Mike Pesca seems to think Charles C. W. Cooke would make an honest argument against gun reform. Here’s why I don’t.
I’ve gotten pretty tired of arguing about guns. Not because I don’t like arguing or that I don’t have any good ideas, but it’s more that I don’t think we’re having an honest conversation.
I couldn’t see it at first. I just felt that things were a bit off. But it went beyond our usual stuff: the talking past each other, the left/right sorting machine, or political polarization.
It was something about the one-to-one conversing itself. Something about what we’re actually offering each other just doesn’t smell right.
A recent interview with National Review editor Charles C. W. Cooke embodied my frustration. And it revealed precisely what I struggled with most in conversations about guns.
Mike Pesca brought Cooke onto his podcast, The Gist to speak about guns in a more honest way. Pesca says at the top that he wants Cooke on his show as “someone who always sticks to the facts and fights fair.” This, of course, sets me up to test this suggestion.
Would he actually stick to the facts and fight fair?
Well…Pesca is sort of right. Cooke doesn’t come off as fanatical at all. It all sounds so reasonable and measured.
And yet, I found listening to this interview multiple times much more frustrating than reading Twitter troll replies. Not because I love to read insults, but because Cooke isn’t very honest with his facts or focused on fighting fair.
He just seems to.
The Appearance of Decency
Some of us put decency in conversation at the top of our priority lists. For others, the top spot goes to hearing multiple viewpoints. For me, integrity in conversation is most important.
I want my yes to mean yes. And I hate when people ascribe motives to me. That’s where I sit. But I do recognize we don’t all sit there.
And often, arguing with a smile and decent respect for one’s conversation partner can mask some really poor arguments. Or shady practices.
Mike Pesca is fond of hearing lots of voices. That’s his priority. He even highlights the pain of responding to a seemingly centrist Ben Shapiro. This alone should give us pause, as Shapiro doesn’t make honest arguments either.
But let’s start where the interview starts. With Cooke sharing why he’s going to be such a reasonable conversation partner.
Stating the Opposition’s Argument
Cooke begins the interview by sharing his own movement from the center-left to a more libertarian conservatism. He describes it as a sense of disillusionment over a misunderstanding of judicial history around the 2nd Amendment.
Why did he come to such a conclusion? A conclusion which would seemingly have him resort himself into a different box? It would seem that suddenly, he discovered liberals have always been wrong on this issue and the Right is just being consistent with judicial history.
He bases his central argument on a belief that an individual right to bear arms has always been implied and understood by the court. Therefore, the Left’s obsession with the Heller decision is disingenuous.
This is both overly simplistic and dismissive. And it seems very much intentional, given where the conversation will shortly go.
1. Cooke Confines the Playing Field
What he’s done right off the bat is establish the playing field for the argument based on his terms. He’s already discounted the more prevailing truth that we’ve spent over 200 years debating the fundamental point of the 2nd Amendment. Or that its broad character bears within it contradictory ideas.
It’s like making an argument which isn’t entirely wrong but for reasons which totally are. He names an implied consistency on an individual right which is, at best, a half-truth but is entirely misleading.
But more to the point, what he’s going to do is establish the idea that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution has always given a fundamental right to guns and therefore the Heller decision is irrelevant.
Then later in the interview, however, he will base his argument on the new standard of Heller. He will dismiss its importance and then rely entirely on how it changed everything.
They’ve barely gotten started and I’m already frustrated by his papering over the fundamental pieces of our disagreement, trivialized the character of the disagreement, and set up circular arguments which sound good but aren’t based in established fact.
On Repealing the 2nd Amendment
Then they get to talking about the recent calls to repeal the 2nd Amendment itself. An idea he thinks is bonkers, and I agree with him, but not for the reasons he gives. Or because he makes a good argument.
In fact, I agree with him on the argument he fails to effectively make and for the very reasons he should’ve made it. But we’ll get there in a second.
Cooke centers on the very specific repercussions of attempting a repeal of the 2nd Amendment and the immediate fallout. He’s concerned with actual legislation and the authorities responsible for maintaining the repeal. On this, I’m almost with him!
Except that he bases this conclusion on an assumption. He assumes that a repeal of the 2nd Amendment would instantly require the federal government to collect all of the country’s hundreds of millions of firearms. He has questions about how they’d be collected, who would be in charge, and how we would go about it.
But he bases this whole sequence of repercussions on an affirmative assumption that repealing the 2nd Amendment is solely based on removing all firearms from the country. Or that repeal’s only logical conclusion is confiscation.
So, on the whole, his argument here might look really sound. He’s sharing with us all of the most obvious fallout of a generic repeal to highlight the “what’s next” problem. But rather than actually take on repeal honestly, he names it a catastrophe and then jumps to a guess about the animating force behind gun control.
He gets hyper-specific then zooms out to intergalactic with a heavy dose of mind-reading.
2. Cooke Uses Specificity and Speculation to Sound Thoughtful.
His critique of repeal isn’t sound, it’s stupid and obtuse. The much better critique is the more obvious one. Most of the people talking about repealing the 2nd Amendment don’t actually have a plan to replace it.
