The gun fetishists and barrel polishers are out in force, and their exalted leader, Wayne LaPierre went on national television yesterday and showed pretty much what we all know: there can be no cohesive or rational justification for the gun culture we have. After a week of preparation, all he came up with was more guns, more god, and more moralizing bullshit about how our declining social fabric can be cured, with autocracy. And even more guns.

In another forum, a chamber maid posed this steaming pile of rhetorical shit disguised as an honest question:

Quiz time: Which is deadlier, a Baseball bat or a gun?

Yes, folks. That came up in "honest debate". How the fuck do you debate when your opponent opens with something so cartoonish?

How are they going to follow this up? What's more dangerous? A 5 kiloton tactical nuclear weapon, or a 10 oz bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows?

This is the reason you can't have an honest or reasonable debate with a barrel polisher. 

For the most part, they are intelligent and emotionally mature enough to realize the inherent moral dilemma in idolizing an instrument of death, yet their desire to possess it overpowers any desire they may have to care about any greater social responsibility. 

Any small guilt they may happen to feel over this morally bankrupt choice can be swallowed yet is evinced by the craven stupidity of their arguments in support of their idols. Rather than simply admit to  a selfish desire, they construct elaborate false equivalences and use excruciatingly tortured logic in an attempt to turn an all-too-obvious reality into some irreducible fantasy.

Here, "the debater" is obviously laying the ground work for the profoundly, no, obscenely, stupid proposition that baseball bats are more, or at least equivalently, dangerous to "a gun". 

Any person that argues that a baseball bat is more or equally dangerous than "a gun" simply cannot be taken seriously. This is a classic demonstration of the fantasy I mentioned above. Forget reality.  

News Flash:
22 December, 2012 - Washington, DC (AP)
In a surprise announcement today, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that weapons researchers had found baseball bats to be such efficient and effective weapons that he'd instructed the United States Army to stop issuing M4s or M16s to troops in preference to Louisville Sluggers. Stock in the Kentucky based sporting goods company skyrocketed in after hours trading on the news that they were being eyed as a takeover target by the nation's top defense contractors.

Yes, people can be killed with a bat. Or a brick. But, it's not efficient, or effective from a energy expenditure standpoint, it's messy and it takes a certain commitment beyond a few ounces of trigger pull. It cannot be denied that making the killing of people more difficult can't help but reduce the occurrence. 

This false equivalency is one of the most utilized tools in the nearly empty toolbox that is rational justifications for our gun culture: "any two objects that can be used to accomplish the same task are thus rendered identical in all respects". A brick can be used to kill someone or build a house, so it's deadly but widely used in a good way. Yep. Just like a gun. Or a baseball bat.

At my last garage sale, I was astonished to learn that while I can drive a nail with my 32 oz framing hammer, or with my handy 33 lb bar of gold bullion, nobody would pay $797,017.00 for my hammer.