The Path Forward on Guns

A lot of people have asked me about guns recently. I mostly don’t talk politics online, and mostly won’t here. But I do like talking about systems, and there’s something unfolding here that almost everybody is missing.

The conversation, from the media to Congress to living rooms, looks on the surface like a debate. Each side has their arguments and stats and logic. They lob them back and forth, trying to change minds. But it almost never actually gets results. On net, roughly nobody ever switches sides.

That’s because you can’t persuade somebody against their will. The underlying strategy of “You have deeply held opinion x, I have deeply held opinion y. I will now show that you’re wrong.” simply doesn’t work in real life. What evidence does exist on it, suggests that it backfires.

Both sides go through the motions of an Oxford-style debate, but judging by their actions, they know persuasion doesn’t work. The actions don’t match a debate. They match a culture war. And those … well, those you win by force.

What does winning by force look like? One example is that the states have bifurcated hard on gun laws since the mid-1980s.

The states that operate from a gun-rights frame have gotten much less restrictive. In 1986, nine states had shall-issue concealed carry permits. Today, 42 states have them, and 13 of those don’t even require a permit at all. That wave grew geometrically.

Similarly, states with a gun-control frame have gotten much more restrictive. For example, in six out of the seven states with assault weapons bans, the bans’ provisions have ratcheted tighter and tighter every 10–15 years.

The force driving this is that when persuasion doesn’t work, the dominant strategy is to use a greedy algorithm: anywhere you can win, take it immediately. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense or even if you really care that much about it. If it upsets the other side, you do it.

Those are textbook culture war dynamics: there is no middle. Fencesitters have to pick a side even if they don’t want to, just for self-defense. So states picked their separate directions and floored the gas pedal. Given their geographical separation, that would be a stable equilibrium. Except there’s one last step before you win a culture war:

To win permanently, you have to eliminate the other side’s ideas. That’s why gun control groups lobbied YouTube to ban videos showing magazines that hold more than 30 rounds. Or why gun rights groups want 18-year-olds to be able to buy rifles. The policy specifics aren’t why people get so worked up.

Here’s why people really care: one side wants to be normalized and the other side wants them to be stigmatized. That’s zero-sum. Every point—bump stocks, Citigroup, mag capacity, YouTube—is a cultural altercation about what is normal versus what is shameful.

One side has an attachment (individual ownership of weapons qua weapons, unconnected to recreation) they view as healthy, essential, and normal. In their culture, it is normal. The other side sees it as deeply repulsive and shameful. In their culture, it is.

Again, that would be a stable equilibrium in a world where mass communication didn’t exist. But it does exist, so ideas that you expelled can still “contaminate” your culture from afar. That’s why this is so acrimonious. Each side truly believes the other side’s ideas should not exist.

This is a central feature of any battle over normalcy versus stigma. An example from a different culture war: in 1999, Jerry Falwell was rightly lambasted for claiming that the purple Teletubby was “modeling the gay life style”. Why did he say something so absurd and offensive?

He explained exactly why: “To have little boys running around with purses and acting effeminate, and leaving the idea that the masculine male, the feminine female is out, and gay is OK — that’s something Christians do not agree with.”

He wanted to stigmatize LGBTQ folks, because he believed them unfit to exist in society. So anything that had the faintest whiff of making the people he stigmatized more normal or acceptable or familiar, he abhorred. (Falwell lost that culture war, fortunately, but note that the mechanics were the same, just pointed in the other direction: he became the stigmatized one.)

One side sincerely believes AR-15s are normal. Hence the glossy marketing, expansion into hunting, etc. The other side sincerely believes ARs are repulsive. Hence anything that makes them seem normal is abhorrent.

That’s why, for example, gun control groups got Citigroup to ban businesses that sell 30-round mags, and YouTube to ban videos on how to build an AR. For brands like Citigroup and YouTube to allow those items normalizes them. A ban makes them unclean.

The gun control tribe knows that, which is why they lobbied for the bans. The gun rights tribe also knows it, which is why gun YouTubers and gun Twitter are apopleptic about this. (“Tribes” as in the classic Slate Star Codex piece on outgroups, by the way.)

So that’s the dynamic at play here. When two sides are locked into that, what matters is winning wherever they can. The logical coherence of the win doesn’t matter, and in fact caring about the reasonableness of your policies is a sure way to lose.

Because while you’re off sagely ratiocinating like you’re Aristotle to figure out the ideal law, the other side is either normalizing themselves to escape velocity, or stigmatizing you to extinction. Once either happens, they win and the discussion ends forever.

I know this “existential war of normalcy versus stigma” frame seems crazy. And it is, for people who aren’t deeply invested in either tribe. But I know hardliners on both sides. This is how they see it. And it’s the only frame that explains both sides’ behavior.

Let’s talk about that behavior. Gun owners are often accused of being unwilling to consider any new gun restrictions (unless paired with a pro-gun-rights advance — more on that later). Broadly speaking, that’s actually an accurate observation.

