Aspirational Gun Use

Adam Gopnik wrote a thing:

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

David French musters the rebutts of the True Scotsmen:

While there is much to be said about this string of slanders, let’s be crystal clear about one thing. Every law-abiding gun-owner I’ve ever met in my entire life is not only utterly opposed to the taking of innocent life, they aspire to defend innocent life at the risk of their own (of course, no one knows how they’ll respond to a crisis until the crisis actually comes).

Thank you for the crystal clarity regarding the gun-owners you know, the law-abiding ones that is, who you can't vouch for in a crisis, said crisis possibly having some bearing on their gun use.

Despite his obvious and overwhelming sense of outrage, Mr. Gopnik can’t say the same.

Adam Gopnik could say exactly the same thing if he wanted, but I assume French thinks his sentence hinges on the "defend innocent life" bit.

If he is “pro-choice,” he in fact believes that some innocent life not only shouldn’t be defended, but that fellow citizens should have a constitutional right to take that life on a whim.

Gotcha! I believe black is white and you have said something about white therefore you have said it about BLACK!

There may be more to Gopnik's depravity than definitional differences; he might be a monster on the order of a Canadian. Nevertheless I'm pretty sure that someone who is utterly opposed to the taking of innocent life shouldn't involve himself in wars of aggression. I know, I know, definitions.