Gun Ban = Book Ban? No, logical fallacy.

I just saw this tweet (pictured below) from one Tom Gresham, and read the embedded link, which was to a blog post from a website titled, "Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership". It had a certain appeal, and at first blush seemed to make an odd kind of sense. For a moment I considered reposting it with an endorsement that it was worth deeper consideration.



But as I gave it the consideration it was due, I realized I was falling for a classic logical fallacy blunder - the most popular of all logical fallacies, the "Strawman".

The Strawman argument logical fallacy is where one draws an equivalency with something that seems similar, then forms an argument based on that similar thing, and presents it as a valid argument for the primary thing. Similar to a valid logical argument of communicative or transitive properties. However, the Strawman is a logical fallacy because the equivalency is inherently invalid. The 2 things being compared may be similar in certain aspects, but the minor differences may be central to the nature of the argument for(or against) the one or the other.

In this article, the author argues that Books are like Guns in that books sometimes contain ideas that cause people who read them to do things that bring harm to others. Therefore Books are dangerous too. Then extends the argument to say, "maybe we should register all books and who owns them, and maybe ban the more dangerous ones". Then, banking on that fact that most people would find the idea of book banning or tracking to be abhorrent, says, "Well, Guns are the same thing."

First and Foremost - while I'm not a fan of it - society DOES in fact deem certain pieces of information to be too dangerous for public dissemination. If you ever watch "Mythbusters" there are several episodes where they work with explosives where they specifically say that they can't show/explain something b/c the information is classified. Beyond that, the entire concept of "classified information" shows that some information is deemed inappropriate for public dissemination. So - the author's argument already breaks down right there.

However that's not the Strawman, that's giving the argument too much credence on its face than it deserves because this is a classic Strawman. The reason this is a Strawman logical fallacy is that a Book is simply an information storage medium. That some books contain information that is dangerous is similar to saying that a crate can store guns but not all crates store guns. So - you can't say a CRATE is dangerous. (you can use truck or locker or whatever, any container will do). The argument presented, to be valid would have to be asserting that since Books can store dangerous information all books need to be tracked, therefore that's why it would be absurd to say Crates can store guns so all crates need to be tracked. And of course, this is not what modern gun control is all about.


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