The health of any ideology can be measured precisely by how often it asks you to engage in “doublethink.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like … but George Orwell’s oracular 1984 defines it thus: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out.” In order to oppose the Second Amendment, you must engage in doublethink all the time, and that’s how you can tell that anti-gun thought is diseased. Here’s what I mean.
Anti-gun Doublethink: “Guns are lethal, but only to you.”
How many times have you heard the canard about how having a firearm in your home makes you more likely to be the victim of gun violence? A lot, right? And how many times have you heard the one about how if you were to deploy a gun against an attacker, he would simply take it away from you and use it against you? You’ve probably heard that one a lot, too. I sure have, but I’ve noticed a bit of a contradiction there.
Which is it, anti-gunners? Are firearms so lethal that their mere presence turns a happy household into an auto-da-fé? Or are they so ineffective that a random mugger can brush them aside like a hatpin? It can’t be both.
Anti-gun Doublethink: “Only the police should have guns. There should be no police.”
How many times have you heard anti-gunners disdainfully announce that if you want to own an AR-15, you should become a law-enforcement officer or soldier? That’s one of the bedrock principles of anti-gun thought—that only the government should have access to lethal force. (What they never explain is how or why government employees are any different or better than regular citizens, and that’s because in America, government employees are regular citizens with the same rights as the rest of us.)
So why is it that the people who are demanding that we NRA Women rely solely on the police to protect us are simultaneously demanding that the nation’s law enforcement be defunded? Are the police infallible automatons that will always deploy lethal force correctly, or are they an outmoded way of maintaining society? Which is it, anti-gunners? It can’t be both.
Cognitive Dissonance Explains So Much
The human mind is not well-designed to deal with mutually contradictory beliefs. It causes what’s called “cognitive dissonance,” and it seems to be unpleasant for the mind that’s trying to double itself. It has been described as a feeling of deep discomfort, a sense that the conversation needs to come to a halt immediately, and feelings of fear, shame and rage.
There’s a way to verify for yourself that anti-gunners do a lot of doublethinking, and that is to ask one or both of the questions I listed above. This is my experience, so therefore it’s anecdotal, but so far it has been universal: The anti-gun answer to “Which is it, anti-gunners? It can’t be both,” has been unprintable. When the only answer to a logical question is the same thing one might say upon slamming a door on one’s finger, cognitive dissonance is what caused that pain.
The One Pro-Gun Doublethink
By contrast, supporting the Second Amendment is easy. There is no cognitive dissonance inherent in “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms shall not be infringed.” That said, no ideology is completely free of doublethink, and pro-gun thought is included in that. We do ask you to engage in doublethink once and only once (and we beg you to never stop): That gun is always loaded, even when it isn’t, so always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction and your finger off the trigger until you are on target and ready to fire.
Now double-tap that doublethink.
