As Cam noted on Monday, anti-gunners are using computer generated video of a slain student from Parkland to call for new gun control. While the technology is new, the overall attempt isn’t treading new ground in the least.

See, anti-gunners have tried to use the slain to speak for them before.

How many times have anti-gunners trotted out the bereaved parent of a slain young person to tell us all about how their loved one would still be alive if not for the evils of gun ownership. They’ll claim their child/wife/husband/whatever would ask us to enact gun control if they still could.

But the question is, just why do anti-gunners invoke the dead to speak for them?

The answer is simple. The truth of the matter is that they need the visceral emotion more than anything else.

A parent talking about their child or the AI version of that child speaking out about the evils of gun ownership becomes essential because they know every parent fears losing their child on some level. They’re terrified of it, so they speak to that fear, hoping to invoke that fear and trigger the parental desire to protect our children.

They use emotion because, at the end of the day, they don’t really have anything more.

Oh, they have their “studies” that claim gun control works, but they know that we can poke so many holes in those studies that they’re completely ineffective at swaying people. The same is true of many of their other arguments, all predicated on ideas that are just as easily dispelled and debunked.

So, that leaves them with emotion.

And, to be fair, emotion is a vital trigger. It’s one of the key ways we, as humans, make decisions. Our emotions evolved so as to help guide our movements. We feel fear because fear is a warning not to do something stupid, for example.

Anti-gunners play on that, try to capitalize on that, all in an attempt to create that visceral, primate-driven fear and use it to direct you to vote a certain way.

The problem, though, is that emotion only goes so far. After all, if someone can play on one’s emotions, then emotions are an unreliable determiner of the correct course of action in this day and age.

For example, fear led to herding Japanese-Americans into interment camps during World War II. Fear led to things like lynchings and murders during the Civil Rights movement. Fear has led to countless atrocities throughout the world.

Yet despite that, the anti-gun camp continues to try to use that fear, even going so far as to digitally resurrect the dead. They want you to think about what it would be like to lose your child, but they only want you to think about it their way.

What they don’t want you to ask about is whether any of the teachers are Parkland would have been willing to carry a gun if allowed. They don’t want you to think about why the Broward County Sheriff’s Office failed to prosecute the shooter in any of the numerous interactions they had with him. They don’t want you to question why someone who was obviously violent was even allowed to attend that school in the first place.

They want you afraid, but they don’t want you to think for yourself, otherwise you might reach the wrong conclusion, so they have their digital ghost tell you exactly what to think.

And they’ll do this over and over again because, at the end of the day, it’s all they’ve got.