Whenever you find yourself in a discussion with a gun control advocate on the topic of guns, how often do they actually try to convince you that they’re right? I don’t mean just repeating stuff that has been said a thousand times, but actually talk to you, get your take, then address your concerns?
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Never, right? That’s because, at their core, anti-gunners think we all secretly believe that gun control works.
This point was recently driven home by an editorial out of Colorado. You see, the King Soopers shooter was convicted earlier this week. There wasn’t a lot of defense that could be mounted and his attorneys failed to convince a jury that the killer didn’t know right from wrong when he opened fire, the legal definition of “insanity” for the purposes of a legal defense.
Now, I get the desire to discuss the case in Colorado. It was a big story.
What got me, though, is how the editorial was written. Especially this bit:
He was convicted of the murders this Monday. His attorneys failed to persuade a jury that he was insane at the time of the shootings.
There is no doubt that these deeply disturbed people should not be permitted to have access to guns. Neither should the people less or more disturbed who shoot hundreds of Americans every day.
Each time someone guns down people in a store, a school, a theater or even a town square, past victims and families are terrorized again, along with the rest of us.
These past surviving massacre victims and their families remember back to the “thoughts and prayers” they, too, received from people like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a long, list of sordid fellow Republicans and Democrats alike who offered nothing else to stem the plague of gun violence in the nation.
The nation has for years been awash in political leaders who gaslight the nation by insisting that it’s not the guns.
Of course it’s the guns.
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Now, this is a newspaper’s editorial board. That’s a board made up of people who use words for a living, and so we must look at every word as an intentional choice, one made with the full awareness of what the word means.
And they chose to use the word “gaslight.”
Gaslighting is when you try to convince people that what happened actually didn’t. You’re trying to convince them they’re crazy while knowing full well what the truth actually is.
It’s considered a form of abuse when it’s done in a relationship.
However, for something to be gaslighting, there has to be a consensus as to what reality actually is in order for one party to try to convince the other that reality is actually something different.
They’re saying we know gun control works and that guns are the problem. We’re just trying to convince everyone else that it’s not.
Gaslighting isn’t when people disagree on what is what. It’s an intentional act meant to distort the truth, to treat the other party like they’re crazy regarding what really happened or is happening.
They think we know guns are the problem and are just lying about it.
We do not. The truth is that guns aren’t the issue. Remove every gun homicide from the murder numbers and we still have a higher homicide rate than other developed nations. That’s not a gun issue and anyone with a lick of sense would realize that. It’s not gaslighting to state actual, verifiable facts.
Meanwhile, they pull this nonsense:
It’s the guns that are killing us from an industry that makes billions promoting a misguided revision of history, implying that founding fathers of the nation somehow supported our right to murder each other by the tens of thousands each year.
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Literally no one has argued that the Founding Fathers believed there was a right to murder anyone. No one tries to argue there is any such right. What’s more, as a newspaper, they’ve run an untold number of stories interviewing gun right rights advocates who made reference to the Founding Fathers. Not a one of them said there was a right to murder.
This is gaslighting since they’re trying to convince us of something that doesn’t reflect reality and they know it doesn’t.
Of course, I don’t think they’re intending to gaslight us. No, I think this is another example of how they think we actually believe guns are the problem and just don’t want to admit it.
There’s a reason they view us as evil. It’s because they don’t bother to find out what we really believe, they just assume we believe the same things they do, which means we can only oppose gun control because we’re evil.
Yet the real evil here is in their refusal to acknowledge that we, free people capable of independent thought, could possibly think for ourselves and come to a different conclusion.
