Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy

Christian Gaylord

Blog post #2

Comm 250

The Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy is an informal fallacy, which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are stressed. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. The Texas Sharp Shooter originated, according to PBS Digital Studios on YouTube, when a Texan was shooting bullets at the side of his barn; after the last clip he went to the side of the barn where the bullet holes were and painted a target around the holes making it look like he hit middle every time. The Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy ignores the differences while focusing on the similarities.

I choose to study this fallacy because I believe that we all are guilty of this fallacy in some kind of way. For example, I went on a blind date with a very pretty girl in high school, she was gorgeous but we had nothing in common whatsoever. She was a year younger then me and was interested in everything I wasn’t interested in at all. She was also a fan of Kansas State. I absolutely hate Kansas State. Therefore I ignored all of the negatives and even stated that I had many similar hobbies she possessed and even told her I liked Kansas State. But since she was so pretty I choose to continue dating her despite having nothing in common. In the end it didn’t work out because I eventually told her that we had nothing in common, and that I despised Kansas State. I was working so hard for a false conclusion with that person that I didn’t let it come naturally. There are many cases where opposites do attract, but thankfully that didn’t occur that time.

Another example for the Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy is when I was in high school and my football coach made the football team run a 5k for punishment because we were goofing around during practice. There were probably around 2,000 people doing the race. So at the start race, a couple of my buddies and I waited for the crowd of runners to get far enough so they couldn’t see us. We hopped into my brother’s truck and he drove us to the finish line. We made sure that we didn’t finish to far in front of the crowd but we did finish 50^th out of 2000 people. Our coach new what we did but he didn’t care because he got praise for his football players finishing the race so fast.