The NRA and its allies use jargon to bully gun-control supporters

[billh58]

Last edited Thu Mar 22, 2018, 01:22 PM - Edit history (1)

If you don’t know what the “AR” in AR-15 stands for, you don’t get to talk.

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between a “clip” and a “magazine.”

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control

It can be infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions among our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

-Snip-

Gunsplaining, though, is always done in bad faith. Like mansplaining, it’s less about adding to the discourse than smothering it — with self-appointed authority, and often the thinnest of connection to any real fact. (If gunsplaining had a motto, it might be Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s macabre old saw: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/03/06/the-nra-and-its-allies-use-jargon-to-bully-gun-control-supporters/?utm_term=.e452f2023b02

NRA supporters and apologists can't seem to bring themselves to confront logical reasons for the need for stricter gun control laws and regulations, so they resort to gunsplaining. Their argument goes something like, "if you are not completely knowledgeable about guns, gun attachments, and ammunition, you are not qualified to have an opinion about guns." Then they begin to try and educate the unwashed about the virtues of guns and gun ownership, care, and handling.

What I need to know about deadly weapons in order to call for more strict regulation of them is this: they are instruments of death, and are inherently dangerous. Over 30,000 needless deaths by guns annually in this country is all the "facts" I really need to formulate this opinion. Gun deaths have exceeded automobile deaths, and we regulate automobiles for driver competency, liability, and safety. Why not guns? You need look no further than the insidious right-wing gun lobby and its lobbyist the NRA/ILA (as financed and promoted by ALEC and the Koch Brothers) and their greed for more profits.

As with most of its positions, the right-wing gunspalining crowd is disingenuous with respect to the connection between gun fetishism, and the Second Amendment's guarantees of the right to keep and bear arms. Every right comes with responsibilities, and is subject to reasonable regulation and control.

Gun violence has reached epidemic proportions in this country, and a majority of Americans have decided that the time for stricter regulation has come.