Scott Adams looks at the American gun problem and suggests how a master wizard of persuasion could fix it:
Stop calling it a gun problem. Stop talking about gun control or even common-sense restrictions. Start calling it gun safety and personal responsibility. (High ground maneuver.) Ask the NRA to propose a gun safety plan that addresses the nation’s legitimate concerns. (Ask them to take responsibility for their freedom.)
That looks rhetorically strong, but we obviously have two sides that have dug in, and neither side wants to concede anything.
Adams suggests that there’s a simple explanation for this absurd situation:
We make the same mistake every time when it comes to domestic issues: We look at averages and pretend those averages are useful for anything but starting fights. We do the same thing with all of our social issues.
[...]
All gun arguments are based on average people doing average things in average places. I agree that the average person should live in a world with far fewer guns because that guy is an idiot with no common sense, no gun safety training, and no gun locks. Luckily, the average person does not exist. Instead, you have some people who are smart enough to safely own guns, people who are far too dangerous or dumb to own guns, and a lot of people in the middle.
Every individual has a different risk when it comes to guns.
His list of potential policies is hopeless, of course. Gun safety measures don’t help against common street criminals or uncommon mass murderers.
The NRA has plenty of gun safety programs. The progressives don’t want anything to do with them.
They don’t believe it is possible to safely use a gun.
To quote the Z Man, he posted this as a comment:
Or to sum it up, again the Z Man:
“Gun control is just a public act of piety.”
And yes, do stop calling it a gun problem:
“The truth is America does not have a gun problem or even a murder problem. America has a black guy problem. According to the Federal government, young black males make up 3% of the population and commit 27% of the homicides.”
Other big minorities aren’t much better:
“While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.
But you never hear about “the minority problem”. I can’t find even one minority safety program!
I don’t own any guns myself but have friends who do and have gone shooting with them, and enjoyed it very much. [9mm Walther PPX, Norinco M1911 copy, S&W 38 Police circa 1942, Margolin target pistol, M4, and a couple of ,22 rifles and an old double barrel shotgun. Fun stuff. An interesting discipline too.]
I’m not especially motivated to invest in gun ownership myself, so the fact it is a greater pain in Canada doesn’t bother me much. Similarly, my city’s crime rate and my way of life don’t seem to suggest self-defence with one is all that likely to be necessary. So I have more or less let time pass without doing more. But I’m pretty broadly in sympathy with Americans who want to defend their 2nd Amendment rights. Always have been.
One thing though, it seems to me as an observer that both camps have dug in on fairly extreme positions. Gun controllers have determined that, alone of the Bill of Rights and contrary to the semantic structure of it, the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right. That strikes me as obtuse. But the defenders of gun rights have now reached the point of refusing any limits at all, even where the safety of others is concerned. That’s also beyond the way the rest of the Bill of Rights is handled. At least the major ones — even free speech has always faced public safety and libel boundaries.
I get why one would not want to concede that point in the modern climate — give an inch and they will take a mile, for sure — but it does strike me as inconsistent with the way Americans have historically defended their other constitutional rights.
To take one idiosyncratic point of view, I have a hard time understanding why private businesses, churches, or all manner of establishments should not have the right to restrict guns on their premises.
I’m not sure that’s a supportable assertion, Graham, though it may seem that way from a media-filtered outside perspective. In fact the different regions of the United States have a wide spectrum of firearms laws from very strict to very lax. Indeed a large part of the seeming intransigence of 2nd Amendment supporters is based on the observation that the regions with very strict regulation of private firearms ownership suffer from all the supposed drawbacks of lax gun-control laws, while those with largely unregulated ownership of firearms seem less afflicted. Note that this doesn’t imply causation, simply correlation.
Attempts by various politicians and interest groups, almost universally hailing from those urban areas with both very strict gun control and very high gun crime, to impose those laws on more rural regions with both very lax gun control and relatively low gun crime tend to smack of a sort of internal imperialism. This is responsible for much of the rancor of the debate, in my opinion.
I agree with the guy who wanted to use a different term when identifying gun control. If you use personal terms like personal responsibility and tie with guns you give the firearm a personality and making the owner realize the gravity and power of the firearm he is handling.