Gun Control & RKBA

icon: Meh- a prolix, badly formatted argumentum ad populum *and* sheer Colonism:

You don't understand much of anything you post, you just copy & paste from a tangentially related argumentation theory which you somehow think is a solid refutation of 'conventional wisdom' - and that is a presumption on my part, since you didn't even have the courtesy of an explanation what you were driving at other than 'shock & awe' with latin definitions.

icon posts: In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum -Latin for "argument to the people"- is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so."

Yeah, that CAN be so, but it's not a refutation of conventional wisdom. Can't you two get that thru your heads?

here's one: ab uno disce omnes from one, learn all From Virgil, Aeneid, Refers to situations where a single example or observation indicates a general or universal truth. Visible in the court of the character King Silas in the American television series Kings.

here's another: abusus non tollit usum misuse does not remove use The misuse of some thing does not eliminate the possibility of its correct use.

So to refute icon's vague argument, virgil believed that a single observation could, but not necessarily did, indicate a general truth, which is the beginning of conventional wisdom, & in part to a correlation.
The second latin term tells icon & johnston that even if conventional wisdom is misused, it does not eliminate the possibility of its correct use.

Another one especially for icon: advocatus diaboli Devil's advocate ... Someone who, in the face of a specific argument, voices an argument that he does not necessarily accept, for the sake of argument and discovering the truth by testing the opponent's argument. Confer the term "arguendo".