The Return of Mass Shootings — and Logical Fallacies

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

 

If you have ever had a conversation with a Democrat friend about election fraud, you know how it goes:

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “There isn’t any election fraud.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “Of course there is. A Philadelphia judge of elections just went to jail for rigging an election in exchange for a bribe of $300, which isn’t very much money, even in Philadelphia.”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “I never said there wasn’t any election fraud.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “. . .”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “But it isn’t widespread.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “Well, it fits the most common definition of ‘widespread,’ inasmuch as it has happened in a lot of elections in a lot of different jurisdictions. We’ve had convictions from Maine to Hawaii — more than 1,000 of them, in fact. And that’s just the ones that result in criminal convictions. So, I think ‘widespread’ is fair.”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “I never said it wasn’t widespread.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “. . .”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “But it hasn’t actually changed the results of any elections.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “I assume that those Philadelphia Democrats were bribing the judge of elections to stuff ballot boxes because they wanted to change outcomes, rather than simply inflate their margins. And we’ve seen cases where fraud has unquestionably changed outcomes. We’ve seen elections thrown out by courts because of fraud. Al Franken probably won his first Senate election on the strength of illicit votes.”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “I never said it hasn’t changed the results of any elections.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “. . .”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “It hasn’t changed the results of a presidential race.”

 

Scrooge McJudgy: “Probably not. Maybe in 1960, but, probably not. Still, wouldn’t you feel better if there were more reliable oversight in place?”

 

Caitlyn Moonbeam-D’Vegan: “Sedition! Sedition! Sedition!”

 

Etc.

 

Students of rhetorical stratagems and logical fallacies know all about these kinds of conversations: question-begging, moving the goalposts, motivated reasoning — all the stuff that makes street-level democracy so dreadfully stupid.

 

You can dramatize the intellectual dishonesty by changing the subject from election fraud to gun control. When a horrible crime like the one perpetrated in Boulder on Tuesday — and in Atlanta only a week before — occurs, the story is always the same.

 

“This wouldn’t happen if we had universal background checks.”

 

“The guy in Boulder could have passed background checks all day and apparently did — he had no felony convictions or other disqualifying factors. The killer in Atlanta passed a background check — he bought his gun from a federally licensed dealer; i.e. in one of the most heavily regulated commercial transactions most Americans ever encounter.”

 

“Nobody should have these weapons of war. There’s no legitimate use for them.”

 

“Neither the Boulder killer nor the one in Atlanta used a ‘weapon of war’ in the sense of something exotic not commonly owned by civilians. They used common weapons that Americans commonly use for common things, from home defense to pest control. One used a 9mm handgun, one of the most common firearms around, and the other used an extremely not-unusual 5.56mm semiautomatic rifle; i.e., literally the most common rifle sold in the United States. Interestingly, in spite of their being so common, these so-called assault rifles are, statistically speaking, vanishingly rare when it comes to murders, as indeed are all rifles and shotguns generally.”

 

“Still, if it saves one life!”

 

“How about if something prevents one instance of voting fraud?”

 

“Sedition!”

 

Etc.

 

Our kooky friends on the radio notwithstanding, the Democrats did not steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump — but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t election fraud and that it isn’t a problem. If they had half a brain, Democrats would understand that even low-level electoral fraud like those apple-stealing shenanigans in Philadelphia is mother’s milk to demagogues like Donald Trump and pure oxygen for the worse demagogues who may yet follow in his footsteps, undermining faith in the ordinary procedures of democratic self-government and inviting tit-for-tat norm-breaking that leads inevitably in a dangerous authoritarian direction. In a sensible country, electoral fraud would be taken far more seriously than, say, illicit commerce in marijuana. Kamala Harris racked up about 2,000 marijuana convictions in California, and . . .  rather fewer election-fraud cases.

 

By the same token, there are things we can and should be doing to reduce violence in the United States and to keep firearms out of the hands of malefactors. Unfortunately, two factors work together to prevent that from happening.

 

The first and arguably more important factor is that prosecutors and police do a poor job — indeed, a culpably negligent one — when it comes to going after straw-buyers and other low-level traffickers in illicit firearms, and, in most jurisdictions, of prosecuting simple firearms-possession cases. That kind of police and prosecutorial work is very labor-intensive, very unpopular, and generally thankless — careers don’t get made by putting away some habitual criminal’s idiot nephew or terrified girlfriend on a straw-buying charge. But that’s how you actually keep criminals from obtaining firearms.

 

The second factor: On top of the lack of law-enforcement incentives, progressives treat gun control as a pure Kulturkampf issue, which is why Democrats turn their noses up at prosecuting career criminals in Chicago while obsessing over new ways to inconvenience and restrict federally licensed, highly regulated firearms dealers and the people who do business with them, a population that is pretty much by definition generally law-abiding. That’s not to say that people who acquire guns legally never commit crimes — they do, as the past week attests — but they do so relatively rarely, and it is very difficult to imagine a constitutionally permissible set of prior restraints that would keep somebody with no criminal record or other ordinary disqualification from acquiring a firearm that he might — might — later use in a crime.

 

This is one of those sharks-and-bumblebees things. Progressives like to present themselves as data-driven pragmatists, but they are fixated on scary-looking black rifles that are as a matter of easily verifiable fact rarely used in homicides. They do this for the same reason that people worry about shark attacks when they are more likely to be killed by a bee or a cow or a moose. The stereotypical NRA member of the left-wing imagination (middle-aged, white, suburban or rural, conservative, bigoted, egg-bound) isn’t a public danger — he’s a cultural enemy, one who presses all sorts of aesthetic and social-status buttons.

 

He probably worries a lot about election fraud, too.