It never ceases to surprise me when I see people who are obviously intelligent and who have the resources and access to accurate information about a subject who advocate for the exact opposite of what is a rational position on the subject.
I’m sure that you can think of a number of topics that we see this about, especially over the last few years. Since we talk about firearms on this site, though, we’ll limit our discussion to gun control.
So, today, we’re going to talk about comedian Jon Stewart. It’s probably not a surprise to you that Stewart, like most “celebrities,” leans towards the political left on most topics. That includes gun control.
To push his agenda, Stewart interviewed a state representative who, unfortunately, seemed unprepared for how to counteract Stewart’s “arguments” in the clips that I saw (to be fair, Stewart is good at pushing and arguing for his political positions). That didn’t stop Colion Noir from doing the job that Stewart’s viewers should have seen in a discussion about gun control and taking apart those talking points in a reply video.
You can see clips from the Stewart piece and Noir destroying Stewart’s talking points in the video below.
So, Stewart, like so many otherwise intelligent people on the political left, takes terms written over two hundred years ago and interprets those terms through a modern understanding of the term.
These people completely ignore that language changes meaning over time so that when you read Shakespeare, for example, his use of some words means wildly different things in modern language than it did when it was written. That’s one of the things that makes reading Shakespeare difficult for many people.
But Stewart should know better. His arena is the use of words and language. After all, that’s what his style of comedy and talk shows are all about: communicating through words.
And, yet, he did exactly that: took words out of their context of meaning at the time that they were written and twisted that meaning by interpreting them through a modern lens.
There’s no excuse for Stewart’s sloppy use of language to push an agenda.
Thankfully, though, there are people out there debunking gun control nonsense, and if you have people in your life pushing that foolishness, just have them read this article and watch the video to clear up their thinking for them.
