The Kansas City Category Error

Influential people with anti-gun views often want to “wade into the debate” after a big shooting. They’d have us believe that they are apolitical people who were above or outside of the debate, but because something that happened was so terrible, it merits them taking the highly unusual step and perhaps enduring some personal sacrifice.

But, if you do a quick search, most of the celebrities who act like this have a history of doing it. The truth is, they’re part of the anti-gun movement, they do this after every high-profile shooting and they’ll do it again.

Want some solid proof? Just look at the talking points. If they were a fresh voice entering the debate, they’d bring some fresh ideas with them. But, they say the same thing all of the other celebrities do. So, it makes sense to point out that they’re being disingenuous so that people can see that they’re faking it.

But, after the Kansas City Super Bowl parade shooting, there’s another valuable point to be made: These “I’m not normally political” celebs don’t want to talk about the factual circumstances of the shooting itself.

The fact is, this was a gang shooting, not a mass shooting. While every life lost is a tragedy, we can’t treat all deaths by bullet the same way if we want to productively solve the problem. Laws that might prevent suicide differ from laws that might dissuade criminals and laws that could dissuade a suicidal mass shooter. When we try to “one size fits all” the problem, we don’t arrive at useful conclusions.

But, as we know, the anti-gun movement isn’t after solutions. They’re after guns. To admit that the shooting in Kansas City was a gang fight and not a mass murder situation would tip the audience off. Anybody with even half a lick of common sense knows that gang members who were already carrying guns illegally aren’t going to be stopped by any new anti-gun laws. All that would accomplish would be to burden good people while leaving gang members’ guns alone.

So, to avoid this awkwardness and keep people from seeing that they’d made a category error (aka a “fallacy of composition”), these celebs go straight to things like this:

 

To categorize a problem properly and come up with a real solution, we first have to look at the whole problem. We can’t look at it from one angle through somebody else’s glasses if we want to see clearly enough to know what’s even going on. But, we can’t expect a guy who said “I hate guns dawg” in the past to give us an honest opinion on the solution. The hate is all he knows, and it’s all he wants fans to know.

Blinding us to the real situation with thoughts about children and victims might seem like the empathetic thing to do on the surface, but stopping there keeps our minds on the surface instead of digging deeper.