So if the evil “gun lobby” is all about securing the “profits of the gun industry,” who, of course, donate money back to groups like NRA (the whole Triangle of Death thing), then why wouldn’t the self-interested response to Fast and Furious be to look the other way? If the goal is to help make money for the evil gunmakers, an operation like Fast and Furious, with the full blessing of ATF to sell as many guns to straw buyers for the Mexican cartels as they can, should form a great symbiotic relationship. So why the outrage on our side? Why was it gun bloggers who first did the digging to discover this scandal? What interest would NRA have, who is part of the Triangle, have in pushing Congress and raising the profile of this issue?
If this was about gun industry profits, we should love Fast and Furious, but we don’t. If that isn’t enough to make our opponents question the veracity of their own rhetoric, they are absolutely blind to the truth.
You assume they know how to determine truth from falsity and furthermore that they care about truth and falsity.
With such a faulty set of assumptions you cannot help but end up with erroneous conclusions.
I know it is difficult to remember these are false assumptions. I make the same mistakes too. I have to think about it and remember these people think much differently than we do. Perhaps even more differently than we can think.
Oh, I realize they can’t really wrap their heads around it, but I like taunting them regardless.
They’ll just assume that we knuckle-dragging cousin-humping gun-clingers aren’t always smart enough to see where our interests lie and thus in this case we are working at cross purposes to said interests.
If I were them I’d respond by saying that’s a contrived short-term view and that since we were as crafty as they like to think we are (while simultaneously somehow being uneducated, unEnlightened, “clinging” Neanderthals of course) we would oppose and expose it because the temporary increased profits don’t outweigh the risk of the Administration’s F&F plan actually working; which would result in the, strangely hard to find but real, “majority of the American people in favor of their suggested reasonable gun laws” calling for a return to the AWB to remove the guns at issue entirely.
That’s what I would argue too, but I spend quite a lot of time when I think about this issue thinking about how I could make our opponents arguments better than they can.
Which is actually kind of sad when you think about it, but I think if you spend enough time thinking about any issue, you should be able to argue both sides effectively. Could Joan Peterson argue our points at all? I really doubt it. That gets back to what I was saying the other day that they have intellectually bankrupted their own issue by filling their leadership ranks with unaccomplished and unserious lightweights.
Really? Quite a lot of time?
You’re too humble. Admit it, at this point you could argue their side of any given argument better then they can coming off a three day bender (or three-day bender equivalent).
=)
That’s the problem with basing arguments on emotion rather than reason (which is what the majority if not all of their arguments boil down to), there’s no impetus to unpack the premises and reasoning you’re working from.
The internal presumption is to simply “believe” what you feel and then not to question your belief.
A basic Philosophy survey class would help these folks immensely (heck, most people would be embiggened by some training in the fundamentals of logic and the various approaches to knowledge and truth).
They might not change their mind about their premises, but they’d be better able to defend their own position by being aware of its internal validity or lack thereof and be able to explain the reasoning they use to get from A to B.
i
My guess is that their thinking goes like this:
Gun nuts expose ATF
ATF honchos forced to resign
NRA blocks appointment of replacement honchos
No one left to regulate gun sales
Evil gun sellers do anything they want
“When an honestly mistaken man sees the truth, one of two things happens: (1) he will either cease to be mistaken, or (2) he will cease to be honest. For he will either accept the truth or he will reject it. If he accepts it, he is no longer mistaken; if he rejects it, he is no longer honest. It is as simple as that. There cannot be such a thing as an “honestly mistaken man” who has once seen the truth.”
From here: http://wordsfitlyspoken.org/gospel_guardian/v5/v5n47p4.html
This reminds me a lot of when they argue that the evil gun industry is against magazine bans to protect their profits. How exactly does that work? The only thing that boosts sales better than talk of a ban, is a passed ban that hasn’t taken effect yet. And after that boom, they get to sell everybody a bunch of new 10 rd magazines. Every time a gun changes had, all the grandfather mags will have to be tossed- and again the evil gun industry gets to sell a bunch of new magazines. Not to mention all those spree shooters who will simply buy more magazines for their duffle bag to get the round count up…
Looks like the best thing Midway can do for their profits is send some oversized checks to Carolyn McCarthy.
Markie Marxist sez: “Of course the gun lobby is upset about Gunwalker! We were using the private sector gun dealers against themselves. We were subverting capitalism by using capitalism against itself. There wasn’t enough murder and mayhem going on in Mexico to advance our gun control legislation, so we had the US federal government put its thumb on the scale to increase the murder and mayhem. We were hoping to get the body count to a high enough level to where our gun control legislation could be moved. Pretty slick, huh? Gunwalker was working just fine until those whistleblowers got squeamish about the dead bodies piling up and tipped off gun rights activists, so we only got 2500 guns into Mexico before our scam collapsed under public scrutiny.”
…Tey have intellectually bankrupted their own issue by filling their leadership ranks with unaccomplished and unserious lightweights. Hey! That’s what I’ve been saying about the California Legislature Democrats for years! Ideology trumps rationality and skill, so simple-minded ideologues win the Party acceptance-stamp.