Dissecting the Worst Arguments Against Gun Control

~A brief analysis of common pro-gun arguments~

As is the case with the vast majority of political issues in the current climate, opposition to gun control can be fraught with logical fallacies and poorly reasoned conclusions.  Of course, this is not to say that there are absolutely no good arguments to support opposition to firearm regulations.

It IS to say that, in terms of logically defending their position, gun rights activists could stand to do a lot better.  Listed below are just a few examples of common arguments which are, in reality, not that good:

1. “What do you know?”
A classic example of the “what do you know?” argument might feature a reporter such as Jesse Watters belligerently stumping about a college campus demanding answers from random students pertaining to in-depth information regarding firearms.  “What does 'high capacity' mean?” he asks aggressively.  “What does the ‘AR’ in ‘AR-15’ stand for?” he demands.  “What is the rate of fire of *insert random, obscure firearm*?”

When students are unable to produce quick, accurate answers which are nuanced and detailed, a reporter like Watters will waste no time in jumping down their throats.  If it is not explicitly stated (and often, it is), the overwhelming implication, at the very least, is that if students don’t know the exact answers to trivia questions about guns, they should have no inclination or right to an opinion about whether or not guns should be regulated.

This is an embarrassingly bad argument.

Imagine, for a moment, if we applied this sort of reasoning to every topic of discourse, political or otherwise.  We would be eventually forced to confine all subjects of dialogue to small groups of professionals and experts only.

Your opinion about foreign relations?  Domestic policy?  Anything at all?  All of them immaterial because you’re not a trained specialist.  You can’t possibly know all there is to know, and so your thoughts and opinions on any given subject may be completely disregarded and discounted, in spite of the fact that the topic may affect you directly.

But we don’t operate with this presupposition.  Not at all.  The opinions of the politically inexperienced public elect our governors and shape our policy.  The consensus of the specifically illiterate masses plays a significant role in the direction of scientific, artistic, philosophical, ethical, and moral development.

One does not have to know the ins and outs of gun ownership and operation to know this: Guns can be used to end many lives very quickly.  Considering this, the name and function of a gun are ultimately irrelevant to the conversation.  Discrediting an opponent by demonstrating his lack of knowledge on the subject matter (which, in this case, is firearm legislation and the history of, statistics, and data on gun violence in the United States) is one thing.  Discrediting an opponent by demonstrating his lack of knowledge on a topic which is loosely related and irrelevant to the conversation is quite another.  And by “quite another”, I mean it is fallacious.  You might refer to it as a "red herring".

Admittedly, it is difficult to respect the evaluations of those who are less educated on particular elements of the subject matter than it is possible to be.  And so when protestors call for and demand restrictions on certain firearms and then are unable to identify or answer questions regarding those firearms, it significantly discredits them and undermines their position.  Many gun control activists could certainly stand to do more research and be able to participate and engage in specifically informed dialogue on the specifics of gun manufacturing, storage, operation.  Simply put: It is never easy to listen to or attempt to understand those whose knowledge in distinct areas may be lacking or inferior to our own.

But this fact alone is not an argument (or at least, not a good one) because the following are facts: People DO die because of guns.  Empirically speaking, the United States has a noteworthy per capita issue with this (see chart).  And you don't have to know what a bump stock is to acknowledge that issue and work to change it.

Chart via the Journal of Trauma

Summarily: The concept that, if one cannot identify with precision the object that can rip him to shreds in mere moments, he should not be allowed an opinion on it is patently absurd.  A student can mistakenly utilize the misnomer “assault rifle” and still bring a perfectly valid and legitimate perspective about gun violence to the table.  A student can be ignorant regarding the meaning of terms such as "semi-automatic" and still hold a worthwhile position on gun violence.  He or she does not have to produce in-depth analysis on firearms to discuss with validity the dangers they present.