And more importantly, those who are naming the flaws in the 2nd Amendment aren’t all in favor of confiscation or are against the 2nd Amendment itself.
It’s both a strawman and a ridiculous IFTTT (If This Therefore That) which few of us should grant him.
So ultimately, for most of us, the 2nd Amendment isn’t the primary source of the problem, it’s Heller.
And if Cooke were being honest to those thinking past repeal, he would see what I see: that the few attempts on social media to rewrite the 2nd Amendment actually enshrine individual rights. And there are many of us who also don’t believe this is inherent to the 2nd Amendment.
So the problem isn’t the repeal, it’s the lack of agreement on what we’re repealing, why we’d repeal it, and what to actually do if it were repealed. Not just in the hyper-specific ways he offers, but in the more fundamental question of “why?”.
The call for repeal isn’t a fully formed argument. Repeal is a guttural response to the specific problem of Heller and the dramatic change in interpretation the Supreme Court gave us in 2008. But he’s treating it like the most obvious end-goal of his opponents.
So what about that individual right?
Going back to the Heller decision, Cooke dismisses it’s importance because he’s already set the ground to suggest it simply named what was always a given. He thinks advocates for gun control are too obsessed with this decision.
I certainly think there is merit to his argument, but we can’t objectively deal with his reasoning here (that advocates for reform are too obsessed) because we don’t grant the foundation his argument rests on. It isn’t fair. Just like the old trick “so, when did you stop hitting your wife?”
Of course, he’s not sinister. He’s a good debater. He needs to recognize and acknowledge what is consistent with his position from the other side. So he rightly grants that the 2nd Amendment is like the 1st. Therefore the government has an interest in regulating gun ownership and use. This clearly puts him in opposition to many post-Heller 2nd Amendment absolutists.
3. He establishes theoretical support for regulation.
As earlier in the interview, this all seems nuanced and fair. But just as then, he dismisses the fundamental newness of Heller and refuses to take up how it has changed our ability to regulate firearms.
He skirts past the near conversation about how Heller struck down many traditionally accepted measures of gun restriction, and the real change it brought to many communities around the country.
4. While also ignoring how Heller changed regulation.
And here, his skill as an evangelist really comes through. Because he’s sculpted the terrain to make his arguments stand up, dismissed as irrelevant his biggest weakness, and given a nod toward the softer points of argument.
He’s established as fact that the courts have supported his position for centuries (not exactly true) and then minimized how it was changed just a decade ago (in Heller). And we’re now told he fundamentally agrees with the principle of regulating firearms. But as we will soon see, there will be no circumstances in which he will agree to our actually doing it.
The Ordinary Standard
Now Cooke finally turns to Heller, not to deal with how it changed the way cities and states are allowed to regulate firearms, but as the new foundation for his original argument. This supposedly unimportant thing which the left obsesses about now becomes essential to his argument.
He relies on the part of Heller which establishes a right to the purchase and ownership of ordinary firearms to make a new argument. Important to him is not the establishment of ownership, of course, because he thinks that’s always been there.
Cooke is suddenly interested in a new idea: that certain firearms are ordinary.
From this, he makes the intuitive leap to point out that the AR-15 is indeed among the most plentiful and purchased guns in the country. And therefore totally lawful.
His original argument is that the 2nd Amendment has always given the individual right to purchasing and owning guns. Then he said Heller wasn’t important. Now he’s using Heller to argue that ownership of a military-grade weapon is a fundamental right.
5. Cooke totally ignores the exact reason gun control proponents hate Heller.
Just like he’s ignored two centuries of conflict over the parameters and concepts of the individual right.
And he does all this while casually suggesting the left is “obsessed” with this decision.
The real problem with Heller is that it names and broadens ownership rights and restricts the state’s power to restrict. Here, most disturbingly, it seems to justify the legal ownership of military weapons. This is specifically why this decision is opposed by so many people and deviates from the previous precedent.
These kinds of guns shouldn’t be considered lawful. Nor should this response to Heller be dismissed so casually.
If the arguer hasn’t stopped giving Cooke the benefit of the doubt yet, she should now. His response right after telling us how he supports regulations was to give us a reason why we can’t regulate a military-style weapon.
And soon he’ll argue against the nature of regulation.
The Cause of Carnage is Circular
While his arguments have been all theoretical and dismissive, when Pesca begins to challenge Cooke on his understanding of an individual right, Cooke begins to struggle. The AR-15 is not a musket or a handgun. It is something really different and the cause of much recent carnage.
Mike Pesca believes Cooke will “stick to the facts”. I don’t.
Cooke acknowledges the lethality of the AR-15, but he chicken-or-the-eggs the problem. He doesn’t know why some people kill—maybe the gun is sexy or maybe they’re crazy. Maybe we shouldn’t blame the gun for being so dead sexy.
Of course, this is all gibberish.
6. Cooke avoids the central question.
Then when Pesca pushes back on him, pointing out the body of research on the lethality of an AR-15 against a handgun; that it is greater in both speed and power, Cooke’s response is “I’m not convinced of that.”
