Is there such a thing as a good gun control debate?
Jay and I have discussed gun control in these pages before. Jay’s description of gun ownership and participation in gun culture taught me something new about what gun’s mean to (at least some) of the ~70 million gun owners in America. He updated his original position in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting and supported a national ban on assault weapons. I never thought we should have zero guns in America, but I understand now how many gun control proposals sound like step one toward a confiscation of all guns, to gun owners.
While Jay and I have been debating our understanding of gun violence and gun control, our country has experienced more mass shootings. As Jay describes, our gun control debate is stuck in a largely immovable place. (Relatedly, I would argue that the Parkland students have done a remarkable job of building a movement online and offline, with little that could be dismissed as childish, but that’s a bit of a different discussion.)
I’ve been trying to find gun control discussions that exhibit some of the qualities that Jay is asking for — treating gun owners as “fully human, with thoughtful and sincerely held beliefs about the social value of firearms and the efficacy of gun control.” They are far and few between but they exist.
A scientific approach to answering questions about gun control
One of my initial proposals, in an earlier post, was to greenlight more studies of the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence. In the National Review, Dan McLaughlin, writes that there are plenty of studies of this type but that they are often politically motivated. He claims that further “medicalization” of this debate will lead us down a dangerous path of moving “gun control regulatory and judicial action outside the purview of Congress and state legislatures.”
I found his careful explanation of what kind of data and research we can and cannot do around guns helpful. But I disagree with his support of the Dickey amendment. I don’t think we should draw boundaries around scientific research. If “more gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders,” shouldn’t we try to understand this relationship more, instead of burying our heads in the sand? The Dickey amendment states that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
I can’t imagine a similar amendment being introduced for any other kind of public health study. We would never tell scientists who study the relationship between smoking and cancer that they cannot recommend any solutions about smoking if they find evidence that it causes cancer. We can decide as a democracy what to do about smoking or guns, but we should be allowed to collect all the evidence we can to inform our debate.
But what if the gun control debate is a debate about identity politics
After thinking about the arguments around the scientific side of the debate, I realized that it may not, in fact, be the more important part of the gun control debate. Treating gun ownership as an identity issue might provide more explanatory power and help create a better debate.
A recent Vox Podcast on a better conversation on guns, features sociologist Jennifer Carlson describing her study of gun owners in Detroit and the role gun ownership plays in their lives. I don’t think her analysis encompasses all types of gun owners, but I do think it adds the kind of evidence that Jay is calling for. It increases understanding of the role of gun ownership in someone’s life.
Understand gun ownership from the perspective of gun owners
In the NYTimes magazine, David Joy, a writer based in North Carolina writes about his identity as a gun owner and his membership in a community that treats gun ownership as an important part of its culture. He describes what it’s like to face the reality that a traffic stop, in which he has to carefully inform an officer that he’s carrying a weapon works differently for him than for someone like Philando Castille. David French also wrote about something similar, but from the angle of police shootings, in the pages of National Review recently.
Joy also describes how difficult it is for him to personally and socially to contend with the role of guns in his life and in his community. There is a huge gap between how the majority of gun owners see their guns and what they see happening in Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland.
I found his essay useful in understanding, not through statistics or news story, but through well written, heartfelt prose, the difficult terrain in which we’re having this national conversation.
How to transition from an identity debate to a policy debate
Seeing gun ownership as an identity issue, I find, is clarifying and will be a useful approach for me, moving forward. But how do we transition that into a policy debate? This recent Slate podcast with Charles C. W. Cooke is one possible example. In it, the host and guest, both talk through some of the proposals around gun control, including the absurd proposals around repealing the 2nd amendment and what kind of gun control is possible without such a repeal. They talk about the constitutionality of proposals. The effectiveness of proposals. And they do it while carefully defining terms, couching causal claims.
They do, however, get close to trying to bridge the identity and policy parts of the debate without quite getting there. Pesca (the liberal in this conversation) and Cooke (the conservative) talk about the value that gun owners see in owning guns and how we could build policy that respects this right. In fact, where they leave things off is that there’s not enough convincing causal evidence that any major gun control proposals would have the impact they claim to have on gun deaths. Which brings us back to my earlier points about research and scientific inquiry.
Thoughtful gun control debates are happening, they’re just not the loudest voices
I suppose all of this is to say, there are some thoughtful gun control conversations happening. They just don’t seem to be happening in the loudest parts of our society. I plan on staying tuned in and committed to finding these thoughtful conversations and hopefully inching our way toward a solution that both respects gun owners’ rights and gun control advocates concerns about the lives of students and citizens. I hope we continue trying to do that on this blog and elsewhere.
