Another Litigator-Worthy Retort to Wayne LaPierre and the NRA — this Time from Psychologist Michael Bader

27 December 2012

Narrow theme — regarding techniques of argument

What follows is about the substance and techniques of effective argument — in instances in which one is trying to persuade people who are not completely rock headed.

What I write will be of no interest to most of the American Gun Right and much of its Left.

That’s okay. Skilled litigators are usually especially trying to reach one or two jurors and one or two appellate court justices.

As a former litigator, I admire closing arguments that reasonably sum the case and close the other side’s bogus escape hatches

Five days ago, I held up Lawrence O’Donnell’s critique (of Wayne LaPierre’s hypocritical posturing against any form of gun control) as a how to substance and emotion model for wannabe litigators.

Today, I do the same with psychologist Michael Bader’s step-by-step exposure of LaPierre’s poorly thought out pretense that he and the NRA actually care about mental illness.

Background — what Wayne LaPierre said after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 20 first graders and 6 adults

From NBC News:

LaPierre also said, “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics” and complained that de-institutionalization of the mentally ill had put too many dangerous people on the streets of America.

“We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that’s got these monsters walking the streets,” LaPierre said.

And he said many states do not put their records of those adjudicated to be mentally ill into the national instant check system that is designed to screen out convicted criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns.

How psychologist Michael Bader responded to Mr. LaPierre

Bader’s retort illustrates what skilled litigators recognize. Sometimes, you have to take your adversary at his/her apparently credible word and explain what would actually be required, if one were to follow through on what the adversary has proposed:

With the exception of Wayne LaPierre's dark ravings about ways to solve gun violence by putting more of them in the schools, the Right has made all the expected moves on the dance floor, beginning with their argument that gun control won't stop deranged individuals and that unless we talk about mental illness, we'll never get to the bottom of the problem.

Obviously, intended primarily as a distraction -- changing the subject by feigning concern for the mentally ill -- the Right's call for more skillful psychiatric detection and care is also morally and intellectually corrupt for other reasons that are rarely discussed.

Let's look at what would be required if we took seriously what conservatives are hypocritically proposing:

Pre-natal care . . . .

Early dysfunctions in parenting . . . .

Headstart and other early education programs . . . .

Special Education Programs . . . .

Smaller class sizes and better teacher education . . . .

Psychiatric Care . . . .

Group treatment programs . . . .

These are just a few things that could be done to greatly improve our chances of identifying potentially dangerous and mentally ill individuals early on, and treating them before they go past the point of no return.

The cost? Huge.

The difficulties of radically reversing current trends in the funding, much less the understanding of the causes of mental illness and its prevention and treatment are even greater.

A broad liberal agenda, of course, would support all of these things.

The very core of the conservative agenda, however, including its right-wing NRA faction, is antithetical to improving the very initiatives that their pundits deceptively and speciously advance.

For rational people, Dr. Bader’s response to Wayne LaPierre on the mental health issue is dispositive

Not that Mr. LaPierre, or his fellow travelers, will be listening.

Extremism of their kind is insensitive to logic.

The moral? — Rational argument works only with rational people

But, for the comparatively few of us who are both rational and thoughtful, intelligently constructed advocacy is aesthetically and emotionally pleasing.

If the one juror (or the one justice), whom a litigator is trying to hook, is thoughtfully reasonable, Dr. Bader has demonstrated how to go fishing.

Litigators need to know their target audience. And how to reach those key people, without alienating everyone else. Dr. Bader’s response to Wayne LaPierre is a good example of how to do this.

Even relatively thoughtless people have enough life experience to know that mental illness is not an easy nut to crack. Which means that an actual solution to gun violence necessarily has to go further than simply advocating that mentally ill people be (un-Constitutionally) tracked in the manner Mr. LaPierre has suggested.

PeteFree.com

Another Litigator-Worthy Retort to Wayne LaPierre and the NRA — this Time from Psychologist Michael Bader