There is no end to the asinine things “progressives” will say, the straw men they will construct, or the fallacies they’ll indulge in their illogical zeal to take guns away from citizens in order to give criminals a healthy advantage when invading homes or mugging people.
For the latest example, let us look at lettuce.
Yes, the left thought that romaine lettuce was usefully analogous to guns or gun control — somehow. Maybe they ate some tainted leaves and became deluded? Here are the two prime examples.
First, this clown:
Banning romaine lettuce won’t work. People who want romaine lettuce will still find ways to get it. The only way to be safe is to make sure everyone has romaine lettuce and let the chips fall where they may
— elan gale (@theyearofelan) November 22, 2018
His premise, spelled out in countless equally asinine replies to his tweet, is that this is the argument gun owners make and that he is demonstrating the argument as absurd through comparison.
The flaws are obvious. First, there is no one arguing “make sure everyone has guns and let the chips fall where they may.” But, Caleb, what about your opening paragraph? Yeah, that’s not what that means. Arguing that law-abiding citizens should have the right to defend their person, family, or property with equal or greater force than those who would harm or take those things isn’t an argument to “let the chips fall where they may.” That’s self-evidently idiotic, and plainly two different sentiments.
Likewise, nobody said, “hey we need to make sure everyone has a gun without restriction for the coming chips-falling free-for-all.” It’s not only equally stupid, but plainly false on its face, as there is broad support among Republicans and NRA members — and by broad, I mean nearly universal — for controls over who does own guns and how they come to own them. In point of fact, those are things America already does RIGHT NOW.
But what’s the most annoyingly idiotic about this perfectly stupid tweet and the mountain of equally witless replies is that this argument does have a somewhat analogous counterpart in political debate — but not on the right and not from gun owners. It’s the left’s basic premise behind the push to legalize drugs. Now, granted, it doesn’t have a “chips fall where they may” flavor, but their basic idea is that you can’t control it and people will do it anyway, so why bother controlling it. That’s not an argument from gun owners, that’s from them. From the elans.
But even worse than this clown was the tweet and attendant article put out by ThinkProgress.
Romaine lettuce is too dangerous to be in stores, but guns are still available 24 hours per day https://t.co/Moza2NKtlF pic.twitter.com/UXRES0eX8E
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) November 24, 2018
This is so blatantly obtuse it hardly requires an explanation. Still, some of the tweeted responses are too priceless to ignore. Like this, from user Hale Razor.
There is no constitutional right to bear salad.
— Razor (@hale_razor) November 24, 2018
Beautiful. Or there’s this excellent Photoshoppery.
Here ya go, Buddy. pic.twitter.com/shXPhMzkWq
— Noxious News (@NoxiousNews) November 24, 2018
Here is the gist of their overtly dumb take:
Food safety is certainly an important thing to get right, but the number of Americans who die from foodborne illness every year — 3,000 according to the CDC — is dwarfed by the 30,000-plus annual fatalities caused by guns in America.
On Thanksgiving Day, after the federal government had taken swift action to protect citizens from pathogen-laden romaine leaves, one male teen suspect in a Birmingham, Alabama mall allegedly shot and injured two others, including a 12-year-old girl. He was pursued by police, shot, and killed. Those were not the only casualties caused by guns that day.
Naturally, they use a tragedy for their agenda. But again, it’s an argument bereft of logic. Besides the fact that there is not, in fact, any constitutional right to bear romaine lettuce, the possession of lettuce isn’t a defense against lettuce. If someone comes at you with tainted food, you having the same tainted food is not a defense or deterrent. You’re just a pair of jerks holding infected salad.
Guns actually defend against guns. Guns defend against crime. They could even, conceivably, defend against lettuce. And that right, the right to defend yourself, is not only sacred, and has not only been held as going without saying for most of the existence of humanity. It not only underlies legal arguments like killing in self-defense or in defense of others, but is guaranteed by the Constitution, an inconvenient truth that only occasionally gets mentioned by progressive idiots, and then only in the context of their incorrectly claiming it doesn’t exist, or immorally pushing to end its existence.
What’s worse is that no matter how much the left protests and objects that they don’t really mean they want to take all guns or ban all guns, every philosophical argument like this romaine analogy is designed as an underpinning of exactly that. They aren’t arguing, after all, that some disease-infested lettuce is fine. They’re saying it was banned — and not saying, but definitely intending you to conclude, “ban guns, too.” So in other words, besides being dumb, it’s dishonest.
By the way, there are dozens and dozens of tweets just like this one.
Romaine Lettuce has killed 4 people & they pulled it from every grocery store in the country. There’s been 307 mass shootings in 2018 and so far you can still get a gun everywhere in America pic.twitter.com/4QvXmnx5Cc
— Stone (@stonecold2050) November 23, 2018
But hey, look, if they can’t get what they want, they can always just nuke us, right?
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