The Gun Lobby Should Pay E.J. Dionne to Be a Gun-Control Advocate

Washington Post Op-Ed columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., weighs in on the public debate about guns that has inevitably followed the Virginia Tech killing spree.

Dionne starts off well:

Why do we have the same futile argument every time there is a mass killing?

Advocates of gun control try to open a discussion about whether more reasonable weapons statutes might reduce the number of violent deaths. Opponents of gun control shout "No!" Guns don't kill people, people kill people, they say, and anyway, if everybody were carrying weapons, someone would have taken out the murderer and all would have been fine.

And we do nothing.

Pretty reasonable. His good guys "advocate" and his bad guys "shout," but that falls within the reach of persuasive license.

But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid:

In other spheres, we act reasonably when faced with new problems. When Richard Reid showed that nasty things could be done with shoes on airplanes, airport security started examining shoes. When liquids were seen as a potential danger, we regulated the quantity of liquids we could take on flights. We barred people from carrying weapons onto airliners long ago.

Umm, E.J.? There may be sound reasons for banning carrying guns into airplane cabins (remember how Auric Goldfinger met his demise), but TSA inspections of shoes and prohibitions of liquids on planes are the textbook examples of security theater, braindead restrictions that are all show, doing essentially nothing to enhance actual air travel safety.

Claiming that gun-control laws are the same category of government restriction in the public interest as shoe inspections and liquid bans for air travelers is an argument against gun control, not for it.

Dionne's argument is so lame, so weak, so pathetic, so mindbogglingly stupid that Occam's Razor goes paradoxical: it is easier to believe that Dionne is deliberately making a weak argument to strengthen the other side than it is to believe that a professional journalist is dumb enough to make that argument sincerely. Even at the Washington Post.

Even Fred Hiatt can't be that dumb.