Fresh from getting busted for pumping out phony maps and statistics, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s outfit, “Everytown for Gun Safety,” slips out a video advertisement they clearly didn’t think all the way through:
Katie Pavlich at Townhall spots one of the big logical fallacies in this ad: the gun control lobby’s preferred legislation would make it substantially more likely that the crazy abusive husband was armed, while the law-abiding woman protecting her child was not.
The new ad shows an unarmed woman with her child alone in her home when her violent ex-husband shows up at the door in a violent rage. She calls 911, but because when seconds count the police are minutes away, that phone call didn’t matter. The ex-husband breaks down the door, takes the kid and pulls a gun on the woman. All of this could have been prevented if the woman had a firearm in her possession as soon as she saw her ex-husband pounding on the door.
The point of the video according to Everytown is to urge people to contact their legislators about keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. Fair enough, but what happens when a domestic abuser disobeys firearms laws already on the books and gets a gun illegally (as most criminals do)? As the video makes clear, there was a restraining order against the husband, which he violated. What are women supposed to do when violent attackers disobey the laws? I happen to believe that a piece of paper and a false assurance police will show up on time aren’t good enough. Women must be able to go on the offensive with equal force to protect themselves.
Allow me to contribute a supplementary point to Katie’s challenge: the psycho ex doesn’t need a gun to severely injure or kill the woman he’s menacing, especially when she’s also trying to defend her child. A determined intruder is going to force entry into any house fairly quickly, if he’s not worried about making a lot of noise. At that point, in the absence of a legally owned firearm in the hands of the woman, this scenario becomes a hand-to-hand battle where most women aren’t going to be the favorites to win.
The gun-control lobby gets creamed in these logical arguments because what they’re selling is based on emotional appeals, above all the demand for childlike faith in the loving protection of the State. The Second Amendment irks liberals because it’s an explicit rejection of that faith, on both the macro level (with the hopefully theoretical concept of armed citizens using firearms to stand up against an unjust government) and the individual level, where the often-repeated aphorism cited by Katie Pavlich comes into play: when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
A fairly constant stream of real-world incidents emphasize that law-abiding people, especially vulnerable women, can’t afford to gamble that the police will arrive in time to do anything other than secure the crime scene. By providing harrowing video of just such a scenario, Everytown logically refutes its own emotional argument.