In the debate frame, that intransigence seems crazy, bordering on monstrous. “Why not compromise?”, “we just want common-sense laws”, etc. Makes sense. But the culture war frame clears it right up: as a rational actor in a culture war, what would you expect the other side to do after scoring a goal?

Naturally, you’d expect them to come back for more! As I explained above with the bifurcation of the states, “coming back for more” is exactly what has happened on both sides. Whichever direction a state was slightly pointed in the ‘80s, it’s pointed much harder in that direction today.

Example: in 2009, Montana passed a law declaring federal gun laws null and void for almost all firearms made in the state. A federal court struck it down, but hey, it passed (signed by a Democrat governor no less). That’s illustrative. Similar laws have passed in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Utah, Tennessee, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Example: in 2013, New York state passed a ban on rifle features like pistol grips and adjustable-length stocks. Only 4% of covered gun owners complied with the ban, so as we speak there are ~1 million New Yorkers with a 15-year felony sitting in their safe.

Example: Massachusetts banned bump stocks this year. Possessing a bump stock there is now punishable by up to life in prison. They sent a “turn them in” letter to every gun owner in the state. Three bump stocks were turned in, total.

So between just New York and Massachusetts, and just since 2013, new laws have created >1 million people with a 15+ year felony in their house waiting to be discovered.

Personal example: I recently spent a Saturday at the range shooting with two friends. Because the rifles had adjustable-length stocks, that same fun day out with friends, if we did it in California, would put us in prison for the next several decades.

I know that’s not the desired result. Nobody writing their ideal gun law with a magic wand would send me to jail for 40 years. And I agree that I haven’t done anything to deserve 40 years in jail. But that is the outcome of these laws in real life.

Moving back to the culture war frame: how does this influence people’s incentives? Looking at this in the objective “what would a rational actor do” sense, she would obviously view any new concessions as suicidal.

So the intransigence accusation is mostly valid. But the gun control groups do have some ideas that are palatable, even interesting, to gun owners. The problem is that that doesn’t matter. Good intentions have ~0 actual effect on whether a law turns out well-written.

A gun ban bill has to run through the legislative sausage grinder. Once it does, the real-world result in all of the ~7 states to do it has been, “Dear median gun owner: starting n days from today, the same model gun you shot last weekend will be a felony.”

It’s tough when good intentions produce bad results. Most of the people at the March for Our Lives had great intentions. But empirically, without realizing it they were marching for laws that would send me and a lot of people I care about to prison for decades.

I was lucky to go to a very fancy east coast private school for grades 1–12, and then a very fancy east coast university. That’s only to say that my formative environment had a lot of cultural overlap with the big bad “coastal elites”.

So again back to the culture war frame: if the recent gun control push alienates someone who grew up in that environment, imagine how it plays in the other 42 states. I personally know five east coasters who bought their first gun in 2018. Two of them didn’t even grow up in the US.

That is culture war in action. The states bifurcate, the middle evaporates, and the tribes aren’t just moving apart, they’re accelerating.

At this point I’m sounding redundant. The gun fight has nothing to do with policy, it’s a zero-sum culture war where facts are worse than useless, etc. Ok, now what? If neither side is going to budge, is there any hope? Should we be prepping for Civil War II: Kandahar in Kansas?

Here’s the path forward. Today each side asks, “How can we defeat the other side?” That is culture war mindset. Instead, accept the truth and ask a different question: “We are never going to agree. So what would it look like to move forward even while still disagreeing?” Here’s what that looks like:

People often use the word “compromise” here. But what they usually mean is, “Fine, let’s compromise: we’ll do none of what you want and only half of what I want.” Neither side is dumb enough to fall for that. They’ll block it, and then it’s back to square one.

A real path forward — and the only way this culture war comes off the boil — is something very different: each side gives some things, and each side gets some things. A path that addresses people’s concerns about guns in the wrong hands and advances gun rights.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about this “grand bargain” concept. They ranged from gun owners who’d be first in line for Civil War II, to people who want all guns banned full stop, to every shade in between. To a person, almost all of them loved it. And one word kept coming up: relief.

That’s the culture war’s secret: everybody is tired of it. They participate because they’re afraid of what the other side will do to them. But if that fear goes away, so does their reason to participate. One honest give-and-take deal, and the fear goes away.

This isn’t a split-the-baby idea. Instead, it gives both sides things they truly want. In peace negotiations, people talk about gestures of good faith. Well, this is a kind of war too. So this isn’t a compromise, it’s a ceasefire—a gesture of good faith in the culture war.

I made a site that lays out the specifics of a deal. Hardliners from both sides have been sharing it to their followers, and interestingly, both sides say “This is great for our side!” That’s a good signal.

Help me seed the meme of a “grand bargain”, and we can make a dent to end this culture war.

The Path Forward on Guns: thepathforwardonguns.com

Note: for easy sharing, this essay also exists in the form of a Twitter thread.