what according to sam harris is "the riddle of the gun?"evidence
In response to the Sandy Hook massacre, Harris stopped sputtering nigh Muslims long plenty to weigh in with a post Sandy Claw essay, "The Riddle of the Gun." Unlike the above mysteries, withal, the gun is no riddle. As the NRA recently reminded us, firearms are but a tool. They can be used as a sturdy hammer, a nifty paperweight, a handsome tie prune, a rather crap spaghetti strainer, and, in a desperate pinch, as a convenient murder weapon! Guns are as far from a riddle as one can get. The numbers are brutally simple. According to this Harvard report, and the least chip of mutual sense, more than guns = more gun homicides. And expounding on this topic, without accepting that fact every bit the moral epicenter of your argument, is tantamount to protecting gun rights over the lives of innocents. Harris, in his standing quest to overcome the savage stereotype that atheists are typically rational people, takes a page from NRA President Wayne LaPierre's handbook of douchebaggery, and suggests the reply to the "riddle" of guns should be, in fact, more than guns. Just a corporate shill or a professional philosopher could get in at this position without realizing (or admitting) how utterly full of shit they are.
Sure, nosotros'd all adopt for this to be a "don't feed the troll" type situation, merely as of this writing Harris's gushing paean to gun violence (and considering the research cited above, describing it equally anything other would be incredibly disingenuous) has received 44,000 Facebook likes, so perhaps it's best to feed this unwitting troll the fatal poisonous substance for which he has manifestly no natural amnesty: logic! And, afterwards nearly a decade of ostensibly sincere intellectual sewage, Harris is straining Poe's Law with introductions like this: "Fantasists and zealots tin be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America." Ah, aye, all those atrocious zealots with their fanatical designs on protecting small children from senseless, preventable gun-murder -- based on the simple truth that guns cause death. Tell usa more, o convoluted one!
"On the i paw, many gun-rights advocates pass up even the most sensible restrictions on the sale of weapons to the public. On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws oft seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want fix admission to a loaded firearm."
The lesson here is that Sam Harris has two hands. 2 extremist and falsely equivalent hands. And he can count them both! But rest bodacious, good reader:
"Between these two extremes we must find grounds for a rational discussion about the problem of gun violence."
Phew! I was beginning to retrieve this was going to be nevertheless another one of Harris'due south patented fake-smart-for-dumb-people routines wherein he constructs a serial of strawmen so proceeds to knock them downwardly. Oh wait. That's exactly what this is. Harris fails spectacularly to provide the advertised rational discussion.
Before delving further into this NRA wet-dream of an essay, let united states of america reverberate on an of import facet of Harris's personality. The common thread running through all of Harris'southward logic-abortions, the key to agreement how a purported "intellectual" can be so consistently wrong and and so morally repugnant, is his unbridled cowardice -- both of the intellectual variety and an all-pervasive, crapping-his-pants fear that manifests itself in the course of sophistry and a brazen condone for following the bachelor evidence to its logical conclusion.
Harris's fears, like much of his "philosophy," are arbitrary and logically inconsistent. After several column inches of rock-hard gun-blooper, wherein he confesses a deep and constant beloved for his ain weapons, the setup for this ode to American gun-rights madness is to claim that firearms are the but reasonable answer to hypothetical knife-wielding lunatics:
"A world without guns is 1 in which the most ambitious men can do more than or less anything they want. It is a globe in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a adult female in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene."
Guns level the killing field. Got it? Or were you also busy raping someone at knife-point, you disgusting liberal zealot?! Of grade, a world with guns growing on trees would leave us all subject area to the whims of the virtually ambitious, and heavily armed, gun owners. This is a point Harris doesn't quite realize he makes further on in the essay when describing the futility of the Second Subpoena to protect the individual citizen (or militia) confronting a tyrannical federal regime in possession of fleets of Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles.
Harris displays a true talent for contradicting himself. In addition to the above paragraph, he writes that well-trained, "good" people need guns to protect themselves against dangers they may encounter exterior of their homes, still, "[l]ike many gun-command advocates, [he has] serious concerns about letting ordinary citizens walk around armed." But I gauge this is the nature of the riddle, the enigma; the dogmatic asshole masquerading as a reasonable arbiter.
In an attempt to calm presumably unwarranted hysteria over mass shootings, Harris offers "some facts about guns":
"Fifty-five million kids went to school on the mean solar day that 20 were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Even in the United States, therefore, the chances of a child's dying in a school shooting are remote. As my friend Steven Pinker demonstrates in his monumental study of human being violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, our perception of danger is easily distorted by rare events."
Ha. HA! HAAAAAAAAA! Excuse my vulgar Chris Matthews-esque guffaws, just anyone familiar with Harris'due south rise to prominence as a post-9/11 fearmonger, torture apologist, and state of war-hawk tin can surely forgive me this slobber-mouthed transgression. HAAAAAA! Jesus Muhammad Nugent! Information technology's equally if the human lacks any cocky-awareness whatsoever.
Americans are far more probable to die at the hands of a--ordinarily--white, gun-totting maniac than they are to be murdered past an Islamic terrorist, then Harris'south "calming" statistics only serve to demonstrate his own ballsy hypocrisy.
