There’s an old saying, supposedly from Mark Twain: “Never argue with idiots. They’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Such it is with identity politics. The idea that Americans should all be squabbling, drooling idiots who can’t agree on anything has been very bad for everybody. When one group demands that another group’s rights be diminished, and they in turn do the same, everyone ends up losing a little bit of their rights.
Fellow writer Kostas Moros said it well on Twitter/X:
Your reminder that the immediate contest of "the shooter was one of YOUR TEAM" that happens after each shooting is corrosive to society and ultimately a no-win game.
I don't really care if the suspect is LGBTQ or whatever. I understand why the dunking is happening, because the…
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) January 4, 2024
This idea that we can attribute the actions of a lone depraved individual seeking murderous attention on Tik Tok to political enemies and then come out with some kind of political win just isn’t valid. The people taking the position that transgender people are responsible for some kind of epidemic of mass shootings think they’re winning a culture war victory, but instead they’re just telling the anti-gun camp that there are situations in which you think gun control is acceptable. They’ll only see that as compromise and weakness.
If anything, this shows that many “conservatives” would gladly trade the right to keep and bear arms away to “own the libs”.
The other problem with claiming that there’s an epidemic of transgender mass shootings is that it just isn’t a factual claim.
Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but nobody is entitled to their own facts. After each of these three mass shootings perpetrated by a transgender person, memes of all kinds claiming that past mass shooters were also transgender pop up, but if you look into the claims, most of them simply aren’t true. There has even been a case where a mass shooter claimed to be transgender hoping to get some kind of legal relief, but it doesn’t work that way.
You can find a lot more information showing that the claim is non-factual here. So, at the end of the day, the people doing this both hurt the credibility of the gun rights movement while signaling to the anti-gun movement that we don’t care about gun rights.
It only hurts gun rights, in other words.
Gun Rights Are Human Rights
There’s only one tenable position: that the right to keep and bear arms, the right to defend yourself from violent attackers, and every other related right are all human rights. They’re for everybody, whether we like them or not. They are human rights just like freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to have a hand in choosing government officials, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to not be compelled to be a witness against yourself, among many others.
When we allow political expediency to cheapen our view of these rights, we’re letting our guard down and letting anti-human rights people get past our defenses. Instead of fighting a principled fight for our rights, we’re only left with fights over identity and fighting against other people.
This inevitably leads to the fight being lost for everyone. When we say that there are exceptions to human rights, truly evil people who don’t think humans have rights will then insert wedges into those little cracks we open up, and then start hammering the wedges. This leaves the integrity of the whole structure vulnerable to collapse, including rights that all of us hold dear.
In many ways, Barry Goldwater’s warning about this topic was prophetic:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
If you think you’re special, and that clamoring for leopards eating faces is safe because your face will never get eaten, think again. The people who want to scapegoat the LGBT community don’t have your best interests at heart. They want power, as much as they can get. If you think a theocratic dictatorship won’t turn later to ban your guns, too, you need to study more history.
Historical dictators like Hitler and Stalin didn’t start their campaigns against human rights by targeting the majority’s rights. They instead started poking holes in the barrier by targeting unfavored groups, with Hitler starting his book burning campaign against an LGBT library. They were an easy target, but eventually everybody lost their gun rights once Hitler got the country onto this slippery slope.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We can only forget these lessons of history at our own peril.
