From Tommy Christopher:
On this week’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher noted that “Cory Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him, a couple of times, what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach, and Cory Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer that question.”
“Can I just say this? Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question,” Blow said. “That is a horrible question.”
“Because what we’re doing is picking out one incident out of 30,000 deaths per year and saying ‘How could you solve this one thing?’” Blow continued. “That is not the objective of gun control. The objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed. And once you reframe it that way, maybe the proposal I have today will not solve that problem, but it cuts into this massive number of people that we are losing to gun violence.”
The question rankles because it smacks of pro-gun talking points, but as Blow points out, it also suffers from a serious logical flaw. It’s like asking a scientist what his cure for lung cancer would do to prevent pancreatic cancer.
Where I might differ with Blow’s analysis, though, is that there is no such thing as a horrible question if you have a great answer.