Another terrible mass shooting hit America recently, this time in the small town of Sutherland Springs, TX. Devin Kelley attacked the town’s First Baptist Church on a Sunday morning and shot and killed 26 people, many of them children. He was shot by a local man after the carnage and then fled in a truck, and he was pursued before he eventually crashed and killed himself. The scene at the church was described as horrific, with blood everywhere and dead bodies littered on the floor. The nation once again reacted in anger, sadness, horror, and confusion.
In that anger and confusion, we once again have seen people targeting their political enemies, something that never seems to fail to happen. Many people have called for stricter gun laws, and if you disagree with them, they’ll react in disgust and basically accuse you of being an accomplice in such mass murder sprees. We have to do something, they say, and if you don’t agree with their “something,” you’re automatically a bad person. Others have championed the fact that Kelley was fought off by a citizen with a gun, possibly preventing further shootings elsewhere. Such people argue that those who want strict gun laws are naive control-freaks who want to take away basic rights of self-defense and resistance against potential tyranny.
Such “discussion” gets tiresome pretty fast, especially when a tragedy like this weighs so heavily. While it is understandable that people will get emotional over this (people should get emotional over this), emotion often makes for poor solutions and poor policy. What is needed is sober-minded reason, and in actuality, if people have a firmer grasp on logic, it helps to have more charitable discussion.
Now what I mean by “charitable” does not mean that you can’t dish out firm or harsh criticism. After all, I eviscerated Shaun King for his utterly stupid response to the Las Vegas shooting. Still, I clearly argued why King’s article was built on worthless arguments as opposed to simply attributing all sorts of bad motives to him without evidence. And that’s what’s needed: An evaluation of evidence and argument, not knee-jerk reactions to satisfy anger. Thus, I mean “charity” to be the avoidance of attributing the worst motivations to your opponent (unless you have good reason to) but instead trying to understand what his argument is and answer it. Such evaluation needs some basic understanding of logic.
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