Why Gun Laws are Still Not Going to Change - And What You Can Do About It

There is one reason that the gun control situation in this country is never going to change: arrogance. We must seek to understand the other side if we ever want to change the debate from useless memes and protests to actual political action.

It is okay to think you are right. Having a strong belief in your own moral position does not make you arrogant. Arrogance is believing that you are so right, so smart, and so much better that you do not need to understand your opponent in order to win. In my experience, the left thinks the right is a bunch of rednecks. They are certain that the right is just an army of illiterate zombies of patriotism backed by corrupt billionaire financing. The left is so sure of this that they make no effort to understand the beliefs, values, and reasoning of the right. Why would we? They’re stupid, simple people. What is there to understand? They like guns more than they love kids. They believe their churches more than science. They hate women, gays, and minorities. We understand them completely.

That’s arrogance. The same arrogance that gave Trump the White House. This arrogance makes it impossible to change gun control laws in the United States.

If you think I’m wrong, then go back to endless Facebook memes and candlelight vigils. In five years, come back and leave a comment and let me know how that has worked out for you and the country. But if you can see some truth in my statements, then please keep reading and try to open your mind to understanding what you are really up against.

What you are going to read is not a defense of the right. It is not the gospel truth of what the Second Amendment means. It is an explanation of how the right thinks (yes, they do think) and what the right believes. Don’t roll your eyes and yell at how I am wrong. Just sit and try to understand. This is not an essay about my beliefs, so don’t debate me. This is a resource to help you understand what I have come to understand from years of listening to relatives, coworkers, and friends explain why they oppose more gun control.

I will cover five main areas that gun control proponents need to be better educated in if they are going to understand and change the gun debate. These are: the Second Amendment, understanding what the right is most afraid of, the uselessness of statistics, how guns really work, and who the pro gun right really is.

(Note: For brevity, I will not write “The right believes…” I will just write plain statements that represent their beliefs. If you find yourself angry at me for my opinions, then you are reading this wrong. This is not me trying to convince you. Just relax and understand.)

THE SECOND AMENDMENT

The second amendment is very short, but the interpretation leaves a mile wide gap between interpretations. Here are the words:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The difference in interpretation here comes from the three places: the understanding of arms, the understanding of militia, and the understanding of why they even wrote this amendment.

The militia is understood to mean the people - the regular citizens - that can rush to the defense of their own liberty. This goes back to George Mason, who was a delegate to the constitutional convention. He ultimately refused to vote in favor of the constitution because he felt it gave the federal government too much power, which power could be centralized and abused should a tyrant be elected. He wanted the Bill of Rights to be written and included in the constitution before it was ratified.. He lost that battle, but was influential in the writing, wording, and passing of the bill of rights in 1791. Mason was an avid supporter of the right to bear arms, and clearly stated why:

“But when once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty. When, against a regular and disciplined army, yeomanry are the only defence,--yeomanry, unskilful and unarmed,--what chance is there for preserving freedom? Give me leave to recur to the page of history, to warn you of your present danger. Recollect the history of most nations of the world. What havoc, desolation, and destruction, have been perpetrated by standing armies!” (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_12s27.html)

From that quote, it is obvious that ‘militia’ did not refer to the federal army. Who was this militia, then? Is it what we now call the National Guard? Mason once explained “I ask, Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.” (http://teachingamericanhistory.org/ratification/elliot/vol3/june16/)

Consider the history of the United States up to that point. They had been largely defended by militias which were composed of regular citizens who trained together with their own weapons. Those militias had participated in the French and Indian wars and many of the battles and guerilla actions of the Revolutionary War. While the militias were not singularly responsible for winning the war against the British, Washington’s army would not have been able to win without them. One of the advantages the colonists had was that many of them owned rifles and were accurate marksmen. The fact that the militia were armed with their own weapons is why the Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms…” (emphasis added). This is more than the right of the state to have a national guard or the right of a person to join the national guard. This is the right of every individual person to keep weapons in their possession.

If the militia was composed of regular citizens who owned their own weapons, then it is logical to suppose that “arms” in the second amendment refers to the common arms that would be issued to an individual infantryman. At the time of its writing, the Second Amendment is referring to black powder muskets, pistols, and rifles. Today, it is referring to magazine fed semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and handguns. Just as the internet, along with its influences and misuses didn’t exist in 1791, but First Amendment protections have been granted to it, so have second amendment protections been granted to semiautomatic small arms.

