Anytime you find a community with a high rate of so-called gun violence that resides in a pro-gun state, someone is going to try to make the claim that the violence is so high because of the lack of gun control. I’m not exactly breaking new ground by saying it because you’ve all seen it before. It’s as common as it comes.
Frankly, it’s tiresome. That’s especially true when you have an entire state that doesn’t suffer the same issues.
Chip Hill, who serves as the chief of staff for Montgomery, Alabama Mayor Steven Reed went on an anti-gun rant recently, blaming the state’s supposedly lax gun laws for his city’s problems with violent crime.
And one Alabama state lawmaker had to clap back and put Hill in his place.
State Rep. Russell Bedsole (R-Alabaster) responded Monday to Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed’s chief of staff Chip Hill’s online anti-gun rant in which he dragged Alabama for what he considers lax gun laws leading to more violence.
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In another post, Hill attempted to connect the state’s gun laws and its rate of gun violence.
Bedsole, who has a lengthy law enforcement career, responded by observing that the same state laws apply to his district, which suffers from a significantly lower level of gun violence.
Now, admittedly, Bedsole’s district doesn’t seem to have an area with as high of a population density as Montgomery, but that’s also kind of the point, right?
If the issue were the lack of gun control laws on the books in Alabama, then population density wouldn’t matter. A community of a dozen people would have as high of a crime rate as the largest cities in the state. Clearly not as many total crimes, but as high of a crime rate.
Yet they don’t.
It’s cities like Montgomery that drive up the state’s violent crime rates as a whole, overshadowing the more peaceful communities throughout Alabama. Yet, those other communities have the exact same gun control laws or the lack thereof.
Gun control advocates often do this. It’s a case of post hoc ergo propter hock, or “after, therefore because of,” an informal logical fallacy that basically argues a thing happens simply because this other thing happened before. In this case, the state refused to pass gun control and Montgomery has a problem with violence.
Yet again, if the issue were purely about the accessibility of guns to law-abiding people, then the entire state would be awash in bloodshed, and it’s not.
But then again, logic also tells us that if criminals can get guns in spite of the law then more laws aren’t likely to keep criminals from getting guns. That’s never stopped gun control advocates from pushing the idea that gun control is what’s truly logical.
Then again, I’m not sure most of those folks would know logic if it jumped on their face and wiggled. If they did, they’d see the fallacies and stop pushing something that’ll never work.
