Last week, the United States Senate failed to overcome a filibuster and pass gun control legislation. That’s not surprising – any optimism on new meaningful legislation was fanciful. You can Google “gun bill not pass blame” and get a bunch of different answers for that, so I won’t go there. But whether one thinks the cause is President Barack Obama’s political style, the NRA lobby or gerrymandering, the fact is that it lost. As Congress has not passed gun control legislation since 1994, I believe it’s time for gun control advocates like myself to analyze why this is the case and how to fix it.
The problem is the blanket dismissal of gun rights advocates’ opinions combined with ignorance regarding guns. In public discourse, and especially in conversations at Northwestern, advocates for gun rights are seen as a group of people whose views are irrational with no sense of social responsibility. However, there is often little attempt to understand the context from which these views arise. Without understanding where differing opinions come from, persuasion is almost impossible.
Persuasion is needed because nearly 20 years have passed since the passage of the last federal gun control legislation. In order to pass any legislation, gun control advocates need to convince their opponents that some methods of control are both desirable and compatible with their worldview. To accomplish this, we need to understand why they support gun rights, and then produce informed legislation that will increase public safety.
The first thing gun control advocates have to realize is that guns are a significant part of some people’s lives. Whether they are embedded in local culture or kept in a safe under the bed in a neighborhood with a high crime rate, guns can be a foundation of someone’s day-to-day life. According to a Gallup poll, 30 percent of Americans own guns. Even on the East Coast, the area with the lowest rate of gun ownership, more than 1 in 5 Americans have one. This shows why merely dismissing gun rights advocates won’t work – there are too many people who view it as an important issue. Thus, we need to find areas of common ground.
To achieve this, gun control advocates need to be knowledgeable about the subject they are trying to regulate. As anyone who has ever had meaningful discussions knows, it is impossible to bridge differences if the other person is incredibly arrogant about their beliefs or has no idea what they are talking about. In the context of guns, many gun control advocates have little idea what constitutes an assault weapon, the marginal utility of an additional bullet in a magazine, or the implications of universal background checks. We just think, “Well, it has the words assault and weapon, and both of those sound bad, so banning them can only be a good thing.” But we don’t recognize that a key condition is merely cosmetic: semiautomatic weapons that look as if they are automatic weapons are banned, while semiautomatics that don’t meet certain appearance-based conditions are allowed. Of course, appearance has very little to do with killing ability. If gun control advocates fail to learn basic literacy about guns, then we simultaneously fail to earn a spot at the negotiating table, fail to respect our opponents and even when we do manage to somehow pass legislation, fail to create regulations that actually increase public safety. Uninformed attempts at regulation are not only bad politics, but also dangerously bad policy.
Once there is a public discourse that revolves around mutual respect, then maybe the power of extremists on both sides will erode so that areas of mutual cooperation may open up. In the U.S., 84 percent of people think increased government spending on mental health would have at least some effectiveness in reducing gun violence and 67 percent support banning possession of armor-piercing bullets. Lawmakers have no excuse for failing to produce meaningful legislation, but the arrogance of the left and the propaganda techniques on the right create an environment where no one is surprised by this failure. Gun control advocates need to rethink how they view their opposition, do their homework and then create informed legislation that will make substantial change. The blame lies just as much with us as it does with them.
Tyler Dillon is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].
