Henry Reardon

2016-08-18 14:36:02 -0400

Common sense doesn’t exist, it’s a misnomer. What does exist, sometimes, is experience.



To use just one example, no one is born knowing that you shouldn’t touch a hot stove burner. Many children have proven this over the years by burning themselves on a stove burner. If we were all born born with the knowledge that stove burners are hot, no one would ever burn themselves and on a burner no one would even have to be told to watch out for burners.



Instead of common sense, what we actually have it experience. We get that two basic ways: someone with more experience than we have warns us that something is harmful OR we learn through our own experience. To use the burner example again, your mother warns you not to touch the burner because it will hurt you OR you actually touch the burner and find out that it hurts.



No one is born knowing even the basics about guns. We only know what we’ve learned through our own experience or the experience of others. If no one ever educates us about guns, we know nothing about guns. Clearly, most of the people in the video know nothing about guns, although the video has clearly been edited to cherry-pick the ignorant ones. (I am more than satisfied that lots of people do know a lot about guns from conversations I’ve had.)



By the same token, a whole lot of people have no knowledge about gun control. They don’t understand how gun ownership is actually limited, what requirements gun owners face, or what loopholes actually exist.



Expecting people who know nothing about guns and nothing about how they are regulated to understand which proposed regulations are sensible and which are not is as ridiculous as most of what went on in the video. A lot of education about guns and gun control needs to happen before voters are qualified to vote on the matter.

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