A
woman waits to hear about her sister, a teacher, following a shooting
at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (photo: Jessica
Hill/AP)
By Dennis A. Henigan, Salon
03 July 16
The gun lobby’s disproportionate political power will never be overcome until these fallacies are destroyed
tortured mythology
The issue of guns in America causes people in other
parts of the developed world to look at our country and shake their
heads. They just don’t get it. They don’t understand why so many
Americans have such passion for their guns. They don’t understand why
gun control is such a contentious issue. Most of all, they don’t
understand how America can tolerate its chronic carnage of deaths and
injuries from gunfire, particularly among our children and particularly
after the horror of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 in which 20 first graders and
six adults lost their lives. American children ages five to fourteen are
eighteen times more likely to die of a gun homicide and eleven times
more likely to die of a gun suicide than children in twenty-two other
high-income countries.
Across all those high-income nations, the United
States accounts for more than 90 percent of the gun deaths of children
under fifteen years of age. President George W. Bush, of all people,
once noted that an American teenager is more likely to die from a
gunshot than from all natural causes of death combined. God bless
America.
Particularly her children.
This uniquely American tragedy is often viewed from a
political perspective. At every level of government, a powerful lobby,
the National Rifle Association, disproportionately influences gun
policy. The Washington Post has called the NRA “arguably the most
powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one
of the most feared.” A 2005 poll of congressional “insiders” by the
“National Journal” found that Democrats rated the NRA the “most
effective” interest group on Capitol Hill; Republicans ranked it number
two. One “insider” hastened to add: “Effective does not necessarily mean
ethical.” In fact, a 2006 Harris Poll found the NRA one of the most
recognizable, and least trusted, public policy organizations in the
nation.
What is truly astounding is that the NRA is able to
block the enactment of legislation that is spectacularly popular with
the American people. Reinstating the ten-year ban on AK-47s, UZIs, and
other military-style assault weapons, enacted in 1994, enjoyed the
support of 78 percent of the American people, with only 16 percent
opposed, when Congress, under NRA pressure, allowed it to lapse. Despite
surveys taken after the Newtown shooting, showing almost 90 percent
public support for requiring background checks for all gun sales,
legislation to extend the Brady Bill background checks to private sales
failed to muster the necessary sixty Senate votes to cut off debate;
the legislation never even reached the floor of the House of
Representatives. Even mandatory registration of handguns has the support
of 75 percent of Americans, yet it has no serious support in Congress.
Gun owners and non-owners alike favor proposals to
strengthen gun laws. A poll conducted by Republican messaging guru Frank
Luntz showed that 74 percent of current and former NRA members, as well
as 87 percent of other gun owners, support universal background
checks. A majority of self-identified NRA members supports handgun
registration and mandatory safety training before purchasing a firearm.
These are positions vehemently opposed by the NRA’s leadership.
The NRA’s power, of course, can be overcome. The Brady
Bill was enacted into law in 1993 and is still stopping criminals from
buying guns from gun dealers. Yet even the successful struggle to enact
the Brady Bill can be seen as an illustration of the NRA’s clout. Though
the bill had public support consistently in the 85–90 percent range, it
took seven years to become law.
The triumph of bumper-sticker logic
Shortly after I began my tenure as a lawyer and
advocate for the Brady gun control group, I started to notice a peculiar
repetitiveness in my opponents’ arguments. Whether it was on radio or
TV talk shows, panel discussions, or speeches with audience Q&A,
there was a striking similarity in the substance of the arguments, and
even the language, used by my opponents.
Over and over again, I would hear “Guns don’t kill
people. People kill people.” I would hear “When guns are outlawed, only
outlaws will have guns.” I would hear “An armed society is a polite
society.” I had seen these sayings on bumper stickers for years, but I
discovered that my opponents actually argued in these terms. Even when
these exact phrases weren’t used, the thoughts they express were
conveyed in other words. In more scholarly settings, critics of gun
regulation would dress up their arguments in the arcane language of
academia and in mountains of statistics, but their basic claims could,
to a remarkable degree, be boiled down to the same themes I had heard on
countless talk shows.
For gun control advocates, the sad fact is that the
bumper-sticker arguments of the National Rifle Association and its
allies have an impact on the gun debate that needs to be acknowledged. I
am not suggesting that these arguments cause most people to oppose
specific gun control proposals; as already noted, a wide range of
proposed restrictions on guns has broad public support. However, because
the arguments sound like they have more than a kernel of truth, they
have had an important long-term effect on the intensity with which the
public favors gun control, particularly as it is reflected in its level
of activism on the issue and its voting behavior.
Years of public-opinion polls on guns suggest that
support for gun control is a mile wide and an inch deep. People will
tell a pollster that they favor a host of gun restrictions, but surveys
show a far smaller percentage will act on their support or will make it a
major factor in determining their support or opposition to a particular
candidate for office. Surveys show that opponents of gun control are
far more likely than gun control supporters to give money, contact a
public official, express an opinion on a social networking site, or sign
a petition on the gun issue.
