You can rely on the pro-life crowd to be most vocal in support of gun rights. Apparently, a dot of cells has value, but country music fans are on their own. Dead? Well, that’s a small price to pay for freedom. And no one is second to Rick Santorum in this hypocrisy.
Like the rest of the gun zealots, Rick is desperate to point the finger somewhere besides guns. He used CNN’s State of the Union, to trot out the old chestnut — violent video games lead to violence.
“Violence in television and the video games — there is a mountain of evidence out there, psychological evidence, about what we’re doing to our young people with these video games, violent video games, and you never hear the left trying to go after Hollywood or the gaming market,” Santorum exclaimed. “It is never involved in this discussion. Where is the solution? Here we are. Where is the solution?”
I’ll grant you, it has a certain superficial logic — you watch violence, you become violent. Unfortunately, a closer look reveals the flaw in Rick’s argument. The UK is equally awash in violent video games — but has no gun massacres and few gun deaths of any kind.
You can say all you want that: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, but that misrepresents an obvious truth. A violent person can’t shoot someone if he doesn’t have a gun. A proposition reflected by the fact that gun violence rates tend to be higher in states with higher gun ownership.
Nevertheless Rick will not be distracted from his program of distraction.
“Always gun control,” Santorum complained. “It is never about the violence we have in our society, it is never about what Hollywood, you know, contribution to that.”
Which raises the question: Don’t people go to the movies in New York and Massachusetts? Of course they do, so their relatively low murder rates must be due to something else. A cursory look at the data shows that gun violence tends to be more prevalent in states with high church attendance. We’ll have to take a closer look at that.
Anyway, people like Rick Santorum are not helpful. He is a man who assumes that because he believes something to be true there must be some evidence to support it. He is, after all, a self-confessed, devout Catholic who thinks he knows more than the Pope on climate change. And disagrees with his own Church’s position on evolution.
(Credit: Mediaite)