The informal logical fallacy known as “appeal to authority” isn’t where someone quotes an expert. It’s not when someone asks an expert for their take, even.
No, an appeal to authority is when someone who is an expert in one field leverages that expertise to pretend to be an authority in other fields.
This matters because, all too often in the gun debate, someone with some expertise in one area will try to use that to justify gun control. Often, though, they’re subtle enough to primarily talk about it through the lens of what they do. Physicians, for example, will justify assaults on our Second Amendment rights by discussing treating gunshot victims.
But this retired physician did none of that. While his bio notes that he’s a retired surgeon, he spends a lot of time pontificating on things he clearly knows nothing about.
Another horrific school shooting, this one Aug. 27 at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, briefly grabbed the media spotlight and our attention.
We learned that a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old were killed and 18 other students were injured, along with three older parishioners, as they celebrated the first Mass of the new school year.
Then the same tired talking points were repeated: Cain killed Abel with a rock long before guns were invented; “guns don’t kill people — people kill people”; “it’s a heart problem, not a gun problem,” and so on and so on.
We should not need the heartbreaking and senseless deaths of elementary schoolchildren to direct our attention to the issue of gun violence. Unfortunately, we have been overtaken by cynicism that tells us that nothing can be done and this is simply life in America — the price we pay for living in a society that values freedom. After all, the constitutional right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
He calls those talking points “tired,” yet I notice something here. He doesn’t actually refute them. He mentions them and then pretends they’ve long ago been debunked or something, when no, they haven’t.
Some have tried, but those attempts were pathetic and unconvincing to anyone who didn’t already agree with the underlying premise.
And then the good doctor gets into constitutional law.
We always seem to forget, though, another critical element of the Second Amendment, the one that mentions a well regulated militia. “Well regulated” suggests that regulations to ensure safety are reasonable and necessary. We also forget that the Constitution was written at a time when the founders couldn’t imagine pistols created by 3D printers or AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles.
Oh boy.
First, “well regulated” at the time of the nation’s founding was a term that meant “properly functioning.” That matters because that’s exactly what the Founding Fathers meant when they ratified the Second Amendment.
Additionally, that phrase is an introductory clause and doesn’t actually change the rest of the Second Amendment’s text, that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
If it actually intended some degree of regulation, it would seem that the militia itself would be open to regulation, not the right to keep and bear arms, which is clearly stated as one that shall not be infringed, and that belongs to the people. Not the state, not the federal government, not anyone else except for the people.
But again, he’s not finished yet.
One pernicious myth perpetuated today is that owning a gun makes you safe. The reality is that data shows overwhelmingly that having a gun in your home increases the chance that you or a family member will be shot and possibly die from a firearm injury.
The studies that claim this have long ago been refuted. For one thing, the researchers failed to differentiate between lawful gun ownership and criminal gun possession.
Further, it counts suicides as a factor but doesn’t account for suicides by other means in non-gun-owning households. It only looked at gunshot fatalities as a whole, then pretended that guns in the household make you less safe when that’s not remotely clear.
This also ignores the millions of defensive gun uses each and every year.
The ubiquity of firearms is not the only cause of our astronomical death rate from firearms, but is without a doubt the major contributor.
Yes, we have a ton of guns, and a ton of people use them to take lives, mostly their own.
But again, many anti-gun nations have a much higher suicide rate than we do, which gets ignored in this debate, because all anyone like the doctor can do is focus on the gunshot deaths.
For example, he fails to note through all of this that our non-gun homicide rate is higher than many developed nations’ total homicide rate. That includes the gun fatalities in anti-gun nations, which are still more significant than many might like for you to realize.
Through all this, the bio sits waiting for the reader to get to.
Dr. Edward T. Chory is a retired general surgeon in Lancaster and chair of the board of the local Partnership for Public Health.
In other words, his bio is supposed to impress people. It’s supposed to convince them that he knows what he’s talking about. This is a classic appeal to authority. He wants his medical credentials to convey his expertise, but his expertise has nothing at all to do with constitutional law, firearms policy, or anything of the sort.
His entire op-ed hinges on you being so clueless as to not comprehend that he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
And this isn’t an anomaly. This happens all the time, and we all see it.
I’m just calling it out.
Editor’s Note: The radical left, which includes people like this doctor, will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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