By Dennis Hicks, Hamilton
It has been reported that the gone-viral passionate speech by Emma Gonzalez was an incentive for the recent school walkouts in Hamilton (and presumably elsewhere). Emma is a teenage survivor of the recent Parkland school massacre in Florida who describes herself in a Harper’s Magazine article: “I’m 18 years old, Cuban, and bisexual.” I listened to Emma’s emotional rant on youtube (emotional appeals are very powerful) and observed that her speech is a target-rich environment for logical fallacies — particularly the fallacies of false-cause and ad-hominem attacks.
Emma asserts the proximate cause of mass shootings is the NRA’s influence over our elected officials — that’s why nothing is done to control guns and keep our children safe at school. She further asserts that every politician that received campaign contributions from the NRA (and presumably, NRA members) should be ashamed of their complicity in gun-related deaths by madmen. Emma, and some other teenagers who have gotten more than their 15 minutes of fame in the news media, have attempted to demonize the NRA by connecting some very strange dots: They assert the NRA, which provides excellent training on gun safety and lawful use of firearms, is the proximate cause of the unsafe use of firearms by non-NRA members.
I no longer expect high-school seniors in America to detect logical fallacies since logic and critical thinking are seldom taught in our schools. For the same reason, I’m not surprised their teachers missed this great teaching opportunity to teach how to detect and counter flaws in reasoning (non-sequiturs), particularly in political speech. But where are the parents? Why are the parents not protecting their children from being manipulated by ideologues who use them as props to advance their so-called progressive agenda with deceptive sophistry?
More gun control is offered as the only solution for what is not a legal problem at all but is a moral problem. Since the development of virtue is also seldom taught in our schools it is no surprise we are experiencing a rise in non-virtuous behaviors in our society — including a loss of respect for human life.
While the left-media feast on the rhetoric of manipulated teenagers, making the survivors of the Parkland shootings poster-children for gun control, they are significantly silent about the parents of those who lost their lives in that tragedy. It might surprise you to learn the parents of 13 of the 17 victims co-signed a letter to Congress in which they endorse the Students, Teachers, and Officers Preventing (STOP) School Violence Act and the Fix NICS Act, both with no gun-control measures. All seventeen families signed a similar letter and voiced their support for Florida’s Senate Bill 7026, which allows a trained volunteer school personnel to carry firearms on campus to keep the students safe.
Teenagers, by definition, are immature and inexperienced and therefore are vulnerable to manipulation by adults, especially adults in authority. It is their parent’s duty to protect them from exploitation and to help them advance in reasoning and critical thinking. When I read about the school walkouts I wondered, where were their parents?