you increase the likelihood of shooting, Like with the increase of extreme weather events as climate change continues, the inability to link any one event to the change in background conditions is not an argument that the background conditions lack a causal link.
Asking teachers and priests to be armed is asking for them to do something that they are not trained for and did not sign up for. Given the performance of many people who did sign up for it and were trained for it, I do not have a lot of hope that Joe six-pack is going to be able to handle it Look at the measured response and trigger discipline by the McCloskeys or the calm and reasonable good guys that make up America’s paramilitary fringe.
In addition to being stupid, this mentality is also ahistorical. In the Old West, cowboys turned their guns. Carrying and practicing with a weapon of war doesn’t make you the Punisher any more than the archery booth at a Renaissance Faire makes you Robin Hood.
The final note I will make is about risk allocation. The same people that are arguing that they will not live in fear over a disease with a 99% survivability rate want to carry around guns in case a random bank robbery needs stopping. This is not a serious argument by serious people. The bottom line is that they like guns because they are fun to shoot and they feel cool carrying them. I get it. They are fun to shoot. When I carried a gun, I felt awesome.
Anyone making this argument is either a person trying to sell something to fools, or a fool who is buying.
Welcome to the Hall, “The Only Thing That Can Stop A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun.”
Best,
Kingman