"Thank The Second Amendment: Texas Church Shooting Stopped In Its Tracks By Armed Hero"
"More Americans Have Died From Gun Violence Since 1968 Than The Total Number Of Americans Who Have Died In All American Wars. (Yes, This Fact Checks)"
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
Yesterday, a Texas worshipper (in the town of White Settlement) pulled a gun on a murderous congregant and shot him dead.
I understand why ignorant people applaud this "heroism."
I also understand that this entire behavioral "matrix" is a measure of America's decline.
It is incontroverticle that mmeasurably more family members are killed by firearm suicides and in-home "accidents" than the vanishingly few lives that are saved by citizens defending themselves with firearms.
That's a fact. An incontrovertible fact.
The Number Of People Who Use A Gun In Self-Defense Is Pretty Much Negligible
"GunFAIL: Weekly Tabulation Of Needless Injury And Death Due To Guns"
Tragically, facts take second place -- a distant second place -- to the seductive power of myth.
Consequently, stupid and/or ignorant people WILL believe that the actual ravages of "being armed to the teeth" render Americans heroic when in fact we are, by far, the most murderous people in the developed world.
And if we take into account the daily ravages of Uncle Sam's foreign policy (not to mention genocide perped on Native Americans, and the toll of slavery), I believe (as Mario Cuomo did) that we are the most persistently violent people in the history of the world.
A confession...
I am starting to "write off" stupid people as incorrigibly stupid.
Arguing with "the functionally decerebrate is still marginally useful, but not because stupid people will "see the light."
Rather, it's useful because "bystanders" "on the edge of the conversation" will learn something.
Thomas Paine was right: “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
And although the Dunning-Kruger Hypothesis is still a hypothesis, it is also my "working hypothesis."
In essence, Dunning and Kruger hold that "stupid people are too stupid to know they're stupid."
"Mark Twain, Adolf Hitler And The Dunning-Kruger Effect"
"New York Times Interviews David Dunning, Co-Author Of The Dunning-Kruger Effect"
McArthur Wheeler: Patron Saint Of American "Conservatism"
"Stupidity For Dummies: The Study Of Ignorance Helps Understand How Intelligence Works"
"The Death Of Epistemology"
"Are Republicans Insane?" Best Pax Posts
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