LETTER: Pro-gun columnist endorses logical fallacy
Victor Joecks’ Dec. 8 column opens with a great sleight-of-hand: “If gun control laws worked, the UNLV shooting wouldn’t have happened.” Sure enough, short of the kind of gun control in the United Kingdom (unthinkable in this country), he’s right. But equally true is, “If drunken driving laws worked, Nevada state troopers Abbate and Felix wouldn’t have been tragically killed.”
Mr. Joecks’ ensuing word salad, berating gun-safety advocates, ends with a Wayne LaPierre’s mantra: The solution to bad guy with a gun is good guys with guns (not coincidentally, upping gun sales for his industry). Sure enough, in this instance, the good guy with a gun was a hero, likely saving other lives. But this “good guy” was a peace officer, trained, qualified and regularly re-qualified in firearm proficiency and safety.
Mr. Joecks obviously is appealing to the most classical of logical fallacies committed when a person draws a conclusion about a population based on a sample that is not large enough. So for future reference, spare us of the laundry list of Second Amendment non sequiturs. The First Amendment right of free speech (something I have spent much of my legal career defending) is not unlimited, nor is the Second Amendment. Speech-licensing, with appropriate procedural safeguards, has been squarely authorized by the Supreme Court for decades. Licensing of guns is constitutionally comparable.
Let’s talk about the other, roughly 50,000 Americans who die every year by gun violence, not just these three, albeit shocking, ones. OK?
