The Disadvantages of GunLoonery
Sometimes I feel guilty for trouncing gunloons so completely; there’s an element of unfairness about it all. After all, gunloons don’t have science, the law, public opinion, facts or history on their side.
It turns out they don’t even have reality.
Here’s an excellent example: recently I wrote a post about declining homicides in New York City. The purpose of the post was two-fold: one, to show a large city with restrictive gun laws was having declining homicides (shooting down the ‘more guns, less crime’ myth); and two, to point up the fact most homicides are committed by intimate acquaintances–not unknown assailants.
Well. Let’s meet B&N. He describes himself as an architect from Kansas. The part about Kansas is probably true; the architect part–not so much. Anyway, B&N responded to the post about NYC in a typical gunloon manner–he was going to show me that people were still being gunned down in NYC.
Harrummph. As noted above, whether or not people are getting killed in NYC wasn’t really the point of the post. But B&N was looking to score some points by trying to maintain “declining homicides” really means “no homicides-ever.”
Like I said, it’s a pretty typical gunloon argument. Except, this one has a bit of a twist. You see, the article he quotes:
NEW YORK: The American photographer Andres Serrano, who gained notoriaty with his photographs of corpses and a work entitled Piss Christ, was gunned down earlier today in Manhattan. [My emphasis]
isn’t true. It was made up out of whole cloth. B&N hasn’t reality on his side.
