Politics—especially when individual liberty is at stake—are an endless struggle. Lazy, ideological minds return bad ideas to us over and over again. The falsehoods and logical fallacies from gun-control marketers are repackaged and sold again. For short periods of time, one might reasonably say that the advocates of freedom have “won.” But such victories can only be assured if our efforts are constantly renewed.
With this in mind, it is worth refreshing our acquaintance with the 10 biggest logical fallacies in the gun-control groups’ playbook—stupefyingly counterproductive ideas that are foisted upon us year after year.
Rule 1:
Pretend there is no constitutional right to keep and bear arms
This dog will not hunt. American history is replete with references to private gun ownership. And there are plenty of examples prior to the American Revolution, when threats to this right were treated as just cause for rebellion.
Before, during and after the ratification of the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was treated as an individual right by everyone who referenced it. When, more than 150 years later, questions were raised about its meaning, it was by those who were advancing stricter gun control, not by those who had an earnest interest in honest interpretation. More than 80% of Americans understand that they have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, which is one reason that 45 of the 50 states explicitly protect the liberty in their state constitutions. In the long run, that number is more likely to go up than down.
Rule 2:
Pretend that the incorporated constitutional right to keep and bear arms does not apply equally throughout the United States
Among other things, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to ensure that the U.S. Bill of Rights was applied to the states. Introducing the provision into Congress, its chief author, John Bingham, confirmed that “the privileges and immunities of citizens of a State” that would be protected by his draft “are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the constitution of the United States.” Among those was the Second Amendment, which, via the two Freedmen’s Bureau Acts and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Bingham and his compatriots had been determined to protect for some time.
That it took the Supreme Court until 2010 to confirm this was bad enough. That there are still politicians who deny this historical reality is utterly astonishing. As Justice Clarence Thomas has observed repeatedly, some are still in the bad habit of treating the Second Amendment as a “second-class right” that can be treated in a different manner than the others.
Rule 3:
Pretend that being a gun owner is a rare or exotic thing
Much of the media coverage of the Second Amendment proceeds from the presumption that, if somebody wishes to own a firearm, it represents ipso facto evidence that he is stupid, has hero fantasies or is otherwise strange. This has never been true, but it is particularly untrue now, when gun ownership is more diverse than it has ever been. There are around half a billion guns in private hands in America, with an average of 20 million new guns being sold every year. Many Democrats own guns. People of all races, religions and political opinions own guns. As far as permanent American traditions go, there are few more prominent than gun ownership—and Americans know it.
Rule 4:
Pretend that semi-automatic firearms are unusual
A favorite trick of the “commonsense” brigade is to cast any gun that doesn’t resemble a Revolutionary War relic as an intolerably modern invention that falls outside of the protection of the law. This is ridiculous. First, semi-automatic firearms make up around half of all new firearms purchased each year—which means that there are likely more than 100 million of them in private hands in the U.S. Second, this supposedly “new” or “unimaginable” technology has been around since Grover Cleveland was president, and is, thus, older than the automobile, antibiotics, recorded video and fixed-wing aircraft. The U.S. has existed in one form or another for 249 years. For 140 of those years, Americans have owned semi-automatic firearms. By definition, they are a normal part of the landscape.
Rule 5:
Blame the people who follow the laws for the crimes of the people who do not
This is the biggest conceptual error made by gun-control advocates. Short of the full confiscation that they insist they do not want—and that would not work, in any event—there exists no logical way to prevent the misconduct of those who do not care about the law by imposing restrictions upon those who do. Nevertheless, when a criminal commits a crime with a gun, officials with anti-gun politics insist that the authorities should go after the people who didn’t do it. Of course, those who are prepared to commit violent crimes do not care that they are supposed to have submitted to a background check, or that they are obliged to have a carry permit on their person, or that their magazine has arbitrarily been designated “too big.”
Rule 6:
Treat gun-makers and gun-sellers as “the enemy”
Among those who are unjustly blamed for the actions of criminals are gun sellers and gun manufacturers. Why? First, because it is politically easier to attack a set of faceless companies than it is to attack the people whom gun-control advocates actually disdain: namely, American citizens who own guns. Second, those companies are easier to monitor and regulate.
For decades, the opponents of the Second Amendment have been trying to find a deception that would allow them to achieve indirectly what the U.S. Constitution forbids them from doing directly. This has taken many forms—taxes, permits, bans on ancillary items such as ammunition and so on—the most recent of which is the attempt to repeal a bipartisan federal law that prevents activists from holding gun makers responsible for the deliberate misuse of their products by criminals. When selling this idea, politicians insist that gun manufacturers have been accorded some special carve-out from the usual rules of consumer protection. This is untrue. If a gun malfunctions because of a production defect, its makers are just as liable as a car maker would be should a car crash due to manufacturing negligence. Federal law protects only those instances in which the unlawful user was to blame—and it does this not as a unique favor, but to prevent precisely the sort of end-runs around the Constitution that have been attempted for years.
