The freedoms that guns provide are, if anything, even more visceral. I know that if I’m carrying my .45 I can protect my family and myself in situations where it would be patently unrealistic to think that the police could get there in time, even if I was able to call them. I don’t look for trouble, and I go out of my way to avoid it, but if I get cornered in a situation of last resort, I’ll have the means to protect myself. And the private ownership of guns has historically been a safeguard against tyranny, and something that tyrants hated. When the Minutemen fired the “shots heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord, they were fighting British troops who had been sent to their communities to confiscate their guns. The rifles they owned were pretty much the state of the military art at that time – obviously, that’s no longer the case. I don’t have a Blackhawk attack chopper, an M1 tank, or a rocket launcher, and I don’t know anyone who does. But the weapons we do have would be enough to give any would-be President-For-Life pause. And that’s the way it should be. I tend to be suspicious of bumper-sticker philosophy, since it lends itself to the kind of oversimplification I started out talking about, but I agree with the sticker that says “I fear the government that fears my guns.”
Another part of the solution is education. When most people didn’t have cars and had never even ridden in one, they were scary, and a lot of people wanted to ban them. Familiarization eased their concerns. I’ve watched my wife go through a similar process with guns. She had very little experience with them and was kind of spooked with having them around, but rather than simply say, “They’re evil! Get rid of them,” she said, “I want to learn how to handle them safely and use them competently.” She did so, and although she has a very healthy respect for the dangers they pose if treated recklessly, she doesn’t lose any sleep over their presence. One of the problems with this issue is that so many of the people who yell the loudest know the least about what they’re talking about. Makes me think of the website where some smartass has a live cam sitting watching a rifle – one of those notorious “assault rifles” at that – that is loaded and cocked, but sitting in front of the camera with no one touching it. It’s been there for a long time, and that rifle hasn’t gone off yet. A lot of legislators and voters base their opinions about guns on appearances or on sensationalist news coverage of isolated incidents. For example, I could walk into a store tomorrow and buy two rifles, a Colt AR-15 and a Ruger Mini-14. They are functionally identical – both are semi-automatic, meaning you get one shot per pull on the trigger; they both use detachable magazines, meaning you can quickly reload them with anywhere from five to a hundred cartridges; they have the same kind of sights and about the same effective range; they even fire exactly the same ammunition. But the Colt looks sinister – it’s the civilian version of the M-16 we’ve seen a thousand deranged criminals and terrorists using in TV dramas; whereas the Ruger has a respectable-looking wooden stock and looks kind of tame – a kinder, gentler looking semi-automatic rifle. One got classified as an assault rifle, and was illegal to buy from partway through the Clinton administration until a few years ago, and the other didn’t get that classification and had essentially little more restriction placed on it than a BB gun. Why? Because the Colt has a black plastic stock and a pistol grip, neither of which make any functional difference whatever. This makes no sense. This is the kind of law passed only by people who either don’t know what they’re doing or are cynically counting on the voters not to figure it out. Would we want some cars being banned because they’re painted the wrong color or have a stick shift instead of an automatic transmission?
Although gun control is my pet issue – partly because I really do not want anyone trying to take away my guns if I haven’t done anything to demonstrate that I’m not a responsible owner; partly because I don’t trust that I will always be able to count on the police to protect me and the government to respect my civil liberties; partly because on this subject, a lot of liberals who normally think in what Lakoff calls a “nurturant family” mode suddenly go all authoritarian and “strict-father”, and I think they’re unthinkingly betraying their own principles out of intellectual laziness; and partly because I know a lot of sensible, moderate, enlightened people who vote Republican because and only because they are afraid the Democrats will take their guns if they get into office – there are a swarm of comparable issues. On each of them, a lot of us liberals are jerking our knees rather than thinking, and betraying the principles we claim to uphold. The majority of the voting public aren’t likely to suddenly start reflecting on the nuances of social questions when they’ve never been taught to do so, and all the media they’re being exposed to are yelling at them to just keep chanting simple-minded slogans and treating every issue as a kindergarten yes/no question, so we in the blogosphere, if we really aspire to be leaders, need to lead by example and provide that nuanced consideration. I believe that if we get some analysis with depth to it out here on a number of issues, point out to the public that a lot of politicians and most of the mainstream media are assuming they’re morons and treating them accordingly, and do so loudly and often enough, at least a few more people will start actually thinking. And I believe the more people really think about things, the more people will start voting more progressively, because I really believe that our bedrock values are in tune with those of most Americans.
So maybe we can start with gun control. If not, let’s pick another issue. But no matter where we start, let’s try to really boil things down to the true paradoxes that lie at the bottom of all real controversies, and looking first for common ground and then for acceptable third paths.
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