This amendment was written to protect the United States from being taken over by a tyrannical government. That government could be foreign, or it could be our own. (Many of us probably feel that the Trump administration makes that seem like a scarier threat than ever before.) The purpose of the people bearing arms is not to go hunting ar shoot beer bottles in the woods. The goal is to maintain a civilian force that is well enough armed with their own weapons that they could fight a government force. They can’t do this with single shot hunting rifles or black powder muskets. They must possess arms capable of competing in a small arms infantry engagement.

The right-wing obsession with scary looking assault rifles is not because they want to feel like rambo or because they need 30 shots to kill a deer because they are drunk rednecks. It’s because they believe they are the best deterrent to government tyranny.

THE RIGHT’S GREATEST FEAR

When it comes to dying, there is one thing the right fears more than anything else: Genocide. They don’t want to be part of a mass killing because they are defenseless. They believe that it is the natural course of humanity that evil men will rise to power and kill the defenseless. History is on their side. We are hard pressed to find a dictator that has not engaged in the mass murder of his subjects. Power hungry monarchs and emperors have been invading neighboring lands and slaughtering defenseless peasants for as long as humans have been recording history.

The right is often accused of not caring about the kids being massacred in schools or the innocents being killed in crossfire in the inner city. This is not true. They do care. It is their children dying, also. They are just as scared that their kids will be killed in a drive-by or school shooting. But they are even more scared of large scale, government sponsored killing.

It is not an irrational fear, mathematically speaking. There are roughly 13,000 people murdered by guns every year in the United States. If we compare this to the genocide perpetrated by Hitler on Jews and non-Jews (11,000,000), we see that it takes 846 years of firearm homicides to catch up with Hitler. And Hitler wasn’t the worst. It would take 3,000 years for the gun murders in America to catch up with the wholesale slaughter of Stalin or Mao. 6,000 years if you put them together. Even a “small” genocide like the one in Rwanda is over half a century of our victims to gun homicides.

The argument is that a steady low rate of 13,000 people dead each year is worth not ever having a government that could inflict the unimaginable horrors of state-sponsored genocide. You have to convince them that the United States would not devolve into an amoral tyranny in the next 1,000 years in order to overcome this deep uneasiness toward government. A difficult thing to convince even a stout leftist of, given our current administration.

This should not be a difficult mindset to empathize with.  We are suspicious of the government having too much power to invade our privacy. Why do we care if the government listens to our phone calls or reads our messages or monitors what we buy if we aren't doing anything wrong? The reason government surveillance is a big deal to us is the same reason it was a big deal to the founding fathers.  We know that if the government ever goes bad, we don't want them to have the ability to arrest people based on political statements they have made.  The left and right are not so different on the belief that giving up small rights now can result in the loss of big rights later.

WHY STATISTICS DON’T WORK

I hesitate to devote any energy toward this question. If you haven’t figured out by now that quoting statistics never convinces someone in a philosophical debate, then I don’t know what I could say to change your mind. Statistics are fine in a business meeting or scientific analysis, but we are talking about a near-religious belief here. (Actually, I know a lot of people that are more devoted to their guns than they are their religion, so maybe we should just say ‘religious belief.’) Statistics are useless in the face of deep, ethical convictions. They may scratch the armor, but they will never penetrate deep enough to win the argument.

The greatest weakness of statistics is that they are so manipulable. Do you immediately distrust any statistic that comes from a right wing source? Do you look for the angle of any number that goes against what you believe? That’s natural. And the right does it, too.

The fact that statistics are easily manipulated also means that everyone has their own. This means that for every number you throw out will be parried by a statistical ‘fact’ that counters it. The arrogance of believing that your numbers are so much ‘righter’ than their numbers leads to an endless fencing match where points are scored by either side, but no meaningful blow is ever struck. Accepting this reality, no matter how much you think your facts are more factual, will allow you to move on to more substantive debate that addresses real concerns.

As an example, here are a few of the anti-gun statistics that are most common, and the reaction that the right has to them.

Statistic: The US has a higher gun murder rate than nations like Great Britain, where guns are illegal.
Answer: Duh. If people can’t get guns, then they won’t use guns. That’s like saying more people in the U.S. die of car accidents involving Fords than in England. It’s not about the car, it’s about the accident. And it’s not about the gun, it’s about the murder. It doesn’t matter how the murder happens, just that it happens. There is no evidence that banning guns would lower the murder rate.

