Asshole of the Week: Wayne LaPierre: Anything But Guns Kills
Two hallmarks of the asshole are (i) his capacity to rationalize a position to which he’s independently committed and (ii) his disposition to brazenly defend it in the face of what should be seen as legitimate counter-arguments. The rationalizations are often the source of his boldness: he’s so convinced by what he tells himself that he’s shameless about going public with what is plainly specious reasoning.
I have no idea what the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre is like privately, but he beautifully displayed these traits in his press conference on school violence with his “Anything But Guns Kills” argument. (Transcript here.) What causes shooters to efficiently kill in large numbers? Anything but the easy availability of automatic weapons, including such things as video games, Hollywood, and, especially, the *absence* of guns in schools. Thus his bold proposal for school safety: every school should have an armed guard.
There’s been lots of commentary that rejects this argument (by noting, for instance, there *was* an armed guard at columbine). For present purposes, what matters is that LaPierre simply ignores the best and most obvious argument in favor of gun controls, which almost everyone else appreciates. It is this:
modest regulations (e.g., an assault weapons, background checks, etc) would significantly (non-trivially) reduce the chances that innocent children will be killed,
AND
those who would find it more difficult to use (certain) guns can’t reasonably object that their loss of liberty or security is more significant than reducing risks of death to innocent children.
People could so object, but it would be plainly unreasonable. They’d be saying, in effect: if innocent children have to die for our liberty to have guns, then I say Let Freedom Ring! That’s pretty absurd as a moral position, which is presumably why LaPierre instead focuses on the “causes” of school killings, presenting himself as a moral champion of curbing school violence.
But even on this score, he simply evades the issue: what we we’d need is an *argument* that there is no set of modest gun controls that would reduce the risks of death to innocent children. Even if video games and Hollywood, etc., are contributory causes of school violence, that doesn’t imply that any and all gun controls will be ineffectual–that they won’t *reduce the probability* of slain kids, whether or not they entirely stop shooters.
The best he does is to simply deny this view, at least indirectly, with his claim that the *only* thing that stops a man with a gun is another man with a gun: gun regulations *won’t* reduce the probability that kids are killed because the *only* thing that would do that is the known presence of an armed guard or teacher. But really? That’s a pretty uncertain proposition. We should believe that no regulations are such that they make it less likely that at least one innocent child is killed? And we somehow know this now, from the limited regulatory efforts tried in the US, and despite the great success of regulation in other advanced countries?
Actually, his position equally implies the incredible conclusion that not even *draconian* regulations will reduce the chances of one school death. But if he admitted this, he’d be back to the morally dubious claim that the real problem with draconian regulations is that they go too far in restricting gun liberties. He’d be back to the view that Gun Freedom Should Ring, At Any Price to Innocent Children.
So it is pretty easy to see why dodging the issues is easier than facing up to them. My guess is that LaPierre isn’t doing that simply as a public display, in an act of Frankfurtian bullshitting. He’s doing it in his own thinking: he’s brazen and defiant in public because he really has convinced himself, mainly by aggressively ignoring the main issues.
