The words “Chicago,” “New York” and “Washington DC” do not appear in this article.

Nor does the phrase “defensive gun use.” Though the concept is mentioned briefly, for purposes of ridicule.

Twisting facts in the name of advancing an agenda is a simple good, if the agenda is good. Insulting your opponents is just good clean fun.

Draconian gun laws reduce gun violence, m’kay?

The correlation between gun possession and gun violence—or, alternately, between gun control and stopping gun violence—is one of the most robust that you can find. And the mechanism that connects weak gun laws to gun murders and massacres is self-evident: with guns around, ordinary arguments escalate into ones where someone gets killed, and crazy kids who dream of getting even with the world can easily find a gun—or, like Adam Lanza, many guns—to do it with.

The article contains not one actual example of this correlation. It also contains no mention of a (robust!) correlation between the proliferation of armed individuals under states’ liberalized conceal carry laws, and the nation-wide drop in violent crime. It does, however, contain plenty of egregious insults, which (since it’s pushing gun control) only shows the writer is right and anyone who disagrees is wrong.

…the counterarguments are either easily explodable pseudo-science or stories that people tell each other on Internet forums.

In response to real social science, with its cautious but solid correlations, you get obscene, Tarantino-style fantasies…

…and stray tabloid anecdotes…

…the favorite absurdity of the moment: to insist that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s any evidence that guns are used effectively on any scale in self-defense, because the incidence of gun use doesn’t accurately track the millions of times that the mere sight of a gun in the hands of a housewife scares off the bad guys…

If we don’t gather data, data doesn’t exist. Therefore the reality underlying the data doesn’t exist. That’s real social science. And in real social science, gun use that actually defends innocents doesn’t exist because the social scientists don’t want to look for it.

Next up: Guilt by association!

To live in a modern society is to accept moral complicity in many kinds of violence. We pay taxes, and drones kill distant kids; we pay for roads, and thousands are killed in cars; we assent to the murder of farm animals that, we can be confident, feel pain and fear. We justify these moral choices, and our complicity in them, either by reference to a greater good—killing terrorists is so essential that the collateral damage is morally acceptable—or, just as often, by pretending they aren’t happening. All we can do is try to be clear about the kind of violence with which we are complicit.

So to say that people who know the consequences and still do everything they can to ensure that gun laws don’t change are complicit in the murder of children is to state, as unemotionally as possible, an inarguable fact.

And you don’t want to be complicit in the murder of children, do you? What’s that called? Argument by intimidation?

No I don’t have any desire to be complicit in the murder of children. Therefore I refrain from committing or condoning the murder of children. Always have. Wouldn’t it be just as logical to claim that the guns, ammo and gear I hold, since they will never be used in the murder of children, have been taken out of the hands of those who murder children and therefore restrictions on such ownership should be reduced? Is that an inarguable fact, stated as unemotionally as possible?

Didn’t think so. But someday I’ll be the New Yorker, and then reality will come into being through my merely making a statement. Just like in the article above.