On The Gun Control Debate

I know that I'm not unique when I admit that I cried after hearing about Newtown. Most of us in America did. And then a lot of Americans did something we haven't done with any real earnestness in a long-ass time - we started talking about guns and gun control.

Cards on the table, I don't think guns keep people safe. I have a lot of reasons for this belief. Like the fact that it's overwhelmingly clear that having a gun in the house increases the risk of being accidentally shot by a whole order of magnitude not to mention that it makes it much more likely that the home will witness a homicide, suicide or non-lethal aggravated shooting. Beyond that, I think that the logic that having an armed populace would provide a significant deterrent to dangerous criminals ridiculous - to use a perhaps overly-reductive example, I look at the most heavily armed neighborhoods here in Chicago and see little evidence that fear of getting shot prevents crime - indeed, it often escalates it.

So while I personally would be more than happy living in a country where personal fire arms were limited to small sporting guns and were rare at best, I also understand that, given America's culture and history, that ain't happening. Like most people on the "more control" side of our national gun debate, my practical objectives are for laws that make less accessible for those who shouldn't have them and less lethal than strictly necessary for legal use (semi-auto assault-style weapons, large magazines, high-powered guns, etc.). 

Yet when I talk to people on the other side of this issue, it often ends up feeling like I end up advocating full firearm prohibition while they're defending total armament, why? I work with two gun owners who I often talk with about this. They're calm, rational guys, liberal-minded (in a broad sense) and both excellent fathers who I'm sure felt the pain of events like Newtown just as acutely as I, if not more so. Given all that, I really does surprise and even worry me that I find it so hard to find common ground with them on one of the biggest issues of our time.

After giving this a lot of thought, the short-term conclusion I've come to is that, as with so many "national debates" we're not actually disagreeing about policy. Indeed, Americans kinda suck at the kind of dispassionate arguments that our founders imagined being the cornerstone of public policy debates. You see, policy is technical and dry and full of the kind of imperfect-world compromises that are hard to really delve into in brief conversations or elucidate via quick evening news segments or Yahoo headlines. I'm sure that neither of my co-workers favor letting mentally ill people or violent offenders buy guns just as I not advocating for laws that would, strip hunters of their rifles or take the pistol from a law-abiding homeowner. Yet that's not really what we're talking about when we talk about this issue.

No, when we argue, what we're really doing is wading into more deeply-coded, personal belief-type territory. When I say, "we need X gun control measure," it's not heard as my seeking a common-ground solution to agree-upon factual problems, but rather trying to impose my worldview on them. I realize that these discussions usually gloss right past specific proposals and head straight for broader questions. They'll be amazed that I wouldn't feel safer packing heat and I'll be amazed that they don't think that reducing the flood of arms hitting the market would also reduce the number of people getting shot and we'll not really get anywhere.

See, what we're really arguing about is how one should view guns, both symbolically and functionally. They'll spin me a scenario which to them is a slam-dunk argument for why I should favor guns - "what if someone breaks into your house late at night? You're telling me you wouldn't want a gun to defend yourself?"* I, of course see it differently, in this scenario I tend to think that my having a Glock would only make things worse; with my firearms incompetence and fear potentially turning a burglary into a shootout (and on the question of competence, I defer to the always-insightful Ta-Nehisi Coates, concurring with his distaste for the commitment required in "living armed"). More broadly, I would also say that we should be focus on reducing crime, especially armed assaults, rather than focusing on how best to blow away potential intruders. You can see that we're just talking at cross-purposes with my co-workers appealing to an ideal of personal self-defense and me to the goal of a world of socially-mitigated dangers. It's pretty hard to resolve such a conflict without convincing the other person that your values trumps theirs. 

The frustrating thing about this "clash of worldviews" (besides the inherently quixotic ambitions on both sides), is that, as so often happens in our big "national debates," the misplaced focus moves people away both from potentially viable middle-ground. I've come to concede that it is possible for a country to fairly heavily armed and still pretty safe** and at the same time, even gun owners support a sensible national background check. But of course, with fundamental distrust on both sides, this type of low-hanging fruit becomes a vessel for accusations and well-poisoning acrimony.

This divide particularly worries me, not so much for any short-term legislative movement but for how unable it leaves us to communicate when this debate reaches a point of no return. I know there is a point in this debate where no amount of goodwill or compromise-seeking could possibly bridge the daylight between each camp's prima facie assumptions and it's then that we'll really be tested. 

And we WILL be tested. Although I know that Wayne LaPierre certainly doesn't speak for all gun owners, I'm going to use one of his more famous quotes here because I feel like its implicit logic is one fairly common to those on the guns save lives side of the aisle. My problem with the logic that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" (as the fella says) is that a) it assumes that "bad guys" are inherently bad, easily distinguishable and will have fairly easy access to guns and b) it treats physical force or the threat thereof as the primary lens through which to view crime prevention. 

The flaws of this approach have a few implications. First off, this logic is ineffective in creating deterrence - fear doesn't make people want to renounce crime, it just creates bolder criminals. Secondly, it saps the bonds of social cohesion by encouraging people to view safety and order as byproducts of a individuals' fear of personal bodily harm. I don't know about you but I find that Americans are pretty willing to risk bodily harm and violence, I tend to think that we rise to be our best, most effective selves nationally when we are called on to sacrifice for the greater good, not in the face of craven appeals to personal interest. Finally, it forgets that any "safety" purchased through brute intimidation rather than consent imprisons both parties - I can only imagine an existence which relies on ability to deploy deadly force for peace of mind to be on some level, frightened and lonely.

It is true other solutions such as things like poverty reduction, treatment of mental illness and other potential compromise issues would all play huge roles in how I would try and tackle gun violence. But no matter how you slice it, my way of thinking inevitably involves both reducing the ridiculously high number of guns floating around while also rethinking how we approach them as part of our culture. There is no getting around that fact and no way to square it with a large number of my country(wo)men.

But when the time comes to really have it out those issues and let the chips fall where they may, it would be nice to be able to do that with at least a modicum of understanding. Doing that will require talking about things with a genuinely open mind.*** It means having conversations that those thousands of tiny incremental steps towards understanding the other side as rational adults with at least somewhat valid opinions. It means NOT talking about this issue the way I've been doing.It takes a special kind of voodoo to have meaningful conversations this way for long periods time. I know that it takes a special kind of voodoo to have meaningful conversations this way for long periods time. I know that wrestling my own ego long enough to attempt any sort of third-party objective is an exhausting and slightly scary exercise. But I've come to the conclusion that it's really my only option here.

You see, otherwise I'd have to assume that my coworkers are confused and dangerous people and I just couldn't take that. I'd have to start carrying gun.

*There's also a certain amount of gut-level fear/apocalyptic thinking floating around in these statements that I'm hesitant to fully delve into. For example, they've also both asked me independently what I would do for protection if society crumbled. I didn't quite know how to answer, considering that I make most of my plans (and take my policy positions) in hopes their benefiting society and making it stronger. I suppose that my first priorities would be clean water and food but their assumption that society degenerate into some sort of Mad Maxian dystopia certainly begs the question of the purpose of gun laws in the first place.

**Canada has seemingly managed to pull this off reasonably well in that annoyingly well-adjusted Bizzaro-American way of theirs, I swear if it weren't for football and beer (Unibroue excluded),we Americans would be forced to rely exclusively on accents and weather for our Canuck jokes.

***NB When I say "open mind," I don't mean "willingness to change your deeply held beliefs," at least not in any short-term sense. Instead I mean "a willingness to accept that you may not hold a monopoly on truth and that even views that diametrically oppose yours have some ultimate basis in a valid reality" or some such thing.