If you have conservative relatives, you see their views in the social media. Unfortunately, the social media suits the hit-and-run type of communication very well. Just smugly post some seemingly clever phrase, and think you’re saving the world for conservatism. However, if you examine the logic of these, you will find it wanting in every case. Most common is the use of the strawman fallacy, where the person argues against something that isn’t real, and not surprisingly, thinks he or she has won.
For example, take the following:
If gay people were shot in the forehead, it would have been a hate crime.
If black people were shot in the forehead, it would have been a race crime.
Christians were shot in the forehead, and it’s a gun control problem?
The writer is referring to the recent Umpqua Community College shootings in Oregon. The words push the right-wing buttons for a slew of things that conservatives habitually whine about: tougher gun control, a supposed war on Christians, and the idea that gays and blacks get special treatment.
Yet there is a fundamental dishonesty in all three of the statements. If a gay person is shot in the forehead, it is in fact not necessarily a hate crime. It’s only a hate crime if the perpetrator was motivated by homophobia, that is, targeted the person because the person was gay. Similarly, for the claim that when a black person is shot in the forehead it is a race crime. Unfortunately, black people, and people of any race, get shot in the head and elsewhere for many reasons, and many of those reasons have nothing to do with race.
But the last sentence is the most dishonest one. For starters, it’s not clear that the shooter was specifically targeting Christians. His writings show a general anti-religious view, especially against organized religion, but not just Christianity. Some survivors report that those who identified themselves as Christians were shot in the head and those who did not identify as Christians were shot in the legs, but other survivors report hearing no questions from the shooter about their religion.
The shooter’s writings show other motivations for killing people than anti-Christianity. The shooter was clearly a depressed, mentally unstable, frustrated person who wanted to go out in a blaze of pseudo-glory. One should also note that even if one admits that there are some hate crime aspects to this case, they are largely irrelevant because the shooter is dead. Calling a crime a hate crime enables the justice system to impose harsher punishments. If the person is dead, the punishment phase is moot.
It’s also dishonest if one tries to connect this shooting with a mythical war on Christians. One Tennessee minister went so far as to urge his congregation to arm themselves. Yet there is no war on Christians in this country. Christians are still the most powerful and privileged religion in this country. Many of them like to claim they are being persecuted but usually that is because someone objects to statements from some of the more extreme Christian sects or because someone objects to Christians trying to use the public government or public school system to promote their religious views. Such Christians rightly deserve ridicule and even legal rebukes for their clearly unconstitutional actions. Religion belongs in an individual’s mind and heart, in the home, and in the church or temple, but not in government-funded locations and activities.
Next, in this case, we are dealing with a mass killing. The first two sentences talk about individual gays and blacks being killed. The fact is that modern guns not only making killing one person easy; they make mass killings far too easy to accomplish. Hate crimes can and have been perpetrated without guns. Just think of the cases when a group of people have attacked an individual because of their race or sexual orientation, and they have been able to seriously harm or kill that person without any need for a gun. They would just string the person up from the branch of a tree.
But when a mass killing occurs and it was clearly made more feasible by easy legal access to an arsenal of weapons by a mentally troubled individual, it is clear that something needs to be done, and this something should include a system that puts limits on how many guns a person can own, what type of guns a person can own, and what kind of person can own a gun. Note that the Oregon shooter was dismissed from the military after a short time. The military clearly saw that this man had problems. If we implement rational gun control, people who can use guns responsibly will still have them, but there will be fewer cases of unstable people having access to guns. We’ll never eliminate gun deaths, but we can reduce them greatly without any infringement of Second Amendment rights.
