{"id":54954,"date":"2015-08-28T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54954"},"modified":"2015-08-28T05:39:41","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T10:39:41","slug":"confirmation-bias-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54954","title":{"rendered":"Betting Long On Ignorance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like most of the Real Americans that support the Second Amendment, I am agog at the gullibility and willful illiteracy of most American gun control advocates, up to and including many of their leadership.<\/p>\n<p>For years, I&#8217;ve thought &#8220;this just\u00a0<em>has\u00a0<\/em>to be part of a strategy to rope in the gullible, the badly-informed, the fear-driven, and the intellectual-legends-in-their-own-minds&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>And as with most of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?page_id=5033\">my flippant observations about human behavior that start out as sarcastic jokes and almost invariably turn out to be ironclad truths<\/a>, it turns out I&#8217;m exactly,l precisely correct.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Violence Policy Center&#8221; &#8211; a &#8220;think tank&#8221; supported by liberals with deep pockets, that&#8217;s short on the &#8220;think&#8221; and long on the &#8220;in the tank&#8221; &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vpc.org\/studies\/awacont.htm\">did a report on gun control tactics in 1988<\/a>. \u00a0 While I was pro-Second-Amendment back then, I didn&#8217;t spend a lot of time reading the opposition on the subject.<\/p>\n<p>And if I had, I&#8217;d have spent the past 27 years beating on this coming quote like John Bonham playing &#8220;Moby Dick&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThe semi-automatic weapons\u2019 menacing looks, coupled with the public\u2019s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons \u2014 anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun \u2014 can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words, the past three decades of the gun control movement have been predicated on exploiting technical ignorance, fear and gullibility.<\/p>\n<p>It extends to all areas of their agenda, of course &#8211; stats, policy, history &#8211; but rarely do you find a grabber putting it in as many words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like most of the Real Americans that support the Second Amendment, I am agog at the gullibility and willful illiteracy of most American gun control advocates, up to and including many of their leadership. For years, I&#8217;ve thought &#8220;this just\u00a0has\u00a0to be part of a strategy to rope in the gullible, the badly-informed, the fear-driven, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-gun-control","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54954"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54956,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54954\/revisions\/54956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}