Apparently, an anti-gun Facebook page has declared any and all pro-Second Amendment supporters persona non grata. They don’t want anyone who might disagree with them anywhere near their page, according to a post at America’s First Freedom.

The anti-gun Facebook page “Gun Control Now” has this at its mantra: “Gun nuts will be banned. This page will be safe for the rational and the sane, a no harassment zone.”

So it’s a “safe space” for people to have one-sided groupthink. Like the “safe spaces” that have been popping up on college campuses to protect the often one-sided views and weak sensibilities of snowflakes, Gun Control Now opted to censor opposing views.

It’s amusing to mock this trend, but the problem is that it isn’t just some curious exception.

This shun-all-the-opposing-views approach from the Left is also why some on the progressive left are shouting down conservative speakers at Berkley, Middlebury and many other institutions of higher learning.

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And it isn’t just happening on college campuses. With the gun issues in particular, the media that lean left shun the freedom side of the story. That media bias toward Second Amendment freedoms has been well documented and is an issue we tackle at America’s 1^st Freedom a lot, but many are missing the ramifications of the problem.

To be sure, this is problematic in many ways, especially on college campuses where opinions are still be formed and presenting both sides is essential. Many college students don’t really have the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas except at school, which is where they’re supposed to see such things.

However, Facebook works a little differently.

With an anti-gun Facebook page, they are all preaching to the choir to an extent. So are the pro-gun Facebook pages. They exist to provide ammunition to their side, ammo that can be used in debates not just on Facebook but throughout life since political debates happen all the time.

Unlike this anti-gun page, however, pro-gun pages also allow dissenting opinions to pop up, which prevents the echo chamber from forming. Whether we actually want to hear anti-gun arguments or not, we do. We see what they’re thinking and understand how to address it. Iron sharpens iron and all that.

By excluding dissenting opinions, this page is also denying their followers the opportunity to understand how to actually debate us. They don’t really understand what we really think, what we really stand for, so when they encounter us “in the wild,” they don’t know what to do.

Fantasy author and gun buff Larry Correia has said previously that arguing on the internet is a spectator sport. You’re never going to change the other person’s mind, but there are people who are undecided who are watching. Those minds, however, can be changed. Those are the people who you’re trying to reach.

Yet “Gun Control Now” is failing to equip its followers with the tools to win these fights.

Sure, they arm them with “facts” they can spout, but they don’t know what to do when one of us counters with how such facts are useless. They prattle on about how assault weapons are so dangerous, but then don’t know what to do when you point out just how rarely they’re actually used in a crime. They kvetch about suppressors but then are exposed as knowing nothing about those except what they learned from Hollywood.

Personally, I think anti-gun pages who ban pro-Second Amendment supporters on sight are doing us a favor. Sure, they can talk their smack all they want, but they won’t be ready for the debate in the real world.

I say bring it on.