Wonderful post by Jeff Reynolds at PJ Media:
Eight False Pretenses Liberals Use to Frame an Argument
Our friends on The Left, especially The Professional Left, use emotional arguments to win hearts and minds. We conservatives are typically not very good at storytelling, which puts us at a disadvantage when trying to win debates over public policy. This disadvantage becomes more pronounced when we fail to counter the false premises of The Left. When we let an underlying premise go unchallenged, we have already lost the argument.
Too many Republicans, and even too many conservatives (not necessarily the same thing), fall into the trap of The Professional Left every single time. They'll meet the Democrats on their turf, leaving their false premises unchallenged in an attempt not to look like a typically mean Republican. When we use the language of The Left to try to beat them, the referee might as well declare a TKO before we even enter the ring. If we conservatives permanently want to change the arguments over taxes, budgets, health care, immigration, abortion, and any number of a host of public policies, we must first learn to recognize the false premises of The Left and call them out for what they are. As Napoleon learned at Waterloo, it never works out when you fight your enemy on their home turf. Reclaim the battlefield, and you claim the battle.
Here are Eight False Premises of The Left. Learn to recognize and counter them, and the argument will flow your way every time (at least until you're called Hitler, invoking Godwin's Law). Which false premise of The Left drives you craziest?
1. Mass shootings are on the rise! If we could just get rid of all the guns, people wouldn't be so violent!
This argument bears all the hallmarks of a False Premise of The Left. Take a crisis, blow it out of proportion, and demand emergency action. Voila! Rights revoked, and everybody feels better! This is the classic argument of the advocates of gun control. This argument presupposes that humans aren't naturally predisposed toward violence to assert their dominance in a dispute.
In order to defeat this argument, one must know the freely available stats on the rates of violent crime. Every outlet you can find, left-leaning, right-leaning, government stats, whatever is out there -- they all show a dramatic drop in violent crime since its peak in the early '90s. This article from National Review gives a good overview. The upshot is that as funding for police increases, violent crime decreases. About those mass shootings? According to John Lott, France had more deaths from mass shootings in 2015 than the U.S. had in all eight years of the Obama administration. This is not a uniquely American problem, and the frequency of attacks is a mere 0.078 per million people. Statistically, the chance of dying in a mass shooting event is roughly equivalent to dying in a severe weather event. Is it awful? Of course. Should we do more? Absolutely. Should we trample the rights of law-abiding gun owners? What do you think?
Well analysed - seven more at the site. Well worth the time to read.
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