"If owning a gun were an effective means of self defense, insurance rates would go down, but they don't because you're more likely to shoot yourself than an attacker."

Insurance companies aren't concerned about crime, they're concerned about paying out on life and health insurance policies; if they're involved in any social engineering, you can bet it's not going to be in support of any actuarial data that show personal gun ownership stops home invaders and other criminals from causing harm, which we know is true--it's just more newsworthy to report "Joe Blow was apprehended by authorities, full stop" than "Joe Blow was arrested fleeing the home of Benny Hanna; police caught him running out the back door after hearing Hanna, 42, rack his shotgun."

My chances of drowning at home are much higher because I have a bathtub, but since my bathtub poses no political threat to busybodies and tyrants, the fact that having a bathtub provides benefits that outweigh the risks is not controversial.

"Alabama, get your act together. No state that bans abortions but is in last place for education and has had four mass shootings alone in 2019 really cares about kids."

Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.

What about next to last place?  40th instead of 50th?  Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.

I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.”  Wow, way to set the bar, there.  It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.

As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama.  These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics:  124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church.  For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings.  All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools.  I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.

Another sign I'm on the right side

I mean, yeah, sometimes even on the Internet I find my echo chamber pierced like a bubble and find facts and logic and decent human beings that don't fit my paradigm, and I wonder if maybe I just have a few good intentions but am largely mistaken.

But then something else happens.

A number of something elses, actually, but I'll talk about how 90% of the violence is either physically on the other side or exists only as rhetoric and accusation and invention but still is on their side later.

It’s not that both sides don’t have solipsism and myopia. It's not that both sides don't have some facts and logic to support their positions (gun violence is never a good thing, even if you can justify its necessity; rationalizing its expansion despite any consequences is inhumane and as bad as the argument that is aesthetic rather than moral that "guns are bad so it doesn't matter if they reduce violence overall").  It’s that on the libertarian side, problems tend to be self limiting; large scale benefits perpetually promised by socialism might not be possible, but neither are tyrannies that keep said promises poorly and then bring more problems.  So when I see situations as I describe below, I find them to be evidence that such beliefs are more dangerous than my own, instead of less.

A coworker of mine--I'll tell you more about him later; he's fun--was lamenting that unemployment was as low as it has been lately.  He has nothing against people working, mind you, and he recognizes that some unemployment is natural as it accounts for people who are willingly between jobs and are not suffering in any way. But his contention was that as unemployment drops below this natural level, competition for workers goes up and that translates into higher wages meant to entice job seekers. And the money for higher wages has to come from somewhere, namely, the price of whatever goods and services are sold by companies that are raising their wages. Thus we end up with inflation hand in hand with wage increases. Okay, that’s not the best situation, although on some level that’s just a tautological opportunity cost—even if the money came from nowhere, prices would go up because the supply of money was higher.

That’s why modern first world countries have the richest citizens in human history and the truly (even the marginally) destitute are not proportionately large in number.

But the kicker? He’s down with a “living” minimum wage.

That’s right. It’s not good for labor prices to rise from natural market forces because it will push inflation, but artificially raising it and letting inflation happen for the very same reason is A-OK. Whether this parallel is unimagined or there is an implicit assumption that enough wisdom and economic controls can be made implemented quickly enough to stave off a crisis, I have no faith that the outcome would be better than not interfering.

"Don't slutshame. Sex isn't meant to have kids. Children are an occasional side effect of sex."

I could say a lot here--I don't want to go off on a tangent about how to discuss things that are inherently shameful, and how shame is not a social construct--but I will restrict myself to this:

If conception is an accident, a rare coincidence, then why is failure to use contraception in 100% of sexual encounters (y'know, just in case it's that one occasion) described as "not being responsible?"