(no subject)

This was originally a Facebook comment in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting that I've taken to reprinting here when there's another mass shooting. When I reprinted it at the time of the Annapolis Capital Gazette shooting, for the first time I got a substantial amount of replies in disagreement, so now rebuttals to the most popular counterarguments I received are in a lengthy appendix to the reprint text.

I keep saying “it’s proven that the killing can be stopped” and you keep saying, “but we have rights” as if having rights was an end in itself. No, rights are intended to serve a purpose.

They’re for preventing people getting killed!

You keep invoking directly or indirectly one sentence in a document that was written in an era when rifles, pistols, and cannons could hold only one projectile at a time and took minutes to reload. That document also contains the built-in capacity for itself to be updated when its provisions are no longer effective. It is not Holy Writ. It even presented itself as updateable before it was completed: the sentence you’re so fond of is itself an amendment. Do you believe the sentence in question was written ultimately for the protection of guns or for the protection of lives? Because it’s used for protecting only one of the two, these days, and that’s not lives. Therefore it needs updating.

I will not accept any citation of theoretical future insurrection against a government turned hostile (which government, by the way, in that event would use planes or drones to drop bombs, against which your home weaponry is no protection - it’s doing so right now to civilian populations overseas, and it did so during the 20th century in Tulsa and Philadelphia - so good luck storming the capital) because firstly, actual civilian innocent lives being lost in the present are more important than any merely theoretical future; and secondly, that’s not what the Second Amendment was truly about anyhow. The militia it refers to were the nation’s first police forces whose original formation was for the purpose of hunting and killing black people. The only valid (using the term loosely) reason for denying that the Second Amendment now requires amendment itself is that you’re okay with police shootings of people of color. Those US government bombings on US soil I mentioned parenthetically above? Black neighborhoods, residences and businesses, rich and poor. That’s what you’re defending whether or not you know it.

You think your postion is “rights are important” but you aren’t seeing the context, the difference between what you think the rights are for, and how they are instead now actually being utilized. You aren’t seeing the logical fallacy in what you’re saying which is “this right whose purpose is the protection of innocent lives is more important than all the innocent lives that are being destroyed by people exercising this right”. You aren’t seeing that your position ultimately reduces to “lives are less important than guns” but I do and it outrages me wherever I see it.

Even if you were correct that Americans’ minds somehow work differently than the minds of all the people in all the nations where gun law successfully prevents mass shootings (which, by the way, seems disproven by the majority popular support of the gun control legislation that Congress brought after Sandy Hook then voted down), it would only mean that disregard for human life has become the American way. It’s not in me to quietly allow that to stand. While that’s your position there can be no meeting of minds between us, no agreement to disagree. I may give up arguing with you in particular as a bad job, but never mistake that for concession.

The question before us is, “Lives or guns?”, and you keep answering, “Guns.”

[end of reprint]

( Popular counterarguments I've received:  )