How to argue on the Internet

I’m thinking of making a sarcastic website about how to argue on facebook and other internet sites. Sarcastic, in that it would teach you how to do all the bad arguing I see people doing. Here is a good example. In arguments about gun control, someone inevitably brings up the problem that “you don’t know what AR stands for”. This is actually a non-issue with regards to sensible gun legislation and it doesn’t  illuminate just what an assault weapon is.  Worse though, it’s just wrong.

https://www.ammoland.com/2016/04/ar-15-rifle-historical-time-line

How to argue about gun control: 

Lesson #1: Present some facts that have nothing to do with gun control. Hopefully no one will notice how irrelevant they are.

Someone I don’t know added this link, with no other comment, to a thread on gun control. It’s just a non-argument to begin with, but the point of doing it is lots of people think it is an argument. It’s a timeline that starts in 1989, when they began producing AR-15’s for the consumer market. This is should be immediately suspicious, since it says “for the consumer market”, telling you there was a different reason the weapons were first manufactured.

As it turns out, the term “assault rifle” is a direct translation of the first such rifle created by the Germans during WWII for military purposes, the Sturmgewehr. This is easy to look up once you know that name, but more trouble than most people will go to if you are just searching for “history of the term assault rifle” or something like that. This anonymous poster was trying to take advantage of people not having a lot of free time.

Lesson #2: Exclude actual history and facts that might hurt your argument.

I don’t doubt that the post was made to educate me that the term “assault” is a liberal invention, intended to make the guns sound worse than they are. The introduction tells you what AR does not stand for, but says nothing about where the term “assault” came from.  If you read the comments below the time line, you’ll see many people believe it was an invention of liberals to serve the anti-gun agenda. What’s unfortunate for them is, comments are open to anyone. What’s unfortunate for intelligent sensible people is, you have to wade through a lot of garbage to find the factual comments.

Lesson #3: Be technically correct. Sometimes called partially correct.

People who say an AR-15 is not an assault rifle are partially correct. It’s like saying a Canon copier is not a Xerox copier, or Puffs is not Kleenex, or an instant photo is not a Polaroid. But when something gets invented, the brand name sometimes becomes what we call it. There is no technical definition for what an assault rifle is, so they can never really lose this argument. No matter how you try to define it, you are never correct, technically. This was one of the problems with enforcing the assault weapons ban. They created a legal definition, but laws can be skirted on technicalities.

Normally, we frown on this. From Perry Mason to Law and Order, the prosecutors are always lamenting people who get off on a technicality. I’m sure the makers of the ban were hoping that people would want to comply with this law and would work to improve on it so safe and legal gun owners who had no intention of killing anyone could have the guns they want, and easy to use death machines would stay out of the hands of criminals and disaffected youths. That’s not how it turned out, and the law expired.

Instead of having these bad arguments that lead to nothing, we could be discussing the practical issues and how we can create a safer world by examining the features associated with this type of weaponry and gun ownership in general and, as with anything dangerous, like dynamite or cars or pseudoephedrine, we could make regulations that we could all live with. Such as:

Large, detachable magazines
Automatic and semi-automatic fire
Proper storage and trigger locks
Caliber, range  and velocity of the bullets as well as the design that causes them to tumble.
Background checks
Loopholes to background checks such as private sales
Education about gun safety
Counseling and services for people who are thinking about misusing weapons

Lesson #4: Now that you have made definitions meaningless, use your own.

What definitely was a deliberate creation of a marketing term is MSR, Modern Sporting Rifle. I know a few hunters and none of them use an AR or AK or anything like it for sport. It takes away the sport of carefully siting and killing a deer or other large animal and would leave you with no meat for small game. I’ve heard they are good for coyotes, but who hunts those? The firearms industry first adopted the term “assault” as a new and exciting sounding product line, but with mass shootings making the news, decided to change that. See 2009 on the timeline.

By careful use of the above lessons, one can take something that their side of the argument is doing; making up terms that provide an emotional appeal, and make it sound like the other side is doing it. Congratulations, you’re ready to join the exciting world of arguing on the internet.