While many of us watch the #NeverAgain anti-gun movement with eyes rolling and heads shaking, many are celebrating the political activities of the teenagers “leading” the way. Now of course the kids aren’t actually leading anything; they’re simply a means to an end of the people already pushing this agenda. Yet that point aside, the more people like David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, and the rest of their ilk lecture us on guns and politics, the more we see how unpolished, unnuanced, and amateurish their views really are. But that should probably be expected from kids between the ages of 16 and 18 years old especially considering how many people won’t be able to parse political ideas much better no matter how old they get.
There should, however, be some ability to simply put ideas together in a logical order. A slogan put together by students of Marist School in Atlanta, GA showed a severe lack of that skill:
2nd Amendment: Written when a black person counted as 3/5 of a person. Times change.
This statement demonstrates an absolute failure in critical thinking. Even if we accept each idea as true, the implied conclusion is so obviously fallacious. Specifically, it is a fallacy of chronological snobbery (there may not be a more cutting name to a fallacy). This version of a red herring works like this: if the obviously wrong position A was held during time period X, then position B which was also held during time period X must also be incorrect.
Someone put this on the side of a truck, which likely means that adults were involved. And that means they must have not seen much of an issue with it. Or if you want a nefarious explanation, they figured that their audience wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out how wrong of a statement it was.
To show just how terrible of an argument this is, all one would have to do is bring up any of the ideas held at the time of the writing of the Constitution that are still held today.
But what makes this even worse is the lack of understanding of the Three-Fifths Compromise. The implication is that blacks (they should be referring to slaves) should have been counted as a full person. That status as a person was for determining the population in a state and thus the number of seats that would be granted in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College. If slaves were counted as full, then the “slave states” would have held unbalanced power in the federal government.
Do these #NeverAgain supporters really think it would have been better to stuff the House with more slave supporters?
There is no way that these kids would have developed any momentum without the backing and support of adults. As much as people want to believe that kids are starting to get political power, they never have. Their agenda is not new. It’s just a new presentation brought to you by the same people that have always been in power. But whether or not these people in power believe the statements being made by students like those from Marist School, the fact still remains that people are attempting to use terribly fallacious ideas to control your life.
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