• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

How to frame the gun lobby argument to cut off debate

The dems use various shootings to push for gun control laws that wouldn't do anything to prevent those particular incidents. It's just as intellectually dishonest as what the gop does.
 
Yes, that's why Chicago, New York, Detroit and Washington DC are among the safest cities in the US surrounded by hot spots of gun ownership like West Virginia, rural Kansas and Arkansas where thousands of people a year are killed by gun violence.

Oh, wait a minute, I have that backwards..... How does gun control work again? :rolleyes:

Gun debate threads are that way >>>>

This thread is about manipulating the narratives.
 
The dems use various shootings to push for gun control laws that wouldn't do anything to prevent those particular incidents. It's just as intellectually dishonest as what the gop does.

Regardless of the debate points, framing is a separate issue. Notice how you claim the Democrats use the shootings for their political issues bypassing the actual issue, what actions might or might not decrease the homicides.

You could have just addressed your point, that you believe gun control would be ineffective. Instead you addressed a political view, attacking the opponent's motives.

One has to ask however, if gun regulations were so ineffective, why does the gun lobby have to frame the arguments so manipulatively?
 
Oh, dear, somebody weaponized science again, I am afraid. You see, even my own erstwhile profession of linguistics can be misused (link to short abstract). The stuff on the link has been weaponized now, and propaganda is so sophisticated that it's now a Goebbels wet dream come true. The profession also spawned that woo horror, NLP.

The narratives the Republican Party deploys are part of a resource kit shared by the right in the EU and US. I find the same stories ("relatos") embedded and tailored to local condition here in Spain as I read in the US, over and over and over again. I imagine if I paid more attention elsewhere, I'd find it. Russia is getting much better at the game, and so are others.

The US, however, is still #1, numero uno, top dog in one thing. Let us take a moment of silence as Carlin lays out our common doom.
I have been pointing media literacy out since I first joined the JREF. I even spoke about it at one of the 15 minute Sunday talks at TAM. I believe recognizing things like framing in the news and in political speech is an important component of critical thinking.

It's more than just BS. It's a particular kind of BS.

Another example is using the all or none argument, claiming the Democrats are expecting gun regulations to "fix" the problem. That is not the claim at all. The claim is it will contribute to decreasing some of the homicides.

Now that may or may not be true. But the debate should be about whether it will help. Changing that argument to whether or not it will cure the problem is replacing the actual argument with one of straw that is more easily defeated.
 
Last edited:
Regardless of the debate points, framing is a separate issue. Notice how you claim the Democrats use the shootings for their political issues bypassing the actual issue, what actions might or might not decrease the homicides.

You could have just addressed your point, that you believe gun control would be ineffective. Instead you addressed a political view, attacking the opponent's motives.

One has to ask however, if gun regulations were so ineffective, why does the gun lobby have to frame the arguments so manipulatively?

When someone is being intellectually dishonest, you point that out. The democrats know that the legislation they proposed in wake of sandyhook would have done nothing to prevent sandyhook, yet that is how they framed it. I see no reason to "debate the issues" with someone being intellectually dishonest. You've done the same thing here, you are calling out dishonest republican framing instead of "debating" it on their terms.

Here's another example of democrats (and republicans too) being intellectually dishonest on the issue: http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ntrol-democrats-debate-republicans?CMP=twt_gu

One could ask why the democrats need to be as manipulative as the republicans, my guess is that's just the state of our politics. There's no honesty in this debate from either side. This issue gets demagogued even when it's not an election cycle.
 
Those who are against a new AWB have many valid points.

96% of gun murders are committed with handguns.

however, number of murders committed by conceal-carry citizens is extremely small, about .47% over 8 years.

Many argue that if you don't include gand-related murders, America's murder rate is well below 1 per 100,000.
 
When someone is being intellectually dishonest, you point that out. The democrats know that the legislation they proposed in wake of sandyhook would have done nothing to prevent sandyhook, yet that is how they framed it. I see no reason to "debate the issues" with someone being intellectually dishonest. You've done the same thing here, you are calling out dishonest republican framing instead of "debating" it on their terms.

Here's another example of democrats (and republicans too) being intellectually dishonest on the issue: http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ntrol-democrats-debate-republicans?CMP=twt_gu

One could ask why the democrats need to be as manipulative as the republicans, my guess is that's just the state of our politics. There's no honesty in this debate from either side. This issue gets demagogued even when it's not an election cycle.
This thread is not limited to only discussing right wing framing.

But you are talking about something different. Using an event to motivate an action is not the same as distorting the argument.

Why the need to not use the event? Because the gun lobby knows said event will motivate people to act.

If, after the event was no longer fresh on people's minds, the gun lobby did indeed come back to the table to have the discussion, one might not be able to label the talking point, "this is not the time", as a debate ending tactic.

But given time and time again that didn't happen, and given when that postponement was no longer effective the gun lobby shifted the talking point to yet another one that delayed or ended the debate, it becomes clear the motive is to stop the debate altogether.
 
Those who are against a new AWB have many valid points.

96% of gun murders are committed with handguns.

however, number of murders committed by conceal-carry citizens is extremely small, about .47% over 8 years.

