Sunday, July 22, 2012

This is how to stop "we need gun control" arguments

Well, if the person with whom you're arguing has any sense, that is.

Jessica Ghawi came to my attention because the victim of the Aurora shooting had a local connection.  Turns out there's something very eerie in her past.  I'm talking shades of Final Destination.

There was a shooting last month in a mall in Toronto the Good, and Ghawi barely made it out before the carnage started:

She wrote that at 6:20 p.m., she bought a burger but instead of sitting down to eat it at the Eaton Centre food court, she went outside to get some fresh air.

"The gunshots rung out at 6:23," she wrote. "Had I not gone outside, I would've been in the midst of gunfire."
This illustrates very clearly that we are right in saying tighter gun control would not have prevented what happened in Colorado.  Because Canada has that tighter control, and it's not what saved her--sheer dumb luck is.

Sadly, it seems her mother hasn't quite figured that out yet:

The fact that she did, within weeks, shows that such shootings aren't “a freak thing anymore,” said (Sandy) Phillips, who described herself as a “gun person” who was raised around firearms. But it's not right, she said, that Holmes had access to a high-powered AR-15 assault rifle.

“There's an anger there, but it's directed at society and the changes we need to make,” she said, adding that if lobbying to change the law is a way to honor her daughter's memory, she will consider it.
I'll give her a pass for the time being; none of us think clearly while grieving.  One hopes she'll realize the logical fallacy inherent in what she's saying.  Even sans the Toronto shooting, though, it's rather idiotic to call for a renewed ban on assault weapons when the man was also armed with a handgun and a pump-action shotgun.  Of course, the other two items don't have the severe amount of disinformation about them floating around, which makes them much more difficult targets.  (I encountered, Friday morning, a liberal Facebook friend who claimed several times that assault rifle = fully automatic.  And she wasn't being disingenuous, she literally did not know any better.)

As a side note, I cannot for the life of me figure out why she used a different surname professionally.  (Perhaps it's her mother's maiden name?  Nothing I've read explains it.)  Can you not be a journalist in Colorado with an ethnic surname?

2 comments:

Albatross said...

You know, until you mentioned it, I hadn't even thought of the name Ghawi as being "ethnic". I just thought she used the name Redfield as a stage name that was easier to spell and pronounce. It didn't strike me as anything odd, because so many other performers and public people do the same thing.

Maureen said...

Mike Taylor from the station she interned at said she reluctantly changed it because "Redfield" was easier to pronounce than her given name, and it was also a play on her red hair.

I enjoy your blog....came over from Dave's.