Gun control advocates have a "high capacity" for ignorance

Is it possible for gun control advocates to have a rational, intelligent conversation about firearms, when they know almost nothing about them?

That may seem to be a flippant and dismissive question, but it is the legitimate question that they most fear. It is also the reason that they seek to wage their “war on guns” based upon emotionalism… they cannot hold a reasoned debate, because they don’t know and refuse to learn the subject matter.

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In various Internet forums, at public rallies, and in private conversations, I’ve had a chance to both watch and listen to various people campaign for gun control laws. On the number of occasions where I’ve attempted to engage them in substantive dialogue, a similar pathology has emerged.

  • Most have no personal experience using firearms.
  • They ignorantly think firearms are designed “only to kill,” and can’t think of a legitimate use for them outside of killing.
  • Their exposure to firearms is limited to what they’ve seen in the mass media, in both the news and entertainment.
  • They are historically and culturally ignorant of the role of firearms in society.
  • They are unaware that a significant number (nearly half) of Americans own firearms, and that millions of Americans belong to “the gun culture,” and that this subculture of society is far more law-abiding than average.
  • They are ignorant of how firearms function, and of the differences between various kinds of firearms.

If you’re picking up on the fact that the common thread among each of this points is ignorance—not necessarily stupidity, but simply a derth of education—them you’ve discovered the problem.

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Gun control is nothing more or less than an argument from ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam.

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Put bluntly, they are no more capable of holding a reasoned, rational, and intelligent discussion about firearms and firearms law than they are capable of telling an electrician how to wire a circuit breaker panel. They aren’t stupid people necessarily, they’re just uninformed, under-informed and/or wrongly informed.

A simple example of the ignorance of gun control advocates can be found in the heated discussions concerning metal boxes that are open on one end, with a spring inside them, used to push ammunition.

We call these boxes by their proper name, “magazines.”

Often times, gun control supporters will call them clips, which are nothing more than a strip of metal. Yes, that is a substantive difference.

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If you ask a gun control advocate what a “standard-capacity magazine” is they will either give you either a dumb look, or one of alarm, as they do not know the answer to this rudimentary question. The better indoctrinated ones (perhaps politicians, or member of the news media) might attempt some sort of double-speak claim that it is a “non-high-capacity magazine.”

This is also factually wrong.

Someone familiar with firearms will answer by telling you that a standard-capacity magazine is the number of cartridges that the a gun designer intended for a specific firearm magazine to use, and that standard capacity varies from one firearm to another.

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The standard-capacity magazine for a Glock 17 is 17 rounds. The standard capacity magazine for a FN Five-seveN pistol is 20 rounds. The standard-capacity magazine of both the AK-47 and the modern AR-15 is 30-rounds. Standard capacity varies by make and model.

Bizarrely (and thanks entirely to gun control advocates) there are now two kinds of “high capacity” magazines, and they are antonyms.

There are those magazines designed to fit the standard magazine well of a firearm and provide more ammunition than the standard-capacity magazines (and thus higher cartridge counts than would normally be encountered). These are real high capacity magazines, and they hold more cartridges than standard-capacity magazines. A 75-round drum for an AK-47 (like the one Dianne Feinstein is pointing at her supporters with her finger on the trigger, the safety off, the bolt closed, and the 75-round drum in place) is a real high capacity magazine, as it is larger than the standard-capacity 30-round magazine.

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There is also politically-created “high-capacity” magazine, where politicians—ignorant gun control advocates every one—have arbitrarily decided that a number of cartridges below the standard capacity of a magazine is “enough,” and even one bullet more than their arbitrarily designed figure is “high-capacity,” even when that capacity is still lower than that of standard-capacity magazines.

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In this politically-created definition of what constitutes “high-capacity,” anti-gun politicians can’t even be consistently arbitrary, with “high capacity” meaning 7 rounds in New York,  10 rounds in several other states, and 15 in Colorado.

If it sounds incredibly insane to artificially declare that the capacity of something must be smaller than what it actually is under normal circumstances, that is because such capricious it is out deranged.

But what else would you expect? Gun control advocates are serially ignorant of guns, and are therefore incapable of making rational, intelligent decisions regarding them.

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