apocryph.org Notes to my future self

A variation of Godwin's Law for Gun Rights Debates

Lately I’ve been lurking in a few gun boards, including OpenCarry.org, The High Road, AR15.com, and SigForum. Most of this lurking was research for my latest gun purchase, but I easily digress onto unrelated threads for hours on end.

In so doing, I’ve stumbled upon a number of gun rights debates. Since these are forums for gun enthusiasts, they are seldom control vs rights debates, but rights vs more rights debates, combined with the occasional vilification in absentia of various gun control bogeymen.

This has led me to formulate a variation of Godwin’s Law, specific to online gun control debates. To quote Wikipedia, Godwin’s law is thus:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

My variation, which I shall arrogantly call the Nelson-Godwin Conjecture, is thus:

As an online gun rights debate grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Communists approaches one.

This is an example of the reductio ad Communisto fallacy, which is a close relation of Strauss’ reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy, only with Commies instead.

An example is warranted. The irony of this particular example is a reference to another supposed logical fallacy:

LOL Fallacy of Composition ^^^ re: BBT branch locations, and your stupid theory.

What is true about one (crazy people who shoot things up with guns) is not true about the whole (anyone with a gun in public).

Here are a few examples:
A main battle tank uses more fuel than a car. Therefore, the main battle tanks use up more of the available fuel in the world than do all the cars.

A tiger eats more food than a human being. Therefore, tigers, as a group, eat more food than do all the humans on the earth.

So take your communist loving, pig eating, liberal progressive, anti-christ bullshit elsewhere!

(From a Fairfax Underground thread linked from a gun forum post. The thread started when a reader posted to express her horror that an armed guard was outside a restaurant where a man was killed, speculating that her five year old could easily disarm the guard and pepper the area with Glock bullets, each of which can kill multiple humans)

Note the reductio ad Communisto fallacy at the end of the post. In this case, the ‘commie’ epithet wasn’t sufficient, requiring in addition a reference to pork (which I don’t understand), liberalism, and the anti-Christ (one could likely formulate a reductio ad Antichristo fallacy as well, but I’ll leave that to another post), while in other cases the invocation of ‘commie’ carries sufficient rhetorical firepower to settle the argument on its own.

I find it interesting that gun rights advocates would settle upon Communism for their reductio ad absurdum fallacy, given that generally all totalitarian regimes, be they facist, communist, or whatever, tend to make civilian disarmament a top priority. Gun rights advocates surely know this, as a common bumper sticker quotes Hitler circa 1938:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

Note this quote is likely bogus, but nonetheless demonstrates an understanding that gun control isn’t the exclusive purview of Communist regimes. And yet, the charge of ‘communist’ seems to be the argument-ending rhetorical counter-attack of choice. Why is this? The corrupt regimes of Africa, Southeast Asian despots, and European democracies all disarm their civilian populations.

I can only guess as to the origins of this fallacy. My most rational explanation holds that, since gun control in this country is strongly associated with the political Left, and Communism is a left-wing ideology, the most extremely left-wing ideologue would therefore be a Communist. Thus, the accusation ‘commie’ implies ‘far-left ideologue’.

Perhaps also this fallacy is a vestige of the Cold War era when Communism was the existential threat du jour for Western democracies. I’m not old enough to remember the extent to which Reds were feared in Cold War America, but historical evidence (c.f. McCarthy, Sen. Joseph) suggests it was quite strongly.

At any rate, it would only strengthen the gun rights movement if its adherents would avoid this unfortunate fallacy and instead limit themselves to the ample credible arguments against gun control.

DISCLAIMER: I am a gun rights zealot. I enjoy shooting, and more than that I believe our Founders were right to insist on widespread civilian ownership of firearms. I believe attempts to regulate or restrict access to firearms by statist politicians, regardless of party affiliation or feeble rationalization, are clear and present dangers to American liberty, to be resisted vigorously.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who agree with me on this issue that are nonetheless a little…shall we say…colorful. Just as the moonbat left discredit the more moderate left with all their ridiculous noisemaking and unpopular rhetoric, the wingnut right only weakens the gun rights argument by pulling the ‘Commie’ trigger (no pun intended). I wrote this post primarily because I think it’s funny, and secondarily because I think it’s true. If you are offended by it, take your commie pig-eating america-hating satan-loving sodomite shit somewhere else.