Any debate surrounding violence tends to draw strong emotional reactions from everyone, and lately the polarizing conversations surrounding gun violence have been saturated with a particular virulence.
Given the historical and societal context, it’s understandable why the debates sometimes feel more like a fracas than an academic exchange of ideas. Since 1970, there have been 1.4 million Americans who have lost their lives (including suicides, accidents and murder) to gun violence, and yet, despite the fierce debates that permeate national conversation, there is often little “progress” made in any direction on the issue.
As a country we clearly feel intensely about the issue, yet we hamstring ourselves from making progress by using rhetoric that accelerates the decay into feuding and quarrel. Those who are pro-gun will bleat about naïve, soft, bleeding heart liberals or democratically-elected tyrants when they look to deflect from statistics about licensed firearms ending up in murders. And those who are anti-gun will lecture about how clearly any gun sold in the United States is a body count waiting to happen and that those who see guns’ utility in society are underdeveloped Neanderthals with views that polite society has left far behind. Regardless of where someone stands on the issue, you’d hope that with the stakes (aka bodies) being as high as they are we could find the ability to have a semi-productive deliberation on the matters at hand, but you’d be about as wrong as an effigy of Pol Pot at a Cambodian wedding.
The rhetoric on the pro-second amendment side of the issue is a great example of how the entire discussion has taken a nosedive from relative sanity (I haven’t been alive long enough to know if this conversation has ever had a tone that could be called levelheaded) to a deluge of rhetorical discharges so foul that they would make bonobos blush. There are a lot of delusions, misconceptions, and fallacies that some who argue on that side employ, but to say that particular perspective is mostly (hopefully) absent from campus would be a palatable assumption. That’s not to say there aren’t those on campus who are pro-gun, but I’d be willing to bet that those who feel that way here at Colorado College construct their argument differently than the sort of person who thinks it’s a good idea to grab some drinking buddies, guns, and occupy a federal wildlife preserve in eastern Oregon because they feel the need to stick it to Obama.
The flaws in the rhetoric of the pro-gun control side of the debate are much more relevant to this campus as there certainly are aspects to that side of the debate that are destructive to progress. It is easy to look at the issue from a singular perspective that’s convenient to preconceived beliefs and notions, but that mindset is not one that leads to compromise or any sort of progress. Once you look at some statistics it seems a bit ridiculous that there has been no progress at all. A Pew research poll in July found that 85 percent of the public favored making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks, and there was substantial bipartisan support for barring the mentally ill from purchasing firearms.
One of the reasons why there has been such little progress is because those who are for gun control often knowingly or unknowingly belittle those on the other side of the table and come across as contemptuous and mind-bogglingly uninformed about the actual guns they want regulated. An example would be a law passed in New York that banned ammunition magazines that held more than seven bullets. If that seems like a solid piece of legislation you should consider that for most guns there are basically no types of magazines that would hold less than seven bullets. There are countless other examples of blithe antagonism that the anti-gun side often purport in this debate, but frighteningly often the antagonism isn’t really that blithe at all. Piers Morgan is a high profile case who regularly berated those who are pro-gun for being either malicious or stupid, often choosing to paint those people as country bumpkins who have been around the bases with their cousins. The narrative that those who are to any degree pro-gun are somehow lesser and beneath respectability is abhorrent and cancerous to any progress to be made on the issue. This narrative exists here much more than we’d like to admit, as it tends to seep in when the intense emotions surrounding this debate come forth in the aftermath of an all-too-common tragedy. Regardless of how right it might feel to hold those views, they more often lead to radicalization than to compromise and progress.
The reality of the matter is that either side can come up with a set of assumptions about politics, society, and human nature that uphold their views to be unchallengeable and righteous, but it’s that very tendency that’s responsible for so much of the polarization and stagnation that has diseased the intellectual content surrounding the issue.
To borrow from Megan McArdle, “The better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are convincing anyone else. The messages that make you feel great about yourself (and of course, your like-minded friends) are the ones that suggest you’re a moral giant striding boldly across the landscape, wielding your inescapable ethical logic.”
The ways we reach compromise and progress are by understanding that on the other side of the issue are logical, rational human beings who are just as moral as the other side. Rather than paint the other side as villains or intellectually challenged, it might be a good exercise to try and understand what sort of contexts, influences, and ideas went in to the beliefs they hold so you can be armed with truly understanding why they fight so fiercely for ideas so diametrically opposed to your own. Only if both sides try to respectfully understand where the other side is coming from will there ever be any sort of progress, and this issue deserves better than the rancid discourse that currently occurs. The corpses of gun violence care little for how righteous an argument is, and until we can make this debate less about ideology and more about solutions backed up by rigorous evidence, the progress made will be token at best.