2. "Criminals ignore laws.  Why make more?"
The assumption here is that those who are dedicated enough to breaking the law will do so without considering whether or not their actions fall within the boundaries of that law.

This is an unproven generalization.  In actuality, it is incredibly difficult to quantify exactly how many people break laws premeditatedly and with foreknowledge as opposed to those who refrain from committing crimes because of the existence of the law and its enforcement.

But let’s pretend, for a moment, that the supposition is entirely true: The law and the threat of its enforcement NEVER stop criminals from committing crimes.  Criminals will always commit crimes anyway.

The ultimate extrapolation of this argument, then, is this:

Criminals disregard laws : Laws don’t work : Thus, laws must be worthless : Stop making more laws and disregard or remove old ones

If criminals act universally without regard to the law, then laws are not working.  If laws are not working, they must be practically worthless unless only as public statements of collectively agreed-upon morality.  If laws are effectively worthless, then their implementation is a waste of time and money.

In conclusion: If criminals don’t follow laws, then why bother outlawing murder, theft, rape, or assault?  Why bother criminalizing anything at all, even if the thing may be worth criminalizing?  This is precisely the same argument that many in the pro-choice community make when arguing for the legality of abortion: Some women will skirt the law and seek back-alley abortions no matter the legal context, so why would we criminalize abortion at all?

Here’s why:

Laws are not designed to psychologically dissuade criminals from committing crimes.  Laws are designed to make those crimes harder to commit.

In other words: The purpose of any given gun law is NOT to convince a “bad guy with a gun” to put his gun down.  The purpose of a gun law is to prevent the bad guy from getting the gun in the first place.
Consider, as an example of inhibitory or preemptive enforcement, alcohol prohibition in the United States.  Prohibition was an unconstitutional law which was enforced with remarkable laxness.  In spite of this, alcohol consumption under Prohibition still decreased by as much as 70%.  This occurred for two reasons: People stopped drinking alcohol because they feared the consequences of doing so illicitly.  They also stopped drinking alcohol because, once alcohol consumption was criminalized, alcohol became much, much harder to locate and purchase.

Moreover, those who diametrically oppose gun control also tend to lobby for heightened border security and increasingly austere immigration law.  Certainly, they are not hoping for laws which crack down on illegal immigrants after they have unlawfully crossed the border.  More likely, they favor laws which make national borders harder to illegally traverse in the first place.  They want laws to be preemptive rather than only reactive and punitive.

These examples are demonstrative of the preventive nature of law.  Laws don’t exist to simply persuade or dissuade individuals as mere statements of moral obligation.  They exist to outline immoral actions and prevent them from happening by compelling bad people to be good.

To say “criminals ignore laws, so why make more?” is to fundamentally misunderstand the very purpose of law.  Of course criminals ignore laws.  To do so is definitionally criminal.  The goal, then, is to make laws hard to ignore and even harder to get away with ignoring.

Individuals don't abide by the law because the law instructs them and informs their actions.  They abide by the law because the design of law is to make crime difficult to commit and because law ensures punishment and retribution for those who break it.

If laws did not work, they would not exist in any capacity.  We would be societally defined by our lawlessness.  But laws do work.  That is why they exist.  And, historically speaking, when specific laws are not attaining the desired results, they are rewritten and reworked to ensure their success.  The current gun laws in place are not unsuccessful because criminals disregard all laws and, ergo, all laws by their very nature are valueless.  The current gun laws are unsuccessful singularly because they lack the reach and enforcement to make them preform properly.

The insinuation here is that laws exist to convince criminals to behave rather than to enforce good behavior.

3. “Look at *insert liberal city* where gun control does not work!”
Chicago is probably the most common illustration of this argument.  Chicago is a city with extremely austere firearm laws, and yet it often leads the United States in gun homicide per capita.  Many use this example (and examples like it) to support the narrative that gun control has been tested in the United States and has failed spectacularly.