Although there is little doubt that the level of gun
control activism increased after Newtown, surveys still indicate that
gun-rights supporters are more likely to say they are “single-issue”
voters than are gun control supporters. According to a 2015 Gallup poll,
40 percent of voters who want gun laws to be “less strict” say they
would only vote for a candidate who shares their views on gun control,
whereas only 21 percent of voters who want gun laws to be “more strict”
say they would make their election choices solely on the gun issue. A
2014 Yale University survey showed an even more dramatic gap: among
voters who thought gun laws should be less strict, 71 percent said they
would never vote for a political candidate who did not share their
position on gun control, compared with just 34 percent of those who
support stricter gun laws.
This gap is ameliorated to some extent by the fact
that far more Americans favor making our gun laws more strict than favor
weakening them, by a margin of 55 percent to 11 percent, with 33
percent wanting them kept as they are, according to a 2015 Gallup poll.
Nevertheless, this intensity gap strikes fear in the hearts of
politicians who perceive that, particularly in swing districts or
states, where a relatively small number of committed single-issue voters
can make the difference in a close election.
As veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart explained,
“You can win the vast majority of the public, but it becomes a nonvoting
issue for them. And the people opposed to gun control make it their
single most important issue. That’s the challenge.”
President Obama,
expressing frustration that Congress would not act to strengthen gun
laws during his administration, recognized the “single-issue” problem.
Indeed, he declared that he would no longer support candidates who do
not support “common-sense gun reform” and challenged other gun-law
supporters to join him in that pledge. This continuing intensity gap may
well be related to the resonance of at least some of the NRA’s oft-used
bumper-sticker arguments.
Let’s take, for example, the declaration “Guns don’t
kill people, People kill people.” The suggestion that the violence that
has long plagued our society is rooted in the evil that lurks in our
souls is effectively used to marginalize, as relatively insignificant,
issues related to the specific instrumentalities of violence. The
slogan has been remarkably effective in diverting attention from the
issue of gun regulation to the endless, and often fruitless, search for
more “fundamental” causes of criminal violence.
To take another example, a great paradox of opinion
polling on gun issues is that the public consistently supports enactment
of gun legislation, even though it does not think it will be effective.
In 1994, the year following the enactment of the broadly popular Brady
Bill and the year the assault weapon ban passed with overwhelming public
support, one poll showed that only 34 percent of the American people
believed that gun control laws would reduce violent crime, while 62
percent said they would not. Thirteen years later,
an ABC News poll revealed similar attitudes; although 61 percent of
those surveyed supported stricter gun laws, only 27 percent thought they
would do “a lot” to reduce gun violence.”
A CNN poll in 2015 found that 58 percent thought it
unlikely that expanded background checks would keep guns out of the
hands of convicted criminals. In other words, at some basic level, the
public is convinced that “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have
guns.” This belief cannot help but diminish the intensity of public
support for further gun restrictions and the likelihood that such
support will be translated into activism and voting behavior. It is
difficult to motivate people to work and vote for gun control if they
are not convinced it will make a difference.
The gun advocates’ bumper-sticker messages, when
examined critically, reveal themselves as mythology compounded by
convoluted reasoning. Yet they continue to exert an outsized influence
on public attitudes toward guns and gun control. Unless these messages
are challenged and discredited, our national paralysis in addressing gun
violence is likely to persist.
Are logic and evidence irrelevant?
Some may think this discussion reflects an
embarrassing level of naiveté about the politics of gun control. If the
barrier to progress is the continued fear of the NRA’s raw political
power, they will say, it will never be enough to show that the NRA’s
arguments make no sense. As one columnist said about the gun control
debate, “This dispute isn’t about logic anymore than the stem-cell
dispute is about science.
It’s about the power of an interest group to
impede what looks to most of us like genuine public progress.” Let me
be clear: I am not arguing that destroying the NRA’s mythology will be
sufficient to overcome the NRA’s political influence. I believe,
however, that the gun lobby’s political power will never be overcome
until these myths are destroyed. Political power is not unconnected to
ideas.
The source of the NRA’s disproportionate political
power is not simply its money and the intensity of its supporters’
beliefs; it is also its effective communication of several simple themes
that resonate with ordinary Americans and function to convince them
that gun control has little to do with improving the quality of their
lives.
The connection between politics and ideas on the gun
issue is nicely demonstrated in the 2006 book “Take It Back” by
Democratic Party strategists James Carville and Paul Begala. Carville
and Begala were solidly in the camp of Democrats who believe their party
has been damaged by its identification with the gun control issue. They
argued that Democrats should “defuse” the gun issue, essentially by
agreeing with the NRA that we should simply enforce existing gun laws,
but not pass any new ones.
