On MSNBC yesterday a prominent Stonewall Veteran said, 'Rifles are instruments of hate.'

[Orrex]

17. You're gerrymandering

By your reasoning, rifles kill fewer people in some specific context. If we pin you down for details, you'll no doubt seek to distinguish semiautomatic rifles from bolt action or whatever, in a further effort to derail the discussion.

Even if we accept your skewed sampling methods, you can't simply pretend that the overall count/lethality ratio is the same between rifles and knifes/fists/blunt instruments. The latter outnumber the former so hugely that the comparison is pointless--and that's according to gun-advocates' own claims that guns are statistically safe based on their total numbers.

And before you pretend that it's dishonest to link gun suicides and gun murders, let's remember that gun-advocates invariably lump all vehicular deaths together. What's the annual number of deliberate vehicular homicides, and how does that compare to overall vehicles in the country? How many vehicular suicides? And how does that compare to the overall number of vehicles? And before you start up about accidental vehicular deaths, we need to factor in the frequency of deaths compared to the frequency of vehicular use.

You want to dismiss it as shifting the goalposts, but in fact it's simply a matter of looking at the numbers and considering what they actually mean.