Apparently, he doesn’t have time for all the evidence. Just the stuff he likes.
Why We Can’t Agree
It’s clear Cooke is far less confident when actually talking about ways to reduce gun violence. He’ll talk about the guns and unfettered access all day, but dealing with violence frustrates his arguments.
Now that he’s waded into the territory of discussing letting random dudes have military weapons, he actually admits there’s a demonstrable downside. But that’s inconvenient. So Cooke starts kicking sand to muddy the water. He’s tried the circular argument. He has to try something else.
And of course! He’s going to explain why we’re going to have to agree to disagree. We have
“different conceptions of the downside to taking this action”
which sounds a lot like you have your facts and I have my alternative facts.
Just as he isn’t convinced of the evidence,
7. He’s preparing to not be convinced of anything.
Pesca makes an analogy to lawn darts. That we sold them in this country, some people got really hurt, and then we regulated them. Now fewer people get hurt by lawn darts.
Cooke tosses that away and compares it to swimming pools instead. Pesca is fine with that analogy. We put up fencing to keep kids from dying in swimming pools.
Cooke calls this stupid “because I think the fencing works.”
When Pesca then makes the comparison to guns, Cooke simply says
“But you think that those make a difference and I don’t.”
This, of course, isn’t an actual argument. It’s a placeholder for an argument. He’s dismissing an entire line of questioning because he doesn’t want to hear it. And more obnoxiously, it’s another defense of the right to marshal alternative facts into the argument.
Seriously. If a teacher asked me to describe photosynthesis, would she accept an answer like “But you think light does that and I don’t”?
Or maybe the next time I’m talking with someone, I’ll shove my fingers in my ears and sing “La la la.” Apparently, that counts as an argument.
The Leap and the Waffle
Still talking about swimming pools, Cooke once again makes the leap to the extreme: he assumes Pesca wants to ban swimming pools (like the correlating assumption that he wants to ban all guns) to make his point.
8. He keeps going to the extreme strawman.
When Pesca said that he would consider banning certain home swimming pools if they proved “particularly correlative to death,” Cooke then waffles, saying he’s nervous about correlations in these sorts of debates. Even though he brought up the swimming pool to disprove the extreme possibility of the argument.
Cooke then dismisses the last assault weapons ban saying it had “done very little if anything and the most recent one that’s being touted just shows a correlation and I’m just—I’m not a scientist, but I’m not convinced by that.”
The interview wraps with those last words and I was left wondering who Cooke was arguing with because he didn’t rebut any argument I would’ve made.
To Sum It All Up
So, if you’re following along, this supposedly fair argument against gun reform is simple: we’ve always had the individual mandate, so the Supreme Court decision in 2008 which struck down a bunch of city and state laws was nothing.
But the decision gives us the right to military-grade weapons because a bunch of people have them. So it’s essential.
All gun reform advocates secretly want a total ban on all guns everywhere and will have a hard time taking them all so we shouldn’t do anything.
And if I don’t like an idea I can just say I don’t believe it.
What I Shouted In My Car
So as I was driving and pretending like I was there to debate Mr. Cooke (and let’s be honest, it got pretty heated), it dawned on me:
- He is not honoring his own arguments.
- And his pattern of dismissing the conversation is dishonest.
I kept hoping Pesca would push him on his definitions or against the territory Cooke so easily established as common.
But most of all, I just wanted Cooke to deal with how he uses facts and how he treats others who also use facts.
9. If facts matter to Cooke, he should be advocating for more fact-gathering, not shrugging his shoulders.
We have lots of research on the lethality of guns, on different methods of regulation, where the shortfalls appear to be, and how most of the deaths are caused.
We also have laws which prohibit the gathering of research and local and state authorities who refuse to gather or share information about the use of guns in the country.
If Charles C. W. Cooke “sticks to the facts and fights fair,” then why does he need to manipulate the playing field, marshal half-arguments, and pretend like we have two sets of facts in the country?
We have different movements using the facts differently. But we don’t have different facts. So being fair to the conversation should begin with being fair to both the facts and the legal arguments themselves.
He’s not.
10. He’s arguing against the extreme left and pretending the center isn’t on the table.
Most of the conversations I get into involve drawing data from somewhere other than the CDC. And most of the time, it doesn’t shock me. Usually, it reminds me of the shortcoming of our data-gathering.
It reminds me that when we’re allowed to cherry-pick our facts, our arguments seem far more reasonable than they really are.
Mostly it reminds me that it’s hard to regulate guns in Illinois when Indiana is a terrible neighbor. We can’t do real background checks when states won’t talk to each other. And we can’t get all the data for homicides and suicides when police departments don’t have to disclose firearm usage.
But we also have plenty of evidence, plenty of differing intentions, and a massive trove of possibilities for reform that can’t be so smugly dismissed. If we’re being honest.
Because if this is what passes for sticking to the facts and fighting fair, then perhaps I’ll just say I’m not convinced by that.
I’ll support people who actually want to collect more data and deal with the problem.