I'm one of those annoying Brooklyn-dwelling, granola-eating, occasional-yoga-class-attending types, and so it's tediously predictable that I'm in favour of strict gun control laws. But even I must accept that it's perfectly possible to make the opposing argument in coherent, rational ways.

One way is to argue that the evidence shows that guns make society safer. (I'm almost certain that's incorrect, but it's not incoherent.) Another is to argue that the individual right to bear arms is so important, as a check against government tyranny, that it's justified – even if the cost is thousands of victims of gun violence every year.

Both these arguments pop up briefly then vanish, like meerkats, in the now-conservative playwright David Mamet's pro-gun essay, Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm, which is the centerpiece of the current digital-only edition of Newsweek.

Mainly, though, it's one of the most muddled and baffling arguments for anything I've read in ages. Others have been fact-checking it energetically, but I hope you'll tolerate my giving it a brief unpicking.

Mamet builds his case, innovatively, around the notion of "needs", beginning with Karl Marx's famous dictum:

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

This, he points out, goes so horrifyingly wrong because somebody has to decide what your "needs" are, and inevitably, in practice – though not in theoretical Marxism – that ends up being the state. But since Marxist ethics have approximately zero traction in modern-day America, it's unclear at first why he raises the matter.

Then, we get to the sleight-of-hand, the con game. Mamet slides from Marxism's "needs" to Barack Obama's use of the word, during his re-election campaign, when he reportedly said that he and Romney both had more money than they needed.

No source is given for these remarks, and I can't immediately find any, but let's assume for now that Obama said them. Plainly, he wasn't advocating a maximum income cap (as you can infer from the fact that he got elected president). But no matter! Mamet is galloping off to his conclusion, which is that Obama wants to define everybody's needs for them – including, most gravely, whether or not they need to be packing heat. Yet, writes Mamet:

"It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs."

Let's just come out and state the problem with this argument: you can characterise almost any action taken by any government, ever, as a constraint on somebody's felt needs, if you try hard enough. (The Marxist slogan implicitly concerns all material needs – a crucial difference.) I might feel the "need" to drive through a residential neighbourhood at 120mph, or open a restaurant without bothering to keep the kitchen clean, or to not pay my taxes, or to help myself to David Mamet's flat-screen television. In each case, a law or regulation constrains me. It is, blindingly obviously, what keeps society functioning.

Should government constraint of individual needs extend to stricter firearms laws? It's an argument of degree: personally, I'd say it's an easy "yes", because the damage to other people's need and desire to not be killed seems so clearly threatened by a society in which guns are in wide circulation. But Mamet doesn't just disagree; he wants this to be a categorical argument instead, in which the very idea of government constraining his needs is outrageously anti-democratic.

There are some traditions with a respectable intellectual history that oppose any such state-ordained constraints, but they tend to come under the label of anarchism, which I'm guessing would horrify Mamet. (That's also the sense I get from reading about his play The Anarchist, though I haven't seen it.)

The real source of the perspective expressed in his essay, I suspect, is that of a celebrity accustomed to having his "needs" and desires met with a click of the finger – and who is, accordingly, driven wild by the fact that he still bumps up against things like gun restrictions.

Gun control advocates won't win the battle by pretending that there aren't rational arguments to be made in the other direction. Mamet's isn't one of them, though.

There are lots of other things wrong with his piece. But the most basic one is that he's abandoned the most fundamental principle of worthwhile political debate. ABC: Always Be Coherent.