Those who believe that exposing the gun lobby’s
bumper-sticker fallacies would have no effect on the politics of gun
control should consider this passage from the Carville-Begala book on
the issue of whether the Democrats should push to require background
checks on gun sales at gun shows:
Sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT)
and John McCain (R-AZ), the bill would require that people who buy guns
at gun shows pass the same background check required for purchases made
in stores. Okay. Sounds reasonable. But what is the political
cost-benefit analysis? A study by the Clinton Justice Department showed
that just 1.7 percent of criminals who used guns in the commission of a
crime obtained their gun from a gun show. By extending the Brady Bill to
catch such a small percentage of transactions, Democrats risk inflaming
and alienating millions of voters who might otherwise be open to voting
Democratic. But once guns are in the mix, once someone believes his gun
rights are threatened, he shuts down.
Notice the question: What is the political cost-benefit analysis? What
Carville and Begala are saying is that gun control simply doesn’t do
enough good, as a policy matter, to be worth the political cost of
advocating it. Presumably, the “political cost-benefit analysis” would
be different if they were convinced that stricter gun laws would really
save thousands of innocent lives and prevent untold suffering.
Dig beneath the surface of this passage and it is easy
to uncover two of the NRA’s favorite myths. The cavalier dismissal of
the need for gun-show background checks is a variation on the theme of
“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” It turns out
that, on the issue of gun shows, the Carville-Begala analysis is highly
misleading. They cite a Justice Department survey of federal firearms
offenders showing that only 1.7 percent of the offenders said they got
their guns at gun shows. This ignores the well-established fact that
many gun criminals buy their guns from gun traffickers who, in turn,
bought their inventory at gun shows. Many criminals simply don’t know
that their guns originated at gun shows. Carville and Begala overlook
the joint Justice-ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms)
study of federal trafficking investigations showing “a disturbing
picture of gun shows as a venue for criminal activity and a source of
firearms used in crimes.”
The reference by Carville and Begala to gun owners
feeling that their “gun rights are threatened” by background checks
implicitly invokes the classic “slippery slope” argument. Carville and
Begala obviously see some validity to the idea that gun show background
checks will lead to serious invasions of the right to bear arms. The
political conclusion reached by Carville and Begala follows directly
from their policy conclusion about the impact of gun control.
It seems clear that the persuasive power of the
Carville-Begala political argument to fellow Democrats likely was
enhanced because the NRA’s bumper-sticker logic has managed to sink in
to our collective consciousness about the relationship between guns and
violence. Conversely, exposing the NRA’s mythology as transparently
empty and dangerous would have made it more difficult for Democrats to
“defuse” the gun issue by embracing the NRA’s view. On the gun issue, as
with other issues, politics and policy are connected.
In December of 2003, former President Clinton,
speaking at the Brady Bill’s ten-year anniversary celebration in
Washington, DC, cogently addressed the way the gun debate is conducted
in this country and how it impacts our nation’s ability to make greater
progress in preventing injury and death from gunfire. He said he was
always struck by the disconnect between the gun lobby’s arguments and
what is happening in real life. “This is all about getting people to
stop thinking,” he said, “ignoring the human consequences of a practical
problem.” He went on: “But the consequences here are quite severe,
because the landscape of our recent history is littered with the bodies
of people that couldn’t be protected, under sensible gun laws that
wouldn’t have had a lick of impact on the hunters and sportsmen of this
country.”
I was in the audience that day and I was struck with
his observation that “this is all about getting people to stop
thinking.” This is, in fact, the impact of the pro-gun slogans. They do
not stimulate thoughtful, rational discussion of the “human consequences
of a practical problem.” They end thoughtful, rational discussion and
replace it with clever catchphrases in service to an immovable ideology.
I think President Clinton was getting at the disturbing truth about the
gun debate in America. Our nation does a bad job of thinking about
guns. Until we get the reasoning right, we will do little to address the
“human consequences” of gun violence. It is no exaggeration to say that
our nation’s gun policy is paralyzed by a series of fallacies—arguments
that appear sound on first hearing, but crumble when subject to careful
thought and analysis.
Although exposing these fallacies is necessarily an
exercise in reason, it should not be coldly intellectual. It is my hope
that the task will awaken the same emotions in the reader that it did in
me: Sadness. Then anger. When President Obama unveiled a series of
executive actions on guns three years after the Newtown massacre, he
reminded the nation that it was a mass killing of first graders. “Every
time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,” said the president,
wiping away tears. It should, in fact, make all of us angry. It should
lead us to realize that too many of our fellow citizens have perished or
been severely injured because the pro-gun fallacies have held sway for
far too long. They have excused inaction and justified misguided
policies. Because gun violence is, literally, a life-or-death issue, the
NRA’s tortured mythology has cost innocent lives. Too many have died
for us to tolerate it any longer.
estlé is planning to open a bottled water plant in Phoenix. Yes, drought-stricken Phoenix, Arizona.
ne
of the more tedious political parlor games in any presidential election
is now fully underway — Vice Presidential speculation. On the
Republican side we have the unusual spectacle of far more people running
away from the possibility than coyly making themselves available. It
seems few people wish to end their political careers this year by diving
over a cliff holding hands with Donald Trump.
e
hear a lot about patriotism, especially around the Fourth of July. But
in 2016 we’re hearing about two very different types of patriotism. One
is an inclusive patriotism that binds us together. The other is an
exclusive patriotism that keeps others out.
