Dennis Prager asks a question with regard to a subject about
which I am agnostic. I never thought about it in the way that he presents it,
and so I never formulated an opinion on it. From the looks of it, however,
Prager must have given the subject a great deal of thought because the question
he asks makes up the subtitle of his latest column. It is this: “What if the
president used dead children to sell the death penalty?” As to the title of the
column, it goes like this: “On Using Parents of Murdered Children.” It was
published on May 21, 2013 in National Review Online.
Despite the fact that the subject as presented is new to me,
I shall try to respond to the content of the column because aspects of it touch
on moral issues that have preoccupied me for a long time. These issues come up
near the end of the article because the author sets up the scene innocently
enough at the start: “The president appeared at many rallies on behalf of
gun-control laws with parents of murdered children.” He then says he has a
question “for those who agree with the president's use of these suffering
souls,” and then asks the question that comes up in the subtitle.
What Prager does after that is plant the seeds that will
eventually demolish most of his arguments at the end. Was that done
deliberately? We shall see. In the meantime, he prepares to do himself in by
creating two pillars upon which those arguments will rest. The first pillar is
the mention of “outside of strongly liberal locales, the majority of parents
whose children were murdered support the death penalty.” The second pillar is
that he recalls “a woman who called in to my radio show to say she was against
capital punishment but changed her mind.”
And why did she change her mind? Because “my brother was
recently murdered,” she replied. To this, Dennis Prager comments: “To have a
loved one murdered adds intense anger to already intense grief.” He also tells
of the view he expressed to the woman: “it was sad that it took the murder of
her brother to realize the cosmic injustice of allowing murderers to live, and
that capital punishment is a moral imperative.”
Thus, as we can see, the two pillars of his argument rest on
the emotional response of people whose loved ones were murdered. And this is
the point where he asks: “What if W. Bush had toured the country on behalf of
capital punishment with this woman? How would supporters of Obama's appearances
have reacted?” Prager then answers the question but does so not to attack Obama.
He answers the question to attack Obama's supporters who include what he calls
the Democratic politicians and the liberal locales.
To this end, he reveals: “I am not arguing that President
Obama did something wrong, I am arguing two other things.” The first is to call
the media and the Democratic party “intellectually and morally dishonest.” The
second is to state that the support for more gun control is “neither morally
nor intellectually persuasive. It is entirely emotional.” And this is what demolishes
part of his own argument because it is itself entirely emotional.
And that is the reason why we must suspect that Prager
decided early on to plant the seeds that would destroy part of his argument.
And so we ask: What was his aim? And the answer is that he wanted to
concentrate not on winning an argument against the President but on winning the
gun-control debate. He saw that it would be easier to do so by attacking the
people who advocate a point of view contrary to his – the Democratic politicians
and the liberal locales; the people he calls intellectually and morally
dishonest.
Still, however, he did not completely exonerate the
president. He found a way to attack him on another front. It is this: “Where
the president crossed over into demagoguery was in his implication that those
opposing his gun-control proposals care less about the parents' pain and the
murder of children.”
From here, Prager finds a way to attack the idea of more
gun-control: “that would have in no way prevented Adam Lanza, a sick and evil
man, from taking the children's lives … those of us who want as many good
people as possible to own guns and want to execute most murderers, hold these
positions because we weep for the parents of murdered children.” This sounds
like an explosive argument, but it is also a very unstable one.
Will it work in favor of Dennis Prager? Well, he asked at the start how
people would react to a president traveling with parents who oppose gun
control. My view is that the approach would backfire because when the brain
becomes saturated with arguments like he set them up, ordinary people will
decide by relying not on the emotion alone or the force of the intellect alone
but on the instinct – their human instinct. We call it instinct but, in my
view, it is something closely related to common sense; a blend that is made of
emotions and brain power mixed together in the correct amounts.
People will rely on their common sense because the options will come
down to choosing one from between two opposing arguments. It would be: “I want
to protect your children by arming everyone.” Or it would be: “I want to
protect your children by disarming most everyone.” The common sense – the human
instinct will leap forward and choose the second option.
Let someone from the Dennis Prager pool of whatever politicians and
whatever locales try his idea say, during the next election cycle, and watch
him or her shoot themselves in the foot every time they open their mouth. They
will not only lose the argument; they will set the American society on the path
of: Let's take away everybody's gun and join the civilized world.