The White Settlement community is still mourning the deaths of the victims of this past weekend’s shooting (and celebrating the heroes who acted quickly to subdue the shooter). But as we told you yesterday, America’s Expert™ Tom Nichols has been much more focused on the scourge of law-abiding people who choose to exercise their Second Amendment right to self-defense, including in church and other houses of worship.
NRO editor Charles C.W. Cooke — who wasn’t born in the U.S. but knows a hell of a lot more about our Constitution than certain self-professed Experts — made a simple but reasonable point last night:
I certainly think that a widespread right to keep and bear arms is a prerequisite component of a free republic.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
It should come as no surprise that Tom Nichols had a problem with it:
Even when I was a Republican, I never understood people who measure freedom by how many of us walk around with guns. This is a cultural change, the spreading of the gun culture from a corner of the GOP to the entire conservative moment. /1https://t.co/xJq5TlAMbw
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 31, 2019
The spread of gun worship is conservative virtue-signaling. Never liked it when I was among my old tribe, and it's gotten worse as "conservatives" try to figure out new markers for what makes them "patriots" now that they've had to sell out so much actual patriotism to Trump. /2
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 31, 2019
When I was a kid, everyone had a gun. Most of my neighbors. Teachers. (Lots more veterans in those days.) But it was not a culture of "I went for a coffee and wore my gun because damn it, I'm an American." My GOP voting family and friends never talked about guns. Why would we? /3
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 31, 2019
Among the working class guys who all owned guns, talking a lot about guns was weird. You had them, it was your right, you left it at that. We didn't measure our sense of worth by whether we were going to go face down the gangbangers around our church in the 70s. /4
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 31, 2019
I'm uncomfortable with people who worship guns and feel the need to have them nearby 24/7 not because of guns, but because I'm uncomfortable with people who worship guns. That this is now a litmus test for "conservatives" tells you something sad about conservatism. /5x
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 31, 2019
You can just feel the sneering condescension dripping from Tom’s tweets. And while he certainly used a lot of words, Nichols’ rambling effectively amounts to shooting intellectual blanks. Find someone who loves you like Tom Nichols loves a straw man, and you’ll be golden.
Since Nichols is evidently too dense to realize that his arguments are pointless, it’s up to Cooke to provide the intellectual firepower:
This is not actually what I wrote. I wrote that the right is a prerequisite; I didn’t say it is the only prerequisite or that everyone is obliged to exercise it. Indeed, in the same thread I explicitly said that freedom means the choice to decline to, too. https://t.co/3QruEoa9IW
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
The only person judging others for their choices here is Nichols. I would be outraged if someone who does not want to own a gun, or to carry one, were forced to, or expected to. Nichols, by contrast, looks down on the people who do. This represents a big difference in approach.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
He also considers the people who do choose to carry guns to be a problem per se, when the facts not only fail to support this, but show that those people are considerably less of a problem in society than the people whom we pay to carry guns.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
An intellectually coherent argument is that the existence of privately owned guns is a problem, and that they should all be removed. I oppose this, for reasons I’ve written about at length. A stupid argument is that we should not do that, but we should restrict carry by law.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
And the worst argument of all is that you consider concealed carriers a problem—and, worse, a class to lament, to avoid, to look down upon—because they aren’t of your “cultural background.” I’m foreign originally; they’re not of mine, either. That’s not an excuse for stupidity.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 31, 2019
See, now that’s expertise.
Tom arguing in bad faith and/or displaying a lack of reading comprehension? Surely you jest!
— High Fruit Toast Corn Syrup (@Maximiliannn) December 31, 2019
For an expert, @RadioFreeTom’s reading comprehension is surprisingly poor.
— Is RBG Dead Yet???⚖️ (@IsRBGDeadYet) December 31, 2019
Charles vs the Expert is a brutal intellectual mismatch. This takedown is going to leave a mark on Tom. ?
— Christie007 (@ChristieAlkema1) December 31, 2019
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