Statistic: 33,000 people are killed by guns each year in the U.S.
Answer: That is misleading, because it includes the 20,000 people that kill themselves with guns. Guns don’t lead to suicide. Japan has very strict gun control, but their suicide rate is 50% higher than the U.S.

Statistic: The U.S. has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. That’s why these shootings keep happening.
Answer: The U.S. has always had a high rate of gun ownership, but only recently (last 30 years) started experiencing a higher rate of mass shootings. Something else changed besides the guns to cause these killings.

Even if they didn’t have a comeback for these statistics, you would still have to convince them that getting rid of guns would solve the problem. When you have knife attacks in Japan, bulldozer rampages in China, arson in Australia, milk poisoning in Pakistan, and truck attacks in France which all kill similar numbers of people as mass shootings do in the U.S. (19, 11, 15, 17, and 85, respectively), it is hard to convince gun-rights advocates that getting rid of guns will get rid of mass killings. 

HOW GUNS REALLY WORK

Have you ever had a debate with someone about something that they knew very little about? Was it frustrating and impossible to win because they didn’t know how little they knew? That’s how the pro-gun right feels about the anti-gun left. They barely feel that it is worth the time to debate, because the statements made about the guns themselves are so incorrect that they have little reason to believe anything else that might be said. If you go into a debate arrogant and ignorant, there is no way you are going to win anywhere except in your own mind. 

As an example, consider this account from a recent NPR article:

Sitting outside a student center on the University of Delaware's campus, Cahlil Evans of Smyrna, Del., 20, says while he doesn't need a gun, he can understand why people would want hunting rifles and handguns. He draws the line, though, for assault-style rifles."There's no need for these high-caliber rifles that pierce through walls," Evans says. "People can say they use them for hunting or whatever, but why do you need a weapon with such high caliber that it would pierce through the animal and like eight trees behind it?"  (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/24/588069946/millennials-are-no-more-liberal-on-gun-control-than-elders-polls-show )

This statement is so factually incorrect that when I have shared it with pro-gun friends, they have burst out laughing. The AR-15 bullet is not a high caliber round.  It will not go through a deer and eight trees.  It is not a special bullet because it goes through walls.  All bullets can go through a wall. Someone who makes an argument for gun control with statements like this is never going to win an argument or change anyone's mind.

If you make any of the following factual errors, you can expect that the other side is going to quit listening to what you have to say.

ERROR: Semiautomatic weapons like the AR-15 can fire 800 rounds per minute.
Semi Automatic does not mean “machine gun.” A semi automatic rifle, like the AR-15, will fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled. Each trigger pull requires several pounds of force. This makes 800 shots in one minute impossible with an unmodified rifle. But assuming the fastest trained fingers, that the finger never gets tired, that the shooter never needs to aim, and that the gun mas a magical supply of ammo that never needs reloaded, a shooter could achieve 360 rounds in one minute. Realistically, semi automatic means a shooter can fire around 150 rounds in one minute. Meanwhile, fully automatic weapons are guns that the shooter pulls the trigger one time and holds it down while bullets spray out. These guns commonly fire at rates of 600-1,000 rounds per minute, though they would not achieve this because of the need to reload.

ERROR: Assault rifles are the most dangerous guns.
Well, this isn’t exactly an error, because an “assault rifle” is defined by the Department of Defense as “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." (Defense Intelligence Agency, Small Arms Identification and Operation Guide - Eurasian Communist Countries 105 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1988]) In other words, Assault rifles are rifles that can be switched to fully automatic fire. The error is that people refer to rifles like the AR-15 as an assault rifle, when it is not. (The AR is the initial of the company that designed it, ArmaLite Rifle.) The AR-15 is a semiautomatic rifle, not fully automatic.

Assault weapon, on the other hand, is a political term, not an actual designation. The AR-15 is an assault weapon. The Ruger mini-30 ranch rifle is not. They both fire the same sized bullet, have the same sized magazines, and can be fired just as fast. The only difference is how they look. Below is a picture of each, with the AR-15 on the left. It looks more dangerous, so it has been labeled an “assault weapon” by the media and politicians. In reality, there is no difference between their killing ability.






ERROR: Banning assault weapons will at least stop school shootings and save lives.
Rifles account for a few hundred of the 13,000 people murdered by guns each year. Handguns account for around 12,000 murders each year. The Virginia Tech shooting, the deadliest in US history, used handguns.