And indeed, Chicago's issues with gun violence are chronic and ongoing.  However, the issues are not necessarily rooted in the basic foundational breakdown of gun control.  Most likely, the cause of Chicago's gun violence problem is to be found in the continued accessibility to firearms due to the extremely limited scope of the existing laws.

"#1 IN GUN CONTROL, #1 IN MURDER"

Gun legislation has not proven successful in isolated incidents of enforcement because those incidents have been just that: Isolated.  And those discussing gun legislation aren't generally advocating for the criminalization of possessing and carrying firearms across the board.  Most of them are proposing a change in the qualifications of those carrying firearms and the nature of the firearms being carried.  

Pointing to Chicago’s systemic gun problems is not a good argument because Chicago’s gun control laws are not relevant to the national conversation on purchasing and carrying firearms and because they apply only in and to Chicago and its residents.  This makes it not only possible, but in fact, quite easy to access guns outside of Chicago and to subsequently bring them into the city, which is precisely what is occurring.  Therein lies the problem that gun control advocates would like to fix.

We see the same thing happen with fireworks.  Certain states entirely outlaw the sale and purchase of fireworks.  What happens then?  Dozens of firework outlets open just on the other side of the state border, where fireworks can be bought and sold without legal reservation.  Consider also marijuana in the Midwest: Immediately after Michigan legalized marijuana, hundreds of non-Michigan residents drove across the borders to legally obtain the drug.  This is a common economic phenomenon.

It is unfair, therefore, to outline and characterize individual cities’ attempts at gun control as indicative of its general conceptual failure.  Gun control measures would likely achieve the highest rate of success if they were universally and evenly applied across the entire nation.  This is almost always the case.

4. “But the Second Amendment says…”
Allow me to fall back briefly on a talking point here: The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was not written in the age of the AR-15.

When the Founding Fathers wrote about “arms” and our right to bear them, they were doubtless thinking of and referring to vastly different arms than those we possess today.
And what are "arms", exactly?  Should I be able to drive about town in an unmodified T-34 Soviet tank?  Should I be permitted to pilot my own armed Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor?  Or to privately manufacture and stockpile WMDs?

Legally, the answer to all of these questions is a profound and resounding "no".  If I do wish to own and operate a tank or a fighter jet, both must be modified so as not to be able to carry or fire munitions.  Further, 18 U.S. Code § 2332a strictly prohibits United States citizens from "Us[ing], threaten[ing], or attempt[ing] or conspir[ing] to use a weapon of mass destruction".  Not only is the language of the Second Amendment as it pertains to "arms" completely inconclusive, but we have since accepted the regulation of many weapons that could be considered “arms” since the inception of the Bill of Rights.

Additionally, The Second Amendment opens with the line “a well-regulated militia…”.  The obvious implication here is that there will, in fact, be regulations.  And in per capita gun violence, the United States ranks 31st in the world according to NPR.  Is this well-regulated?  And what constitutes regulation anyway?

We must always seriously consider the fact that the Constitution was not intended to endure permanently in its original state.  A process of amendment was provided with extreme intention, and the 27 amendments which have been passed (not to mention the hundreds which have been proposed and suggested) serve to demonstrate that the United States Constitution is a malleable document which was carefully written and crafted to evolve and progress with the swiftly changing tide of modernity.

A strict Constitutional originalist (or a traditional interpretivist) runs into all sorts of problems, such as the necessity of opposing abolition (considering bills such as the 3/5 Compromise which constituted federal allowance for the continued existence of slavery) and supporting prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment) on principle.  If this foundational governing document is infallible in its original, venerable state and if its subsequent amendments are to be considered equally flawless, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to make a constitutional argument in opposition to slavery, segregation, prohibition, or a plethora of other issues which we have now acknowledged that our framing document did not initially address sufficiently.

The Constitution was deliberately created to change and adapt.  Merely pointing to what it says as an "end-all, be-all" is a violation of its design and intent.

5. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people!”
I considered giving this point a variety of different headings, including but not limited to “It’s a heart issue, not a gun issue”, "Take away guns, and bad guys will just find another way to hurt people”, and “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to be a good guy with a gun”.  These statements are all predicated upon the same faulty argument.

Firstly, let’s consider the following unanimously common ground: Inanimate objects don’t kill people.  Nobody has or is suggesting that a firearm, independent of human use and manipulation, is capable of causing injury or death.  This presents us with a stark reality: It IS a heart issue.  PEOPLE kill other people.

So why would we give them guns?

When we say “people will kill one another regardless of whether they use guns to do it", we are actually saying “Humankind is naturally inclined towards self-annihilation.  This is pervasive and inescapable, and so we might as well not take measures to prevent it at all.”  Acknowledging that humanity has a deep, intrinsic instinct to eliminate members within its own community and, in the same breath, weaponizing this fact to support gun rights seems senseless.  If people struggle so intrinsically with a desire to kill other people, why wouldn’t we consider limiting general access to firearms?

The response to this is often something along the lines of: “If we criminalize guns, humanity will simply turn to new methods of self-destruction”.  Proponents of this reasoning point to incidents of violence and terrorism conducted and perpetrated by use of knives, vehicles, pressure cookers, etc.  Essentially, everything is or can be a weapon and therefore, so the argument goes, banning guns is ultimately futile.  Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Government Building in Oklahoma City with fertilizer.  The Nice, France attacker murdered dozens with his truck.  Should we ban fertilizer?  Should we regulate trucks?

Of course not.

Why not?  Fertilizer and trucks can and are used to kill other people.  In some places, this happens with frequency.  Since gun control advocates are in the business of banning things which are used to kill people, why wouldn’t they ban forks and batteries and everything else remotely dangerous?  If we’re going to regulate guns, we should crack down on cars too.  After all, people die in car accidents with astonishing regularity.

The difference between these scenarios is incredibly obvious: Guns are designed to kill people.  Cars, fertilizer, knives, and pressure cookers are not.

If people are burdened with the compulsory urge to kill other people, we can acknowledge that this will happen with ordinary, everyday items.  We can come to terms with the fact that some violent criminal acts are not preventable.  We can accept that violent crime always has and, for the foreseeable future, always will occur.  We can do all of this without permitting, with little to no regulation, the ownership and use of items specifically designed for that purpose.

Yes, more people perish in car accidents and swimming pools across the United States annually than are the victims of gun homicide.  But fewer crimes are being committed by use of vehicles and swimming pools than are being committed by people who own guns.  And while it is true that the aggregate number of automobile related deaths tops the total number of gun related fatalities annually, it must also be considered that many more Americans own and use a car (88%, according to a Pew Research Center study) than own and use a gun (roughly 30% according to CNN and Gallup poll surveying).  This means that the number of gun related fatalities per gun owner in the United States is vastly greater than the number of automobile related fatalities per car owner.  In short: Guns are statistically far, far deadlier per capita.  And, unlike automobiles, they do not serve a practical purpose outside of harm (warranted or otherwise).

Sure, remove guns (instruments specifically designed for killing) from the equation, and people will discover and create other ways to harm one another.  But cars and pressure cookers are not designed merely for killing, and by the numbers, they are significantly less efficient at it.  The notion that people will go right on killing other people does not prevent us from enforcing protective legal measures against it.

A good argument against gun control presented by the Libertarian Party

All of this is not to say that national gun control would or will succeed and achieve its intended
purpose.  In actuality, true gun control has never been attempted in the United States, and incidents of enforcement outside of the United States have yielded a mixture of success and failure.
And it is worth repeating: This is not to say that there are no good arguments for gun ownership.  There are.

Ultimately, however, the very common arguments listed above are not the good ones.  If gun owners and gun rights activists wish to advance their platform, they should abandon them altogether.