It’s too hard to persuade people to willingly surrender the right to protect their own lives.
Last week I wrote a long essay in The Atlantic that represented my best effort to explain “gun culture” to those who may be more hostile to gun rights than, say, the typical reader of National Review. I began by describing threats to my family and how a person’s decision to carry a weapon is often directly tied to personal experience of real danger. Today, my friend Bethany Mandel published a similar essay in the New York Times, describing how her mother once chased off an intruder with a gun and how she herself decided to buy a gun when her family was threatened during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The goals of both essays are simple: to destroy stereotypes and to explain that the individual decision to purchase and carry a gun isn’t rooted in some sort of strange gun fetish or Wild West swagger but rather in the fundamental desire (and right) to protect your loved ones from harm. If arguments for gun control don’t grapple with this reality, then they’re destined to fail.
Yet the responses to both essays have helped demonstrate why the Left keeps losing on guns. It simply can’t persuade a rational, reasonable adult who’s experienced a threat that they’re safer withouteffective means of self-defense. Indeed, the effort to make this case is so often rooted in condescension or ignorance that it’s deeply alienating.
First, there’s an odd argument that it’s somehow illegitimate to make a decision based on “fear.” Or — as one correspondent put it — “fear and paranoia.” This makes no sense. Americans make safety-based decisions all the time. Is it wrong to buckle a seatbelt because that’s a “fear-based” decision? Should you ride a motorcycle without a helmet just to show the world you’re not scared? Reasonable people take precautions in the face of real threats.
Next, you immediately hear that you’re foolish. That “you’re more likely to hurt yourself than defend yourself.” In other words, the gun is more dangerous to you and your family than it is to any given criminal. But if you’re speaking to a responsible, non-suicidal adult, then this argument is flat-out wrong. In fact, even when you include suicides in the analysis — and compare them to the best estimates of annual defensive gun use — you’ll find that law-abiding Americans use guns to defend themselves far more than they do to hurt themselves.
No matter how long Hogg and his little bunch of wet behind the ears adoleses wring their little hands Americas will refuse to listen to the whining little twerps
There is no debate. All the left wants to do is ban guns and disarm citizens. If there was debate about how to prevent tragedies like Parkland, gun bans would be the last thing discussed. The list of governmental failures, any one of which could have and probably would have prevented the tragedy from happening is staggering, yet the left does not want to discuss or even consider a single one of them.
I’ve been having a lengthy discussion with my nephew on just this. In response to his post about a “debate” on CNN about the value of the AR-15 (which he regarded as “enlightening”) I asked if they ever got around to discussing how the problem of missing 3 warnings to the FBI, 39 visits by the police, numerous disciplinary issues regarding violent behavior, psychiatric treatment and school expulsions could have prevented the tragedy, which he regarded as “hind sight” and “finger pointing”. He has been programmed to accept that knee-jerk reaction that the least effective action is the action they prefer. He can’t see the ineffective history of that action, he only follows what he is told (by such as CNN) what would really feel good to do.
There’s no debate. There’s only a pursuit of an agenda and the opposition to that pursuit.
The gun debate was settled in 1791 they are late to the table .
Let the Left put forward any law change they want.
Then ask one question:
How would that law change have prevented any recent “mass” shootings?
More laws on the books are not needed.
Politically correct “disparate punishment” policies need to end to prevent shootings like the one in Parkland.
That ex-student was top-of-the-list of all teachers, administrators and students.
But…..because of Obama’s policy to stop the “school-to-prison” pipeline…. he was never arrested or given a 3 day mental eval.
Either of those things would have flagged his gun purchase application at the background check phase.
But the Left doesn’t want to change that.
They want to take guns away from EVERYBODY in the vain hope that it would make them safer.
And that will never work.
If you think the NRA is responible for all mass shooting then you must also think the Earth id Flat and Colombus never left port back in 1492 and that the earth is the center of the universe