He continues:
"We still take more guns and more gun violence than any other developed state, but the correlation betwixt guns and violence in the United States is far from straightforward. Thirty percent of urban households have at least ane firearm. This effigy increases to 42 percent in the suburbs and 60 per centum in the countryside. As i moves away from cities, therefore, the rate of gun ownership doubles. And however gun violence is primarily a problem in cities. It is the people of Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, Niggling Rock, and Stockton who are at the greatest risk of being killed by guns."
The obvious connection between crime-related gun violence, or the asymetrical form of warfare known as "terrorism" (considering the Iraq War wasn't terrorism!), and socioeconomic condition is totally lost on Harris. No surprise. Harris goes on with a "I'g non saying Ten, only I am saying 10, so what the hell's my point?" form of masturbatory argumentation. Knives can be just equally unsafe as guns, as evidenced by a recent slew of attacks in Chinese schools, except they're really non as deadly, and--even so again--guns are the but real defence force confronting knife-wielding maniacs. Then there's some more imitation-sagacious obfuscation, similar considering the astounding number of people who dice of infection each twelvemonth because hospital employees don't launder their hands well enough, followed past the immediate admission they're not the same problem, nor does contrasting the 2 phenomenon offer any insight whatsoever. Then aside from learning that Sam Harris has 2 hands, i of which is made of straw, nosotros meet that he could benefit from an editor--or peradventure simply shutting the fuck up, rather than subjecting his readers to pointless circumlocution.
Hither's where we achieve the virtually telling paragraph--a glimpse into Harris'south stunning intellectual cowardice:
"In the vast majority of murders committed with firearms—fifty-fifty most mass killings— the weapon used is a handgun. Unless we outlaw and begin confiscating handguns, the weapons best suited for being carried undetected into a classroom, movie theatre, eatery, or shopping mall for the purpose of committing mass murder will remain readily available in the The states. But no one is seriously proposing that we address the problem on this level. In fact, the Supreme Courtroom has recently ruled, twice (in 2008 and 2010), that banning handguns would be unconstitutional."
No one is seriously addressing the trouble on this level. No i. What, did you read someone doing that? Well, they must non have been serious. All those liberal zealots who've heard calling for a ban similar to the one the United Kingdom put in place later on a similar school massacre in '96--a ban that, despite the statistical spin your favorite radio fascist has put on it, has reduced gun violence there in the long-term--were engaged in parody. And you lot thought they were serious, yous dumb bastard. That'due south always been a transparent tool in Harris's kit of intellectual dishonesty--if you lot don't hold with Sam Harris, whether you have skilful reason or not, you and your ideas are but not serious enough for Sam Harris banning handguns? "[T]lid's not going to happen," says Harris. Due to the two very contempo Supreme Court cases he cites, in the short-term, he'south quite correct. Clarence Thomas is not going to suddenly reverse his position. Antonin Scalia won't have an epiphany regarding his unconscionable perversion of "strict constructionism" (militias ≠ individuals, per the English language).
Only knowing what we know (or in Harris's instance, choose to ignore or subvert), that more guns = more than gun homicide, it's the responsibility of not-assholes to quite seriously propose addressing the trouble on that level. Harris shrugs off this responsibility in the aforementioned cowardly way thousands of conventional-wisdom-worshipping, status-quo-peddlers take done throughout history. Abolition of slavery? That'southward non going to happen. Women's suffrage? Not going to happen. Civil Rights? No way.
While any random selection of Harris's essay is worthy of derision, I'm going to start wrapping this upward, though I encourage yous (especially my fellow atheists) to read his nonsense in its entirety and vent in an appropriate fashion. Earlier signing off, yet, I have two remaining tasks: addressing Harris'southward same egregious lack of self-awareness, and issuing a sort-of challenge to my swain atheists. As promised, the offending passage:
"Merely once again, any law that allows the states to commit or imprison people on the footing of a mere perception of risk would guarantee that large numbers of innocent people volition be held against their will."
Those familiar with Harris'south tape will accept already spotted the logical inconsistency. For those blissfully unaware of his many crimes against thinking, the uncharacteristically sound reason Harris gives above for not imprisoning all mentally unstable people is precisely the "common sense" reason he'd previously used to justify a policy of Muslim profiling at airports. (For the satisfaction of reading security expert Bruce Schneier deliver Harris a much-deserved drubbing, meet here.) Granted, committing people to a cuckoo's nest is a great deal more than severe than subjecting them to drome screenings, but at that place's probably a folksy aphorism I can conjure to brand this work--apples and oranges are both fruit, if you get my migrate. Yeah. That'll exercise the flim-flam, simply like a junebug in May, or Dan Rather in a Texas teapot.
The ultimate tragedy of Harris's article is that he touches on the answer to "the riddle of the gun" only to dismiss that answer as existing beyond the parameters of contend. Unlike god or gods, that'southward one of those things that's true if yous say it'due south true, and faux if you say it's false. Harris is, confoundingly, a popular effigy, capable of shifting the frame of acceptable discourse. Why doesn't he give information technology a go? Well, that may be the biggest mystery of all.
Source: https://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/
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