Many argue that if you don't include gand-related murders, America's murder rate is well below 1 per 100,000.

Care to bring this around to framing issues?
 
I'm going to need to see some evidence of manipulation.

If you are bilingual, just watch Fox News and RTVE1. Here we also get a lot of towing the EU line from Germany. What you do not find is much of anything outside of these narratives. One is heavy misuse and willful lack of mentioning business cycles, as if there were no lag times, to give an example. It's a great trick, and used all the time. At this point, the over-investment in real estate in that most contributed to the local financial crisis was built up over successive administrations, mostly the right. Magically, now the 2008 burst is all on the party at the time. Obama got the same, with many even associating him with policies that Bush implemented right at the end of his term, strangely in this case good policies but still rejected, and the blame mislaid.

Of the top of my head, but as I say, watch both channels in the same news cycle for a few days, and compare comments wrt similar events/issues and manners of reasoning. Generally speaking, the manner in which economic issues are explained is nearly identical, as if from a script. Doesn't mean it's conspiratorial, only a bandwagon. The hired guns who generate the memes work in political campaigns and Super-Pacs.
 
I like to frame it thusly: Agents acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power slaughtered Americans on our own soil, and the Democratic response to this is to disarm Americans of the best available means of defense against such attacks.

That ignores how there are so many mass shootings in the USA despite there being so many armed citizens. There are no armed citizens in Europe and it has far fewer mass shootings.

I know it goes against what you think is logical, but more armed citizens means more mass shootings.
 
That ignores how there are so many mass shootings in the USA despite there being so many armed citizens. There are no armed citizens in Europe and it has far fewer mass shootings.

I know it goes against what you think is logical, but more armed citizens means more mass shootings.

But your fewer mass shootings have much larger body counts. So it all evens out.
 
What is the difference between persuasive and manipulative?
The definitions can be similar and can overlap, especially since you might persuade someone by manipulating them. But to persuade someone in the context of this thread would be to convince them based on a factual argument.

To manipulate would be to mislead them. Framing becomes manipulative when it is done purposefully to mislead.

For example saying we shouldn't talk about gun control when people are emotional over a tragic shooting is dishonest. What the gun lobby is really saying is they don't want anyone to talk about gun control when the reason to talk about it is on people's minds.

You could make the legitimate argument that the discussion of gun control would be better when people are not duly influenced on either side. But if that were the case then the gun lobby should make a point of bringing it back up in between mass shooting incidents. Of course they don't because they don't want any controls that might impact their profits.

A persuasive argument might be one that addresses how effective gun regulations might be. A manipulative argument is getting people to falsely fear their right to own guns is going to be taken away.

Pointing out the most extreme views and claiming that is the mainstream view is another manipulative tactic. So when a tiny minority talks about outlawing all private gun ownership, that is paraded as if that is what the mainstream liberals were saying about gun regulation.

Or if one says that would be nice, they are accused of secretly aiming for that goal when in reality they know it is impractical and they are really only aiming for better regulations. Again, it would be making a manipulative argument, not a legitimately persuasive argument, to claim the person was plotting to use the slippery slope when they were doing no such thing.
 
Last edited:
But your fewer mass shootings have much larger body counts. So it all evens out.

In a playing with statistics as the Democrats and GOP put forward the various reasons for acting/not acting/which action to take on the US gun issue.
 
In a playing with statistics as the Democrats and GOP put forward the various reasons for acting/not acting/which action to take on the US gun issue.

To bring this back to framing of the arguments, here's another one being framed in various ways.

Was the PP shooter just mentally ill or was he a Christian terrorist? Was Dylan Roof a white supremacist terrorist or just an individual racist nut-job?

Why, when shooters are Muslim, does terrorism become the automatic framing?

It is legit to point out the difference because there are the radical religious nut-jobs that are acting as a group.

But then so a subset of the anti-abortionists.

Is the rhetoric of ISIS that is triggering these mass killings from a distance (as opposed to incidents they are directly involved in), really that different from the anti-abortionists falsely claiming in the national media that PP is cutting up live babies to sell body parts? Or how about Trump et al amping up racist rhetoric?

Perhaps openly directing your believers to kill differs from merely playing with matches of hate rhetoric.

But then that should be the discussion, not pretending the hate speech is not influencing murders.
 
Because they've been so effective at every mass shooting so far, haven't they?
Perhaps the fact that nearly all of these incidents take place at gun-free zones? The government building was off limits to concealed carry even if one of the very few licensees in California (where it is notoriously difficult to get a license and few were issued) were present.
 
You would fit in the category of one who bought the lie.

Disarming Americans is pure straw man

And you've not made an argument for why we can't talk about limiting the firepower available to these people along with other ways to deal with the threat.
Straw? I said the Dem response is to disarm Americans of the best means of defense against such attacks, and you just repeated your desire to do just that.

The best means = semi-auto rifles with large capacity magazines, just like the ones police brought to the scene after the terrorists left.
 
With guns that you happily allow them to buy. That attitude helped Farooq accomplished something.
If only we had common sense gun laws like they have in France this sort of thing could never happ, err, ummmmm....
 

Back
Top Bottom