Two Knives and a Garrot equal one Assault Rifle

In, 1999 - a long, long time ago, indeed, way back in a previous century - Neil was preparing over the summer to enroll in Vermont's Middlebury College.  Striving to assist my son matriculate the ball down the field toward a more successful academic career than my own, I endeavored to incorporate in a multi-page narrative all the best examples of classical logic and rhetoric (with comparisons to sophistry) from my Davidson College years.

Now, sixteen years later, I remember very little of my essay, about which Neil has confirmed having no recollection whatsoever, despite its classical prose honed at the desk of Classics Professor George Labban, R.I.P.  The exclusive recollection still fresh in my own mind is that the rhetoric of logic, when done well, is the most persuasive form of the rational polemic.  Here is the very example I shared with Neil:   A raging dialectic debate, then in the forefront of U.S. opinion makers just as it is today, focused on the transformational utility of gun control measures.  These gun control advocates advanced as their central tenet the purported direct cause and effect correlation of private gun ownership prohibitions with achievement of the universally desired goal of the eradication of gun violence, citing accurate crime stats from several nation's with these prohibitions that had experienced sharp drops in firearm murders.  For them, however, that fair proposition was invariably followed up by pure sophistry.  These gun banners then asserted unequivocally that such mass gun confiscations, by ending unlawful shootings, secured universal public safety by prevention of homicidal criminal violence. 

Regrettably, logic and reason immediately put the lie to this grandiose claim.  As I wrote to Neil:

  "After Great Britian banned the private ownership of firearms, murders by garroting increased by over 2000 per cent annually."

Now, I did not actually research England's record of strangulation homicides.  Nonetheless, the imperative of comparing all methods of murder to ascertain effectiveness of any particular prevention policy is obvious and would not to be overlooked by intellectually honest persons seriously proposing to repeal an Amendment to our Constitution enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  Again the obvious - humans bent on doing murderous harm to others will readily substitute alternate available weapons for the guns denied them.

Indeed, a recent news article from Great Britain reported that a Member of Parliament was calling for restrictions on the sale of steak knives due to a recent significant increase in homicidal stabbings.  One could easily ask - would serving forks with multiple prongs be next up for confiscation in England?

In sum, therefore, this rhetorical exercise has demonstrated by irrefutable logic that the evil in men's hearts will not be deterred by mere gun control laws; they are no panacea in that all western societies having implemented them have achieved little if any enhancement to public safety.  Would that our nation's policy makers and talking heads had been graduated either by Middlebury or Davidson.