Virus?
Dr. Catherine Christoffel, a Chicago pediatrician and spokeswomen for the fifty thousand members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the American Medical Association: "Guns are a virus that must be eradicated." She went on: "Get rid cigarettes, get rid of secondhand smoke, and you get rid of lung cancer. It is the same with guns. Get rid of guns, get rid of bullets, and you get rid of deaths."
This is certainly an unstable leg to use in support of gun abolition.
Let us address the content directly:
Well, no, they are not. Not in any viable sense of the word. Not in their physical manifestation, not in their production, not in their dissemination. This is the worst sort of broken metaphor: "learned" hyperbole. There is simply no supportable avenue for this assertion.
On the other hand, let's examine something that
DOES spread by contagion (since this is the essence of the "virus" allegation). Let's examine bad thinking. Let's examine false data. Let's examine hysteria and phobia. It is significantly more plausible to say that
"hysteria and flawed reasoning promoting irrational fears by using 'authority' and falsified facts" is a virus.
Hysteria spreads the way a virus spreads: by contagion via persons who have no natural or inoculated resistance to the emotional "carrier wave" of the message of fear. Rumors (factually unverified stories of alleged events) spread the same way. It is an axiom of politics that what a public hears often enough "becomes the truth" for that public.
Guns don't spread virally. There simply is no mechanism for it. One could plausibly assert that
cars spread virally, but the mechanism there is aesthetics conveyed through popular media and a wide cultural acceptance and constant open exposure.
There simply is not any equivalent conduit for guns. Instead, guns are constantly and unremittingly vilified, constantly attributed with evil, constantly prohibited, constantly blamed for criminal acts, and constantly used as a scapegoat for a myriad of social ills. Spread virally? Not hardly.
Let us address the other point:
"Get rid cigarettes, get rid of secondhand smoke, and you get rid of lung cancer. It is the same with guns. Get rid of guns, get rid of bullets, and you get rid of deaths."
Amazing. Staggering. The use of a falsehood to promote a factual hyperbole, followed by yet another falsehood.
This level of dishonesty in presentation is breathtaking, inasmuch as it is so compactly presented and done with the clinical "precision" of a diagnosis -- completely dismissive of any alternative view.
Yeah, guns are a virus; get rid of them and people will stop dying.
That's not just ONE falsehood, it's two. And they don't even depend on one another; both assertions are independently false. This gives rise to a third, but more subtle falsehood, being that death is the natural consequence of guns.
Yeah, cancer is caused by secondhand smoke, so we have to get rid of cigarettes.
That secondhand smoke causes cancer is yet another piece of politically driven "science" having no foundation in actual fact. It was trotted out to support the punitive taxation of tobacco. Any number of social programs were then funded by this new revenue stream.
In my own home state, a scholarship program was instituted that would be "completely funded" by tobacco monies. The joke, of course, is that this taxation has accomplished just what taxation always does: it has caused a steep reduction in revenues, leading to the legislature's having to appropriate monies from other revenue because, after all, just because the promised tobacco revenue has dried up, that's no reason to discontinue the "cost free" scholarship program.
The secondhand smoke boogieman has been used to impose any number of restrictions "for our own protection" when in reality these restrictions are simply behavioral control.
To use this piece of false data to support the hyperbole
(guns are a virus) is so far from anything resembling science that its use can only be understood to be disingenuous.
In the vernacular: it's a tissue of lies used to hide the motives of the person using the argument.
It's dishonest. It's dishonest and hides its political motives behind false science.
I don't believe I could bring myself to study a book, other than as a clinical exercise, that was written from this approach to "research."
Such an endeavor would amount to intellectual assault.
Sadly, however, this intellectual assault will be used as another weapon in the ongoing cultural assault against individual liberty.
And this I cannot condone.
