Reply #68

...AWB that grandfathered pre-existing high-capacity magazines. But this doesn't change the point that high-capacity magazines should be banned -- something that pretty much 100% of sane people agree with -- there's no reason anyone needs a 30-round magazine except to kill a lot of people quickly.

But this is the usual NRAer game: find some technicality that was wrong, and use it as an excuse to dismiss valid arguments that are essentially unchanged by the omission. And I get it, if I were in NRAer, I'd much rather harp about failing to mention loopholes in the AWB than try to argue that high-capacity mags should be legal ("but it's my RIGHT! Do you also want to put a limit on the number of WORDS in a SENTENCE!"... lol)

Anyway, despite failing to mention this loophole in AWB, this is in fact a good article (and I don't agree with all of it), and it is far more factual than most anything I've seen pro-gunners post here (not too much of a surprise, since the pro-gunners' favorite sources tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch for some odd reason -- OK, that's not quite fair. As far as I know, WorldNetDaily and TownHall are not owned by Murdoch).

For example, consider the recent work of fiction claiming to debunk the "myths" of gun control, written by professional climate change denier Larry Bell, and posted here not once but twice. The difference is that the pro-gun types like Larry Bell go way beyond just technical omissions that don't change to the main argument. The pro-gun lies, include pretending that the Brady Campaign has simply invented the fact that gun ownership has dropped, despite the fact that we both know this comes from GSS, universally considered the best source for gun ownership statistics by social scientists (including your friend). And then there's the claim that NCVS only counts DGUs "where a citizen kills a criminal, not when one is only wounded". This is not an omission it is an overt lie, and it makes a huge difference to the argument, because if that were true, it would be a valid reason to discount NCVS DGU statistics.

If you look at those two threads, you see a bunch of the usual pro-gunner suspects posting. And yet nobody sees fit to object to the lies or even acknowledge them. Including people like you, who know better.

Here's the thing. Presumably the DU pro-gunners represent the best and brightest of the lot, because whether or not you like to admit it, the vast majority of hardcore pro-gunners are right-wing nutjobs. So, given that even here on DU, the pro-gunners are almost universally jump all over technical inaccuracies to dismiss otherwise solid articles by credible sources, while ignoring over very blatant and central lies in pro-gun articles from right-wingers, what does that say about the intellectual and factual footing of the pro-gun ideology?