While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain.

According to the fact-resistant former secretary of defense and CIA director, Iraq and Syria today would be flourishing in peace and stability and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) would have been stillborn if only the United States had intervened more forcefully with military might.

Sadly, the don’t-budge-an-inch absolutists are painfully fact-resistant. When, in an earlier column, I cited the common figure of 30,000 gun deaths in this country per year, an angry caller left me an enraged message.

It needs to be said, however, that one of the signs that our mental pictures of violence are often not based on demonstrable fact, but on fact-resistant faith, is the unreasoning reaction to arguments that question those images.