I used to be against gay marriage. I never thought it was a big deal but I could tell the people screaming about it weren’t really screaming about marriage. They were screaming about “rights.”

I mean, if gays are really so psyched on marriage, why are they doing it at the courthouse in matching Hawaiian shirts? Where’s the ceremony? Who are the bridesmaids? I know it doesn’t put me out personally but neither does saying drag queens can use the ladies room. Sorry, you can’t just put on a dress and become a lady. You may not go in there. It’s not like I give a shit about who uses what bathroom, it’s the principle of the thing.

It’s not about the government issuing a piece of paper. Marriage was around before government. It’s fundamentally about kids and that tends not to be a gay thing. However, the libertarian in me couldn’t justify a law that said people weren’t free to do something that didn’t hurt anyone. Besides, at a divorce rate of about 50%, it’s not like the straights are taking it very seriously. “FINE!” I yelled and stormed upstairs to my room, “YOU CAN GET MARRIED BUT NO MORE COMPLAINING!” Then I slammed my bedroom door so hard, the “No Fat Chicks” sign came off.

I think a lot of people voted for Obama for the same reason. “FINE” they yelled in the voting booth while checking off his name, “You got your black president. Now leave me alone!” But the complainers didn’t stop. They’re as insatiable as the Taliban. They don’t really care about the thing they’re complaining about. They just want to have power over you and if that means waving a picture of dead children in your face until you capitulate, so be it.

That’s what’s happening with Sandy Hook. Piers Morgan is using children’s graves as a pulpit. He’s right. If we got rid of all automatic assault weapons, the shooter wouldn’t have been unable to use one to kill those kids. Maybe he would have used bombs like Andrew Kehoe did. If Adam Lanza had been committed to a mental institution he wouldn’t have done it either. Let’s use their deaths to make it easier to commit people. Here’s a better idea: How about you don’t use tragedies to further your own political agenda? Especially when said tragedies are becoming rarer.

Automatic weapons Assault rifles count for so few crimes you feel like yelling, “FINE! BAN THEM” just to shut people up but then what would Jeffrey Stauber’s son have used to defend himself and his sister? It’s much easier to show gun victims than all the crimes guns prevented. That’s the beauty of big government. Nobody can point to all the jobs that weren’t created by a policy or list all the invisible companies that would have thrived if they weren’t drowning in red tape. Instead, people like Piers get to argue about what it’s not about and if you’re against them, you want children to die. How did we get here? I think it’s because people stopped taking math in school. Nobody runs the numbers anymore.

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THE TYRANNY OF ANECDOTES

Remember the good old days when you’d only have one tyrant per country and they’d usually kill a few thousand people? Today anyone can be tyrannical and use their shrill screams to kill millions of conversations.

In The Tyranny of Clichés, Jonah Goldberg talks about how clichés such as “Violence never solves anything” trump logic and end debates despite the evidence saying the opposite. (He says violence liberated America from the English and also ended slavery.) The perpetually misunderstood Sam Francis has a similar take but calls it “anarcho-tyranny” and describes it as

a combination of anarchy (in which legitimate government functions—like spying on the bad guys or punishing real criminals—are not performed) and tyranny (in which government performs illegitimate functions—like spying on the good guys or criminalizing innocent conduct like gun ownership and political dissent).

There’s a third kind of tyranny with which the seemingly oppressed like to oppress us: anecdotal evidence. Where freak occurrences and exceptions used to be treated for the aberrations that they are, they now define policies and dominate discourse. Right now, Putin is using one dead orphan to justify a total adoption ban on American parents because his ego is hurt. To be against him is to want orphans to die.

Safety culture uses this tactic often. Thirty-four children in Ohio died in car accidents! Are you OK with that? Are you OK with a classroom blowing up? To be against booster seats for 7-year-olds is to laugh at the atrocities in Sandy Hook. No wonder Ralph Nader has a career. If you don’t pay his extortion fees, you’re killing kids. When you have the emotions behind “common sense” on your side, counterintuitive truth is doomed.

In a culture where a Liberal Arts degree is considered education and “Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent,” replacing data with propaganda is easy.

Here are 10 totally random occurrences that tyrants pretend aren’t random at all.

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1. A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT HAD A MELTDOWN

When the tsunami hit Japan last year, it destroyed a nuclear power plant that killed probably dozens of employees and will lead to countless cancer deaths down the road; ergo, nuclear power is bad. Every time I try to defend nuclear energy this past year, the conversation jumps there and promptly commits hara-kiri. But the number of workers killed appears to hover around zero and the number of future cancer victims caused by the accident is expected to approach 100. That’s less than 1% of the deaths the tsunami caused.

2. SOMEONE LIT THEIR TAP WATER ON FIRE

The documentary Gasland exploded into the fracking debate by showing families near natural gas mines lighting their tap water on fire. This is a very compelling image for Americans who don’t live near areas with plenty of naturally occurring methane already in the water table. However, the ones that do are well aware their tap water has been flammable since indoor plumbing began, which was decades before fracking. The tap water you saw in Gasland was always flammable and it was always drinkable.

3. AN ABORTION DOCTOR WAS SHOT

I’m always surprised by how many of my Canadian brethren see America as an evangelical hellhole full of religious lunatics who regularly shoot abortion doctors. In this CBC interview the journalist is so flummoxed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s respect for America, he blurts out, “They shoot abortion doctors in the United States of America.” Despite the hatefact that Canada has more dead abortion doctors per capita, the half-dozen murdered in America since 1993 mean that if you love America, you want abortion doctors to die.

4. AN ANTI-NAUSEA DRUG DEFORMED BABIES

One of the most catastrophic side effects in the history of pharmaceuticals was the deformed babies that resulted from thalidomide. The scandal begat a much stricter FDA, which seemed like a good idea at first but we’re now strapped with a ten-year wait to get anything on the market. We’ve all but cured deafness and could be in a similar place with blindness if the FDA didn’t make it virtually impossible to get a cure passed. Thalidomide isn’t pretty, but preventing millions of lives from being improved is downright twisted.

ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE

-GAVIN McINNES