One of the most intellectually dishonest ways of “debating” an issue is the use of strawman arguments.
Now, if you’re not familiar with the concept, a strawman argument is when one side of the debate distorts or lies about the other side’s position on the issue, and then proceeds to attack and debunk the false statements as if they are actually defeating the real arguments of their opponents.
Unfortunately, you see the use of strawman arguments regularly in the political arena especially when it comes to hot button topics like firearms.
Now, to be fair, there are instances when someone may unknowingly use a strawman argument because they actually think that the other side has that position. Those people aren’t intentionally making a false argument. They are just misinformed or ignorant.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t address the strawman being put forth when that happens, and that’s why we’re going to address the most common strawman argument that anti-2A activists make against pro-gun policy positions. An article at the NRA-ILA talks about this:
We now sit at 29 states with some form of Constitutional Carry, and in virtually every state where there has been a legislative push for such a law, those opposed repeated the same doom-and-gloom predictions they rolled out for the push to make carry permits more easily obtained.
“Our state will return to the days of the Wild West!”
“Simple arguments will explode into violent shoot-outs!”
“The streets will become a war zone!”
But none of that happened, just like it didn’t happen during the carry permit reforms.
We know that those concerns aren’t reality, In fact, as the NRA-ILA points out, “when self-defense options were expanded for law-abiding citizens, states saw either a decline in violent crime or no significant change.”
And there’s no doubt that a number of anti-2A activists, especially politicians, know that. They’re intentionally stoking fears of a “wild west,” fears of a massive increases in violence. They know that the idea that a violent wild west “gun hell” is imaginary, misleading, and intended to get people emotional and irrational about the issue.
But a fair number of anti-2A activists are fed a steady diet of the legacy mainstream media and other left leaning political sources, and those folks have a complete misunderstanding of what happens when people aren’t prevented from exercising their 2A rights.
The solution? If you can get an anti-2A activist to actually have a calm civil conversation about this with you (not always an option), you get the statistics to them.
Gun violence and overall violence decrease, if they change at all, when gun control is reduced, and that’s why anti-2A activists should actually be working with us on our side of the issue supporting gun rights.