Republicans Throw Snowballs at Gun Control

There are several subjects about which Republican sabotage is so obvious that their arguments are absurd.  One such example of TEAbuggery was perpetrated by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Not OK), when he threw a snowball as proof that climate change is not real.  Now Republicans have thrown six snowballs at gun control.

People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-winter snowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.

Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.

Snowball No. 1: There is doubt or mystery or uncertainty about whether national gun control can actually limit gun violence. No, there isn’t. The real social science on this, published in professional and, usually, peer-reviewed journals, is robust and reliable, while fake or ersatz social science that proposes to show the opposite has been debunked many, many times. Of course, to say that the social science is settled is exactly not to say that one or two authority figures are in dogmatic possession of the truth—that’s not what makes it science—but that a broad community of people who have taken the trouble to study the evidence and open their data to each other have come to something close to a consensus. More guns mean more homicides. More guns mean more gun massacres. More guns mean more death. Common sense confirms what social science demonstrates: there really have been no gun massacres in Australia since Australia decided to act to stop gun massacres from happening…

Inserted from <The New Yorker>

This is only the first snowball.  Click through for the other five.  Unfortunately for Republican Ammosexuals, this snow will not wash the blood from their hands.