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Natural rights have been a concept since before the founding of our nation. The idea is simple. We, as living and breathing human beings, are endowed with certain rights because we’re living, breathing human beings. These include freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the rest.

The way someone once described natural rights to me was that these are the rights you would have if there were no governments to grant or take away “rights.” Were we living in anarchy, you’d say what you want, worship how you wish, and yes, you’d carry a gun.

Many of us, myself included, refer to these as “God-given rights,” because we’re people of faith and if God created us and we have these natural rights, then these rights were granted by God. Makes sense, right?

Not to everyone.

God is being unjustly blamed by members of the National Rifle Association to lamely justify their obsession with guns (“Carrying guns called ‘God-given’ right in Ohio,” Dispatch story, April 11). God said himself, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20: 13).

That’s all guns are, nothing but instruments by which to commit murder, whether a man in a fit of road rage fires at the driver who cut him off on the highway, another man shoots his estranged wife, someone shoots up everyone at his former place of employment in retaliation for being fired or it’s just a drive-by shooting.

…

Why? Because guns were not created to do any of those things. They have only one purpose: to put a bullet into someone’s body in an attempt to kill them. But the NRA chooses to ignore God’s word in the book of Exodus in order to allow numerous children to keep getting shot to death at school.

Wow.

Just…wow.

First of all, if guns are “nothing but instruments by which to commit murder,” then I’d love for someone to explain to me how as many as three million people use them for self-defense each year, many never even needing to fire a shot. That’s orders of magnitude more than the number of people who lose their lives to firearms, even if you include suicides–which accounts for most of that number, by the way, and suicide isn’t murder, either.

In other words, the writer here doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

But this is typical, I’m afraid. The irrational arguments are par for the course. Why? Because we’re dealing with irrational people.

Look at anti-gunner arguments. They’re routinely based on emotion and feelings, not facts. When facts are included, they’re from horribly flawed studies that were biased from the start. In other words, the studies aren’t rational either.

Yet this is the debate we’re stuck with. We’re forced to deal with irrational people who neither understand the topic nor have any desire to. Trying to explain facts gets dismissed as “gunsplaining.” Trying to reason with these people results only gets you high blood pressure for a time.

It’s people like the writer above we’re dealing with, and that’s why the gun debate trying to have a rational discussion with horribly irrational people.