ERROR: There is a gun show loophole that allows anyone to buy guns.
Anyone that sells guns as a business has to comply with federal laws, no matter where they sell the gun. Those businesses still run background checks at gun shows. The “loophole” is that a private citizen can sell a gun to another private citizen without a background check. There are still laws that govern these sales - age limits still apply and the sale of handguns can’t be across state borders. But who’s checking? Removing the loophole doesn’t make the government omnipresent, so it wouldn’t stop anything illegal from happening.  Also, buying guns on the internet requires a background check. The gun can't be legally shipped directly to the buyer. It has to be shipped to a licensed gun dealer, who has to run a background check before turning over the gun.

WHO ARE THE GUN OWNERS?

I had a shocking revelation while I was in college. I was attending a small engineering school, I was invited by some friends to go shooting. They said it was a get together of some guys on campus, and we would go out to the empty desert that surrounded our small college town. This was an engineering university, not a redneck community college, so I was surprised when I got there and found 20 other people. They had AK-47’s, AR-15’s, shotguns, rifles with scopes, and more handguns than I could count. They had enough ammunition to keep up a pretty steady rate of fire (with breaks to set up targets) for two hours. I was awed by the firepower. These were nerds from middle and upper income homes. I had been sitting in class with many of these guys for a couple of years and had no idea that there was this side to them. They weren’t violent or unstable. They approached shooting like a pool player racking up some balls for fun.It was a hobby that they found enjoyable as they practiced to become better at making their shots.

When I got home, I googled how many gun owners there were in America. My jaw dropped. 40% of Americans own guns. And most of them own more than one gun. It is estimated that there is one gun for every person in America, without even counting the guns owned by the military and police. America is up to its eyeballs in guns. This got me interested in gun culture. I realized that there was a silent, almost invisible subculture that surrounded me without me realizing it for the first 20 years of my life. It turned out that almost everyone I knew owned a gun. Meeting someone that didn’t proved to be difficult.

So who owns these guns? Everyone. Rich, poor, educated, and uneducated. Doctors and lawyers, plumbers and mechanics, scientists and students, teachers and police. Everyone.

The fallacy in the left’s approach to gun control is that they think it is a bunch of rednecks with the monetary backing of the NRA that makes it difficult to legislate more gun control. But what the left doesn’t understand is that the NRA is not powerful because of money. It’s powerful because it represents almost half of America. When the NRA says something is unpopular, politicians realize they are about to displease a large number of their constituency. In many cases, they will be alienating more than 50% of their voters. The NRA isn’t the opposition. The opposition is 132 million Americans with guns.

Most of them are quiet about it. Most of them have little fear that gun laws are going to change because they know the power they wield - through numbers, through the second amendment, and through laws. It takes a ⅔ vote to change the constitution, and the anti-gun population is nowhere close to that. Gun owners know it, so they don’t worry. There are some that do. These are the few vocal ones that show up on your social media feed to debate with you. The news likes to interview the craziest ones. It makes good theater - a Berkeley alumnus debating a camo-jacketed hillbilly with a southern accent. It makes everyone feel good about their stance. It lends to a feeling of superiority and...arrogance.

Why can’t we pass gun control? It must be because of the NRA. That is the only explanation for losing this battle to a bunch of gun-toting right wing extremists. We are too arrogant to think that maybe our respected family doctor, or the nice lady that lives across the street, or our favorite teacher might be able to hold a view diametrically opposed to ours. We believe that someone has to be stupid to hold a view on guns other than our own, and this blinds us.

It is hard to find and understand this silent behemoth that stands in the way. Most gun owners are reluctant to engage in debate. They don’t want to feel attacked. They don’t want to waste time in endless circles. They don’t want to endanger friendships. They don’t need to because they control the status quo. If that is ever going to change, the left is going to have to find them, and gain their trust.

This single blog post is not going to teach you everything you need to know about your pro-gun neighbor. It is only the beginning. It is meant to give you a taste of what you don’t know, and encourage you to go meet someone and seek to understand them.

Stop accusing them of not caring about the lives of children. They care. Stop saying that their hunting guns are safe. They don’t care. Stop swearing at them, calling them heartless, and accusing them of corruption. They will sit in their well defended position and ignore you. They don’t have to be the ones that change the tactics, because right now they own the battle. They know that you don’t know who to attack, where to attack, or how to attack. It’s time to end the hubris and try to find another way. It’s time to swallow your pride and admit that you need to include them and their values in finding a solution to our problem.