Cowardice

Thursday 18 April 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Jacob Sullum on Obama and Giffords’ insistence that those senators who declined to vote yea on the gun control bill did so out of cowardice and fear:

Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who stood next to President Obama yesterday, nodding as he berated the senators who voted against his gun control proposals for their “shameful” failure to agree with him, continues the tantrum in today’s New York Times. As gun controllers tend to do, she opens with an emotion-laden non sequitur[.]

[. . .]

In Giffords’ view, these senators are two-faced, because you cannot truly sympathize with her unless you vote for the bills she supports. But I am a little confused about the purported motivation for this perceived betrayal. Obama and Giffords both insist the senators who voted against new gun controls did so not out of conviction but out of fear—specifically, fear that they would be defeated the next time they run for re-election. If their constituents “overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks,” however, wouldn’t voting for the bill mandating those have been the politically expedient thing to do? And why is opposing the will of the majority a mark of “cowardice,” as Giffords says, rather than a mark of courage?

They talk of “fear” and “cowardice” because they haven’t any intellectual ground on which to stand. Their only argument is “they didn’t allow the emotional pleas of an ex-congresswoman and the parents of dead children whose bloody shirts we wave as a banner of solidarity to convince them to vote our way, and have been consumed by fear of the NRA.”

Sullum concludes:

Enough already. If you have an argument to make, make it. But do not assume that the only possible explanation for your failure to persuade people is their bad faith or lack of compassion.

Unfortunately for the left, non-sequitors and invective is all they have.

2013-04-18  »  madlibertarianguy