Thread:Comments:Gun background checks a no-go in US Senate/The mission of the U.S. government is not to keep the people SAFE; it is to keep them FREE/reply

There are several problems in that reasoning; I'll not try to cover them all, but touch on some high points.

The principle expressed in the first paragraph (and recurring later) is generically like the proverbial 'motherhood and apple pie', while in specific situations it may become a tool wielded by an advocate of an unreasonable position to prevent others from making an obvious criticism of that position &mdash; like the Emperor claiming it's uncivil for anyone to say someone else has no clothes.

Another theme is trying to frame a controversial debate in a way that quietly presupposes multiple things most people would say were invalid from the start. Such as "why the population has become so childlike, so immoral, and so psychotic that the need to discuss disarming the population even arises", which presupposes at least three things at once &mdash; that the population has those characteristics, that whether or not it does has any bearing on the gun-related issues under discussion, and that the proposal under discussion involves disarming the population. This technique works better if one presupposes three or more things at once; that way, if someone challenges any one of the presuppositions, the other presuppositions may effectively support it, while challenging all of them at once would be harder for the challenger to orchestrate.

My guess is, you aren't using these techniques deliberately. But that doesn't mean you aren't using them; they're a sort of infection that spreads from person to person by imitation.