The number of foreigners obsessed with American gun laws is an endless curiosity for me. This country fascinates people in Britain, Australia, and Canada—or so social media tells us. Canada being our next door neighbors may explain their interest, but the other two nations are oceans away, living in gun control “paradises.”
One such example is the YouTube channel of Canadian, Nicole Arbour, someone who describes herself as a “comedian, recording artist, motivator, and emoji lover.” As with so many people who are famous for being famous, my first reaction was Nicole who? She seems to have been in a handful of movies and reality TV shows and in more programs about programs, so it’s no surprise that I hadn’t heard of her before.
Her video, “Dear Gun Enthusiasts,” is a bizarre accumulation of slurs, falsehoods, and scattered pop-culture references, including repeated demands to pay Rihanna. But her primary concern is all the random Americans going about armed.
Arbour asserts that if we want to get away with murder, all we have to do is shoot someone, then claim that the act was in self-defense. It’s true that about a third of homicides aren’t cleared, either due to suspicion of the police or to a preference on the part of prosecutors for guaranteed wins. But if you call in law enforcement and say you shot to protect your life, a failure to close the case isn’t going to be a problem here. She may have George Zimmerman in mind, but that case was investigated and tried, and the police are generally capable of determining what kind of shooting—self-defense, intentional homicide, or negligence—has occurred. The concern is more toward whether they’ll treat genuine self-defense cases as such. Besides, it’s always telling when gun control advocates treat law enforcement as incompetent at doing their jobs, while so often claiming that the very same people are ones who should be armed.
But then, according to Arbour, self-defense with a firearm isn’t actually possible, anyway. She claims that if someone wants to shoot me, I’m going to get shot. Her evidence for this? The assassination of J.F.K. Of course, doing a little research—such as item number three that showed up in a quick look on Duckduckgo.com—would have shown her that the Secret Service screwed up that day. By her line of reasoning, if I’m having an off day and let a student use logical fallacies in an essay, the field of expository writing is in doubt. It would be just cruel to tell Arbour about the number of defensive gun uses that occur in a given year.
If we want to be gun owners, she would have us pass a stringent test of our mental health. One of the questions she’d like to see on this test would be to ask if a particular D.J. is a role model. Whom she had in mind wasn’t clear—yet another celebrity I’ve avoided knowing about, I suppose. But she doesn’t want us treating the framers of our Constitution in the same manner, since the, um, stuff (not her word) that they wrote was written a long time ago. That they protected speech and by implication YouTube videos at the same time as gun rights doesn’t trouble her thinking.
Is this video sarcasm? Of course it is. And while it’s important to know what we’re dealing with, too many on the gun control side see the claims she makes as solid arguments. If Arbour wishes, in the words of Emily Dickinson, to be a Somebody, telling her name to an admiring bog, she’s free to do so—especially on our side of the border where speech is protected. But she shouldn’t expect her attempts at humor to convince many of us.
And if she wants to mock our accents, I’ll have to ask her to translate the speech of Newfies talking to each other, but that’s another matter.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Guns.com.
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