Rule 7:
Back policies that increase crime
Astonishingly, the same figures who blame the law-abiding for the misconduct of criminals tend to favor policies that make it easier for those criminals to operate with impunity. Sometimes, this takes the form of creating so-called “gun-free zones” and imposing restrictions on concealed carry that, together, have the effect of ensuring that the only armed people in a given area are police (that is, if any happen to be about) or those with ill intent. On other occasions, it involves opposition to effective policing and the election of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute. In both cases, the results are absurd, as these government officials choose to micromanage those who are the solution to the problem while ignoring the problem itself. Crime is a complicated issue, but, by this point in our history, we have learned a few universal truths that, when ignored, are guaranteed to lead to bad outcomes. The notion that increased gun control can make up for ignoring such common sense is profoundly ridiculous—and it fails every time it is tried.
Rule 8:
Depend on a legacy media to make false arguments
The legacy media’s grasp of gun policy is extremely weak. Most journalists do not understand how firearms work, have no idea what our laws say or do not say, believe conspiracy theories about the meaning of the Second Amendment and willingly launder the brazen lies of activists. With a small handful of exceptions, to read a story on the topic of guns in any mainstream outlet is to be badly informed. Among the many topics on which the press regularly misleads the public are what constitutes an “assault weapon,” how many mass shootings occur in a given year, just how law-abiding are concealed carry licensees, how effective concealed carriers are at preventing crime, and which regulatory proposals are popular and which are not. In recent years, trust in the American media has dipped to catastrophic lows, and yet, despite being less popular than Congress, the mainstream media has taken no concrete steps to improve its coverage of the right to keep and bear arms. At this point, one can safely assume that a good number of Americans are simply tuning these outlets out, but this does not make this behavior any less reprehensible.
Rule 9:
Attack researchers who tell the truth
Unsatisfied by their success in recruiting the press to serve as its mouthpiece, America’s gun-control establishment relentlessly attacks any researcher, academic or statistician who dares to push back against their narratives. Most recently, the target of choice was Dr. William English, a political economist at Georgetown University who had the temerity to publish a survey on the number of defensive gun uses each year that has been cited in a host of successful litigation efforts—including at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a long piece from 2024, The New York Times attacked Dr. English for having been read widely, for having charged for his time as a consultant and for having been reluctant to talk too much about the topic of guns because, as a professor without tenure, he is worried about being bullied out of his position. Evidently, the intention of the piece was to scare Dr. English away from sharing his research, or to make his employment at Georgetown untenable. But neither of these desires has come to fruition—and, even if they did, they would not change the results of his work. As with other researchers—from Stephen Halbrook to Clayton Cramer to John Lott Jr.—the facts speak for themselves, and they cannot be altered by frivolous attacks on the researchers’ characters. Ultimately, it is sign of weakness and a lack of confidence that, despite its stranglehold on the media, the gun-control movement still feels such a keen need to stamp out dissent.
Rule 10:
Medicalize the Second Amendment
As with declaring a political issue that has nothing to do with national security a “national-security issue,” attempts to declare the regulation of individual rights a matter of “public health” are the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Alas, this tactic has only grown in prominence since the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the effectiveness of that playbook. Under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the surgeon general of the United States, Vivek Murthy, has declared that the immediate passage of a robust collection of European-style gun-control regulations is not merely his preference, but a scientific and medical necessity. Naturally, no such exceptions to our longstanding political rules exist anywhere in the Constitution, and, as such, the ploy has been met with eye rolls from the public.
To compile an exhaustive list of these fallacies would require a compendium. Indeed, at times, defending the Second Amendment can feel like playing Whack-a-Mole with a particularly energetic and profligate opponent. The good news, however, is that the list of what works is shorter and simpler than the list of what does not. For the best results, we must interpret the Second Amendment as it was understood when it was written; impose as few limitations on the rights of the law-abiding as possible; rigorously enforce the law against violent and career criminals; distinguish properly between those who create problems and those who help to solve them; ignore figures who spread misinformation about guns while promoting figures who tell the truth; and, above all, always refuse to give into the fads of the day, which, for all their superficial appeal, would have us trade our unalienable birthrights for a cold mess of pottage.
Most Popular
