In a philosophical sense, we shouldn’t judge a particular idea, argument, or position based on the person who holds it, but we should judge the merit of the opinion itself.
In a very real world sense, it’s very difficult to listen to the ravings of gun nuts over the last month and a half and give any validity at all to any opinion they might hold, from now until the end of time.
It’s not just that they love guns more than people. There are people who love films, computer games, flowers, electric trains, and treehouses more than other people. There’s a difference between unsociable and anti-social, and society can adapt to a fairly high number of the first and even a few of the latter, although maybe not if the latter have guns.
It is not just that they are very determined supporters of an increasingly defenseless point of view, always willing to defend the stupidest of memes, to argue about minute points of gun terminology, to blithely get behind the most ridiculous arguments (“We should ban spoons, because they make people fat”). You’ve got to admire their persistence, in a way.
But, when they start attacking people who’ve been the victims of gun violence themselves, they have crossed a line. I am not just talking about the verbal onslaught, calling them everything from retards to traitors with plenty of other slurs into the mix (This is not one or two people. This is thousands.) That is crossing one line, for sure.
I am talking about death threats. Think about that. Gun lovers are threatening to shoot people for objecting to the idea that crazy people should be able to buy guns to shoot people because they are friends and relatives of people who have been recently killed by a crazy person by a gun.
It’s a Westboro Baptist Church level of offensive but now we are talking about large numbers of people, coast to coast.
If you are a gun lover, you should be embarrassed by this, at the very least. If you have taken part in it at all, you should seriously reconsider what it means to be human, because it’s obvious you haven’t given that enough thought.
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