Dana Bash’s Logical Incoherence on School Shootings

Upon receiving the news of the horrific killing of six people, including three nine-year old children, by a deranged and troubled shooter in Nashville, the Democrats and their stenographers in what passes as our “news” media immediately began their cultish ritual: knee-jerk calls for stricter gun control.  In a revealing exchange between CNN’s Dana Bash and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Bash accused House Republicans of loving guns more than children. She asked:

Are you…telling the American people that mass shootings, including of young children, is just something that’s going to happen and you’re not going to make any moves, at this point to try to stop it?

The accusation, repeating the familiar liberal-media trope, is, of course, that Republicans do not care enough about the lives of our children to do anything that might weaken the Second Amendment.

In response, Crenshaw proposed a foolproof solution to end school shootings: station at least two armed guards in every school in the United States.  Bash replied, sarcastically, with a generality: “So the answer is more guns?”

It is not clear why Bash thinks this question is legitimate.  When one has a problem one often uses empiricism to resolve it — it is not a witticism contest.

Here’s an analogous hypothetical: if firefighters propose igniting backfires in an area between a housing complex and a massive forest fire, a cocky reporter with a Bachelor’s degree in Narcissism Studies and knows nothing about fire-fighting but has a flair for the appeal to emotion fallacies so popular within her profession, might sarcastically ask, “So the answer is more fire?”  The answer would be… “Yes.” (Sometimes it is necessary to burn out an area in the path of the fire because this destroys the fuel for the fire in a controlled way to prevent a firestorm that would burn everything, including any animals and people unable to be removed.)

Similarly, when a doctor tells a patient he needs to vaccinate her with a live virus (cowpox) in order to prevent a virulent natural virus (smallpox) the patient might ask, incredulously, “So the answer to my virus infection is more virus?”  However, the correct answer, by people outside of newsrooms who actually know something, might well say, “Yes, just as one can only fight fire with fire, sometimes one can only fight a virus with a virus.”

One could add numerous additional examples but the point should now be clear enough that even a liberal “journalist” can understand it.

Crenshaw responds to her question slightly differently though:

No, the answer is armed guards. The answer is armed guards, right? Yes, more guns – the kind of guns that protect the President, that protect you all at CNN.

Is it easy to get into your headquarters at CNN? Absolutely not. There’s armed guards there. There’s single points of entry. I think we should look at our schools as a place that is precious and have the same kind of security that your corporate offices do, that we do in Congress. You know if we consider a place to be important where our children go to learn every day, it should have the same level of security as every other place, whether it’s a shopping mall or a corporate office that’s hard to get into.

It is worth pointing out that although Crenshaw begins his reply to her question, by saying “no” more guns aren’t the solution, he then changes and acknowledges that “yes” more guns are in fact the answer.  There is a reason why he replies in this way, first saying “no” and then “yes” — namely, he wants to defuse the appeal to emotion fallacy in her sarcastic question.  Since the armed guards he wants to put in schools will have guns, Crenshaw does believe that the answer is more guns.  He initially says “no” in order to shift the emphasis in his answer from the hardware, the guns, to the trained professionals that will know how to use them to help solve the problem of school shootings.

Whereas Bash offers what the rest of leftist “journalists” have — a heavily made-up face on camera to virtue-signal about how deeply they care, and demagogue the issues for their favorite political party.  Crenshaw, who has actually sacrificed for his country, actually wants to solve the problem, and being a former military member with combat experience he has actual expertise relevant to the solution.

Bash actually makes an unsuccessful attempt to counter Crenshaw’s point, saying:

There were supposed to be armed guards at the schools in both Uvalde, in … Texas and Parkland, and that didn’t help anything[.]

To this, Crenshaw aptly replies, “But they weren’t there, which is important.”

Astonishingly, Bash attempted to neutralize Crenshaw’s logical point that armed guards at schools would eliminate the problem of school shootings by using a non sequitur fallacy (roughly, a fallacious argument in which there is no logical connection between premises and conclusion) by pointing to cases where armed guards were supposed to be at the schools, but weren’t!

When Crenshaw points this out, Bash responds with another irrelevant generalization: “Well, OK, but they’re humans and that also happens.” Bash’s appeal here to the fact that anything involving human beings can sometimes fail is especially ironic.  She originally accused Republicans of holding to the idea that school shootings are “just something that’s going to happen” and therefore Republicans aren’t going to make moves “stop” acts of premeditated violence.  Yet, Bash does not appear to grasp that she has sarcastically ended the discussion with an argument that commits her to precisely of which she accused Republicans.  Bash’s cynical point that human projects are always prone to failure could be applied to any purported solution that anybody proposes to stop school shootings, including the favorite liberal plan for gun control.  It hasn’t occurred to her that a black market in illegal guns, just like the black market in alcohol during Prohibition, would soon emerge, perhaps entering the country through the border that the Democrats insist on keeping open?

Crenshaw proposed a specific concrete solution to stop school shootings that Bash cynically and casually dismissed by employing several logical fallacies because it doesn’t fit the liberal script of gun control.  Unfortunately, this is par for the course in what remains of our “news” media.  Most journalists are not trained to solve real-world problems.  They don’t actually know much except what goes on in their privileged little newsroom bubbles.  They are trained to grab eyeballs for themselves by making sensationalistic claims and accusing people, sometimes real heroes like Crenshaw, of heartlessness or malfeasance.  It is no wonder that a majority of the American people believe that what passes for our “news” media is dividing the country with their constant politically partisan shenanigans.