There are many lousy arguments used to push for gun confiscation, many of which are well known. Here are four which are either newer or less well known, but which are increasingly relied upon by would-be confiscators.

Bad Argument #1

The first bad argument, ubiquitous among the Blue Cheka, is a sort of syllogism:

A. Bad men are committing atrocious acts with the most commonly owned gun;

B. Ban the most commonly owned gun;

C. Therefore, bad men will no longer commit atrocious acts.

Note that the conclusion C is not that bad men will no longer commit atrocious acts with the banned formerly most commonly owned gun, which does follow. If you melt into shackles all AR-15s, it is profoundly true no bad acts will be committed with them. No good acts, either.

The conclusion is instead that bad men will lose the ability to be bad. Which is asinine.

If you eliminate the most commonly owned gun, you create the most commonly owned gun. That second most commonly owned gun won’t be the same gun as the former most commonly owned gun. But as long as people own guns, there will always be a most commonly owned one.

And that is still true if you swap weapon for gun everywhere. Recall that the enriching diversity which is blessing England has turned to knives, guns being scarce. This has led leaders there to suggest banning knives, or at least banning sharp knives.

No one has thought to ban, or at least control, the bad men.

Bad Argument #2

The second argument adds a premise to Bad Argument # 1, namely that all “assault” weapons should be banned. Then bad men will no longer be able to commit atrocious acts.

This is doubly asinine, because (1) bad men will always find a way to be bad, and (2) any weapon used in an assault is by definition an assault weapon. This includes steak knives. It is only unjustified optimism on the reader’s part to reason that leaders would not some day call for a ban on “assault knives”. See England.

Bad Argument #3

The cry is for “red flag” laws, which would allow the government to confiscate “assault” (“hate”?) weapons from individuals who set off “red flags.” The claim is that these red flags are correlated, even perfectly correlated, with the red flag sender eventually becoming a bad man who commits an atrocious act with a weapon. Therefore, if the weapons are confiscated from from the red flag sender, he cannot commit atrocious acts. That is only true, of course, if all possible weapons are removed from the red-flag sender’s path. Which is impossible.

Perfect correlation between a red flag and future crime, or pre-crime, is impossible. Thus the majority, the vast majority, of red flag senders who will never commit an atrocious act will be unfairly punished, though the potential of a true lunatic to do harm is somewhat lessened. The argument then devolves into costs and losses of both outcomes.

All that pales next to red flags themselves. Consider these words: xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and so on almost endlessly. A phobia is an irrational fear, as is constantly pointed out (in vain). An irrational fear is a form of mental insanity, and any form of insanity is a red flag. Defining their opponents mentally ill is a well used tool of “the left”. See e.g. USSR.

Thus in order to send up a red flag, a person only has to espouse Reality and Tradition. No, strike that. History shows that a person in a leftist regime who remains quiet and does not voice the official ideology also sends up a red flag. It is often said a right wing tyrant only demands obedience, but a left wing tyranny eats the souls of its victims.

Bad Argument #4

The absolute worst, most asinine, most idiotic, most deluded, most screamingly obvious moronicity (you heard me: moronicity) is bad argument #4. It is so flatulent that every time I see it used, I weep.

The argument is that guns should be confiscated from citizens. What follows from that (for that is not the bad argument itself) is that only government employees would have guns.

It is then assumed that guns in the hands of government employees are perfectly safe, and always put to good use. A man with a gun in his hand who yesterday would have been seen as a menace and a terror today becomes an angel of light, for today that man has become a government employee.

We’ll end with this much cited quotation, which is the best rebuttal there is.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?…The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

The last line, dear reader, was this: We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

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