Wilkinson Comments on Teens Having Gun Access
Analyzing the article
Our Analysis: 2 Fallacies
It's about time. A Michigan jury on Tuesday found Jennifer Crumbley guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Crumbley, whose son Ethan killed four and wounded seven in a 2021 shooting at Oxford High School, is being held accountable not for his actions, but her own.
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The Crumbleys, who had previously left a pistol where Ethan had accessed it, purchased a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer semiautomatic for their tormented son. Jennifer Crumbley even took her son to a shooting range to get a taste of the firearm's capabilities. Ethan subsequently used the gun to shoot up his school. He was sentenced in December to life without parole.
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The dead and wounded have 1 failed to dissuade the denizens of American gun culture that firearms don't magically cure the problems that guns, in reality, create. Guns, in this make-believe world, are defensive instruments of peace and justice. They don't harm. They protect.
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2 Road rage without a gun is a nasty shout or an obscene gesture. With a gun, it's a dead girl. Getting lost at night and pulling into the wrong driveway is a mistake. With a gun, it's murder. Likewise, masculine insecurity and alienation don't produce mass murder - at least not until a gun enters the equation.
Parents who make guns available to troubled offspring are at last receiving scrutiny.
- After making some reasonable points in the opening paragraphs about parental accountability for gun access, the text goes on to exhibit the fallacies described below, thereby weakening the overall cogency of the article.
- Nut-picking • By focusing on an exaggerated, absolutist stance that guns are purely defensive instruments that "don't harm" but only "protect", the author is attacking an extremely weak, minority argument of hyper-enthusiastic gun advocates rather than the stronger, more nuanced positions held by most pro-gun voices, who acknowledge both benefits and risks of guns. This differentiates it from a standard straw man fallacy, which would misconstrue a typical argument to make it easier to attack. The passage here isn't even engaging a typical pro-gun stance at all, but rather the absolute fringes lacking persuasive substance.
- Causal oversimplification • The author oversimplifies causal relationships between guns and violence in a logically questionable way. By presenting dichotomies like "road rage without a gun" vs "with a gun it's a dead girl," the rhetoric implies guns directly and inevitably cause escalations from shoutings to murder. However, this suggests an oversimplified direct causality between gun possession and violence that ignores other factors. Road rage may still turn deadly without guns available. Guns don't automatically turn mistakes into murder. These examples rely on causal oversimplification.
References
- Francis Wilkinson (2024, Feb 6). Conviction of School Shooter's Mom Is a Breakthrough.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-06/jennifer-crumbley-found-guilty-of-involuntary-manslaughter
Disclaimer
Note that there being one or more apparent fallacies in the arguments presented in this article does not mean that every argument the arguer made was fallacious, nor does it mean there are not other arguments in existence for the same or similar position that are logically valid. Also note that checking for fallacies is not the same as verification of the premises the arguer starts from, such as facts that the arguer asserts or principles that the arguer assumes as the foundation for constructing arguments. For more about this, see our 'What is Fallacy Checking?'
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