NRA Nonsense

Another popular bullshit line asks why should we bother passing laws – since the “bad guys” don’t bother with laws anyway. This sounds really savvy until you start to dig in. By that logic we shouldn’t outlaw murder either, because murderers don’t follow the law, right? But if it weren’t illegal, then we wouldn’t be able to put someone in jail for murdering someone. Right? And if we make owning automatic weapons illegal, we don’t have to wait until we catch you killing 49 people in a night club on a Saturday night. We can arrest you as soon as we see that you have in your possession a gun whose only use is to mow down dozens of people. This would of course prevent some number of murders by automatic weapon. NRA nonsense ☀

What makes the AR-15 an assault weapon ☀

After another mass shooting in which an AR-15 most certainly posed a problem to many people trapped inside a nightclub, such a blasé approach to powerful civilian weapons may be harder to maintain. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a great 20th-century philosopher and a veteran of the first world war, wrote in his “Philosophical Investigations” that when “we employ the word ‘meaning’,’’ we are most often referring to the everyday purpose of some phrase. “The meaning of a word”, he wrote, “is its use in the language”. By that sensible if trivial standard: if an AR-15 can be used to assault large crowds of people, killing and maiming scores of them, on multiple occasions, it qualifies as an assault weapon.