And now, from the same people who see a need for 60 different gender options on Facebook, a complaint about gun defenders splitting hairs over word choice.
“While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology,” writes Adam Weinstein in The Washington Post.
Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.
Think of it as the counterpart to asterisk attached to everyone who dares contradict the pronouncements of the Parkland kids without having been in a similar situation. Creates a nice balance, don’t you think? Anyway, we all know gun controllers' tactics are unimpeachable. “Gunsplaining, though, is always done in bad faith,” asserts Weinstein.
“It can feel infuriating,” Weinstein goes on, “being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons.”
It can also feel infuriating that the progressive arguments to confiscate guns are based mostly on raw emotion and fear, motivations no more valid and noble in dealing with gun ownership than with immigration or refugees. Gunsplainers aren’t the only ones arguing in bad faith. Gun control is power grab of opportunity. Activists have always tried to take human agency out of the equation (there is only “gun violence,” not “knife violence,” “baseball bat violence” or “automobile violence.”) Guns, rather than their operators, kill people. Why should we trust activists to talk honestly about the real attributes of the guns they’ve practically anthropomorphized?
Lefties are sticklers for categories and definitions in other contexts – remember, the Democrats are the Party of Science™. Why is it ok to allow a shocked, grieving public to believe fellow citizens are packing “military-style” or “assault” weapons? It’s not, unless it’s convenient to the cause.
(And there are actual military rifles in circulation out there -- guns that kill just as effectively and efficiently as they did 75 years ago. A semi-automatic M1 or M2 Carbine can hold up to 45 rounds of .30 caliber ammunition. A semi-auto 8-shot M1 Garand of World War II vintage fires 30.06 rounds – ideal for hunting deer. Deadly on humans. And you can bet if they were as scary-looking or popular as the AR-15, liberals would be asking why you need them.)
Weinstein knows all this. He says he’s “lifelong shooter and a third-generation gun collector.”
I know that an AR-15 is not a machine gun or an assault rifle, that its rounds are not high-powered, that it accepts magazines, not clips — any law that seeks to ban them should be written with precision.
Well that’s nice. If you’re going to infringe on a constitutional right, it’s only good manners to do it well.
But I also know that it, or a weapon patterned after it, was used in Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Las Vegas; San Bernardino, Calif.; Orlando; Sutherland Springs, Tex.; and Parkland. Whatever the causes — media sensationalism, marketing, “tacticool” military mimicry, easy availability — clearly, this rifle and its relatives are go-tos for a certain kind of American-bred killer. That’s worth at least addressing in a public policy forum.
Yes, it probably is. It’s worth addressing using facts. We’re under no obligation to help the left obfuscate and confuse the issues.
