One of my favorite social media assessments is this: “It’s difficult to win an argument with an intelligent person—and impossible to win one with a stupid person.”
“Stupid” may or may not be the right word, but it’s shorthand for people who simply do not allow factual information, logic, science, or reality into the discussion while proudly flexing Popeye-muscles when it comes to audacious hypocrisy and willful ignorance.
This is why there is simply no talking to a “gun nut.”
Now by no measure do I consider everyone who owns or even loves their gun to be a “gun nut.” If you are a sportsman who enjoys responsible hunting, or someone who can sleep better at night having a gun close by for home protection, then, hey, you do you. “Gun nut” is a whole different world of weapon fetishization with a side order of delusions of grandeur. And this is why the cognitive dissonance rings like broken gong anytime a nutter is engaged in debate:
A gun nut has a bumper sticker on his F150 that reads “Shall not be infringed”—but somehow has spent an entire lifetime ignoring the whole “well regulated” part of the 2nd amendment as if it doesn’t exist.
A gun nut typically has a near sexual obsession with soldiers and law enforcement agents—but yet feels the need to own an arsenal of guns so he can one day murder a few of them. (Hey, Jethro, when the hypothetical government decides it wants your guns, they won’t be sending librarians and park rangers.)
A gun nut believes the 2nd amendment gives him a superhero-level of freedom that must be acknowledged and celebrated by all—but will happily give you a list of circumstances in which they allow themselves to be the arbiters of who else should be entitled to constitutional freedoms. Ever hear a gun nut say something like, “Of course they have a right to build that Mosque!” or “I applaud Colin Kaepernick’s right to kneel during the anthem"? Of course not. A gun nut doesn’t love freedom—he loves HIS freedom. Yours, however, is quite negotiable.
A gun nut loses his mind at the thought of any legal possessor of a firearm having his rights infringed in any way—unless that legal possessor happens to be black, like Philando Castile, who was shot seven times and killed after telling a police officer that he had a licensed, legally owned gun in the glove compartment of his car. Backlash from the NRA? Not a peep.
A gun nut will tell you until he’s blue in the face that “guns don’t kill people. People do.”—and then argue against any sensible regulation of the people who should be allowed to own guns, such as domestic abusers, criminals, potential terrorists currently on the “no fly” list, and further arguing against national databases, closing gun show loopholes, or anything else that could lessen the casualty rate, including, in the case of Iowa state law, blindness. Yeah. No, really. A fucking blind person can buy an AR-15, or a dozen of them, and use them in Iowa. What could possibly go wrong?
A gun nut actually thinks the argument “but criminals will violate the law anyway!” in some way supports his argument against further sensible regulation. Think about that for a second or two, and apply that contorted logic—anywhere else. Some people are going to rape, so why have laws against rape? Some people are going to pilfer a pair of sunglasses at 711, so why have laws against theft? People speed, so let’s just abolish speed limits altogether and let every Tom, Dick and Harry redline it up to about 120 mph in a school zone. Seems legit.
A gun nut fervently believes that “good guys with guns” are a deterrent of crime—and yet in a country of 310,000,000 circulating firearms, the number of mass shootings prevented by a “good guy with a gun” through the entire course of the history of the republic stands at: 0.
A gun nut will generally proclaim that “the government should just enforce the laws already on the books!’—and then spew invective about how legal gay marriage should be criminalized, and how abortion, which has been legal since 1972, should be once again illegal.
There are reams of statistics and studies that plainly indicate that states with stricter gun laws have lower incidences of gun violence; countries with stricter gun laws have lower incidences of gun violence. Gun nuts will have none of it. The knowledge may as well not exist.
Here’s one last thing the gun nuts are wholly invested in, and why they can't be debated with: they like the idea that they are pissing other people off. They like the idea that they can be intimidating or menacing with a weapon if they choose to be. They like that the current debate is essentially their right to own deadly weapons against everyone else’s right to not be mowed down in schools, churches, night clubs and concerts. The gun nut pathology is one of fear and resentment—being able to theoretically kill people that think they are superior to them—progressive politicians, elites, minorities and libtards…
And that’s the real reason they’ll never give up their guns. Your six-year-old bleeding out in the corner of a 1st grade classroom is a small price to pay for the theoretical invincible superiority over “the other” that gun nuts feel when they hold the cold weight of their AR-15s in their arms. Unfortunately, that’s also, in extreme situations, the same pathology that compels gun nuts like Nikolas Cruz, Dylan Klebold, and Stephan Paddock to actually wind up pulling the trigger.
It's also why gun nuts can't be talked to. Their "reality" is not the same one you and I share.