Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Not too long after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde Texas, the gun control discussion group on Facebook that I had been a member of for only for a few months was flooded with anti-gun users who used the same tired old arguments. Usually, I enjoy engaging with people with opposing views, but there are times when I find it tiring to argue with somebody who bases his entire arguments on emotion and not fact. Especially when they use the same tired arguments that did not hold water twenty-years ago, such as you don’t need an AR-15 to hunt or you only care about guns and not children. A few years back, I wrote an article titled Arguments Gun Prohibitionists Should Avoid, by Sean Gangol (ncc-1776.org) where I basically gave the anti-gun side a tip on what kind of arguments they should avoid in the future. Not that I would ever expect the anti-gun side to ever give up using these arguments since they have nothing else to bring to the table. I would later see other tired arguments in the discussion group that did not make into my previous article.

One of the first arguments that come to mind are the ones that are made from ignorance. Not that it is particularly unique to the anti-gun side, since I have seen people run their mouths on several kinds of subjects that they clearly know nothing about. Personally, I think it’s better to admit your ignorance than to make a complete fool out of yourself by trying to pretend to know what you are talking about when you clearly don’t. That is why you will never hear me engage with a physicist on String Theory or an auto mechanic on internal combustion engines. Yet, it seems like there are many on the anti-gun side who either have no self-awareness or they assume that everybody else is just as ignorant as they are on the subject. An example of this is when they throw the word “Assault Weapon” around, while not even being able to define it. They tell you that the AR-15 falls under this category because the letters AR stand for assault rifle. This is laughable because the letters actually stand for Armalite, the company that invented the AR-15. It’s amazing how these people are too lazy to do a simple Google search before either running their mouths or showing their ignorance in a discussion group. It’s even funnier when these same people try to tell me that .223 bullet from an AR can take somebody’s head off like that comical scene in the movie Three Kings. I have had several people who attempted to argue with me on this point, yet they were usually silenced when I pointed that in some states a .223 is legally relegated to hunting smaller game, since many consider the cartridge to be too small to hunt larger animals.

You Don’t Care About Children. You Just Care About Your Toys.

That’s alright, I don’t think you care about children either. You just use images of dead children to pull at the public’s heart strings, so you can further your agenda. What? You don’t like us making unfair assumptions about your intentions? How do you think we feel?

I am from Australia/Great Britain/Any Country in Europe and Our Countries are so Much Safer. Adapt our Gun Laws.

It’s not that we Americans don’t like being told what to do by snooty people who don’t even live here. It’s just that… wait. We really don’t like being told what to do by non-Americans. I would have thought Great Britain would have gotten the hint after 1776. I find it interesting that Americans are thought of as arrogant, yet I don’t know too many of my own countrymen who would even give a second thought to how any other country conducts itself. I will hear what you have to say when you move here and become a citizen.

An AR-15 is a Weapon of War and Shouldn’t be in Civilian Hands

I have about the same hatred for this argument as I do with the hunting mantra. Though I think the pro-gun side often makes mistakes when they point out that an AR-15 is not a military weapon. It is certainly true that the semi-automatic AR-15 has not been used by the military in the same capacity as its select-fire brother, the M16/M4. However, that is beside the point because military weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment was written to protect. This is one of the reasons why I hate the whole condescending argument about not needing an AR-15 to hunt. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms doesn’t have Jack to do with hunting ducks or shooting skeet. It is about having a properly armed populace to resist all forms of tyranny, foreign and domestic. If you were to ban military weapons from civilian use that would include handguns, shotguns, bolt-action rifles, knives and just about any household chemical that can be made into an IED. Just about anything can be made into a military weapon if you are using it to wage war against your enemies

The Second Amendment Doesn’t Mean Anything because the Government has Tanks/Rockets/Gunships/Drones/Nukes

These people think that achieving high scores on their Call of Duty games makes them military tacticians. Were they awake at all in history class when their teachers talked about the Vietnam War? Does Afghanistan ring any bells? You know that country that no superpower has been able to conquer for two thousand years, including our own military. Seriously, how is it that these people have never heard of guerrilla warfare? In high school I guess they were too busy hitting the bong, instead of the books. As for the part about the government using nukes on their own land, I can’t even believe that I have to respond to that level of stupidity. Apparently, these people couldn’t stay awake in physics class either. It is also apparent that they have never heard of a thing called “Mutually Assured Destruction.” There was a reason why the Soviet Union and the US never had a physical war that involved weapons of any kind. It was because it would likely escalate into a nuclear war that would lead to the destruction of both nations or possibly the entire world. That was why neither nation wanted to be the one to cross that line. That was when both enemies were on different sides of the globe. Just imagine if the enemy is in your own backyard. What good is a nuke then? It is so sad that I need to explain this to anybody. Even more recently, I remember on this now defunct discussion group, a guy who claimed to have served in both the Marines and the National Guard also used the same arguments about nukes. Sadly, I hoped that the guy was lying about his military service because I actually find the thought of anybody this idiotic serving in our military to be completely unsettling.

For the anti-gunners who feel the need to resort to petty insults, try to come up with something better than gun lover or gun humper. While you are at it, stop misquoting Sigmond Freud. He did not say that guns were an extension of a man’s penis. He said that it was those who feared weapons that had sexual inadequacies, not those who loved them. For that matter what is your obsession with the anatomy of gun owners? I can’t speak for all gun owners, but I can certainly say that I have never given a second thought to what your organs look like (male or female). There are some of you who like to troll gun owners in these discussion groups, but have the nerve to act butt-hurt when we troll you back. If you want to dish it out, be prepared to take it when we give it back.