The Great Gun Debate Part Three: A Conversation

This article follows Part Two, which can be found here. Part One is here.

In my third and final installment of this series, I am pleased to present evidence that there may in fact be a way for America to move forward on this topic.

Shocking as it may sound, I found someone whose perspectives on this issue appear to be diametrically opposed to my own, yet we had a reasonable, respectful conversation about the topic, without name-calling or meanness. I credit his patience with my ignorance more than I do my own willingness to listen.

This Medium user’s name is Edd Jennings, and I will be quoting his responses to my Part Two article heavily below. I thought the discussion was important enough to summarize as my conclusion to this topic (for now), so I am going to present the highlights of the back and forth that happened over a week or two.

According to his user profile, Edd “runs cattle on the banks of the New River in the mountains of Virginia.” (https://medium.com/@ejennings53). Through our conversation I was reminded that two perfectly reasonable, informed, and honest people can have vastly different perspectives on a topic without either being “right” or “wrong.” The paradigms of each individual American can vary greatly, and we have spent a lot of time over the past several years focusing on the extreme ends of the continuum, forgetting that there are all kinds of levels in between.

We make a great number of assumptions about people whose beliefs and perspectives differ from our own. I see how easily I make the jump from “gun advocate” to “Trump supporter” to “stupid idiot,” because when I think of pro-NRA, pro-gun people, I see the grossly exaggerated stereotype that the liberal media likes to present, just as a lot of conservatives make the jump from “gun control advocate” to “Hillary lover” to “clueless hippy” because of the stereotypes they are being fed.

Turns out, we’re all just people. Some smarter, some more world-wise, some more able to enunciate their views, but we’re still more alike than we are unalike (to quote Maya Angelou).

Edd’s first response to Part Two started with:

This one reads like you’re objectively interested in reducing gun violence.

So he told me I was being objective, and that I had a valid goal in mind. Not a bad way to get on my good side.

He went on to point out the best way to avoid gun violence was to be wealthy and live in the suburbs. He also agreed that reducing legal gun ownership would reduce gun violence, but pointed out that it would not reduce violence in general:

…by reducing legal gun ownership we reduce the chances of the criminal being surprised by more resistance than he expects. Three criminals with baseball bats, crowbars, etc., can break into any home and subdue the homeowners with near impunity without firearms if they can be assured of an unarmed homeowner. Whether the result would be desirable might be argued in some quarters, but if there is no gun, there is no gun violence.

Disarming the police was another strategy he suggested for reducing gun violence, and he again pointed out that this would possibly increase crime, but would certainly reduce gun violence.

I responded noting that he had provided a great example of a “Reductio Ad Absurdum” argument, and agreed that “ restricting guns in such a way that more violence and death may occur is not the answer.”

Edd ended his post with the following paragraph:

The accidental death angle has been thrown out for years as a dishonest piece of fake sympathy. Do you really believe the wealthy patrons of gun control measures care all that much when a gun owner, whom they see as another dumb, drunk redneck blows his head off accidently? One less Republican vote.

to which I responded:

And your last paragraph speaks to exactly what is wrong with the gun debate in this country. If it were about people who love guns talking to people who don’t, or people who are comfortable around guns and understand how to treat them talking to people who are afraid of them, it would be much like any other debate. But much of the “pro-gun” argument is being made by the NRA and gun manufacturers, who do not represent the actual views and opinions of the majority of responsible American gun owners.

See what’s happening here? Edd sees those promoting gun control as “wealthy partrons,” and I categorize those opposing gun control as “the NRA and gun manufacturers.” Each of us sees the opposing camp as being driven by groups who have agendas other than what their followers think they are.

To oversimplify, Edd and I are definitely coming from opposing camps, but we both believe the folks in the other camp are being deceived by their leaders.

I read “What’s the Matter with Kansas” when it came out, and I have accepted the picture painted in it as an accurate representation of how American politics often work. It goes something like this:

Politicians (or large groups and organizations seeking to influence politics, such as the NRA) tell people whatever they need to in order to get their support and their votes, while truly serving a hidden agenda focused on gaining wealth and power at the expense of those very people supporting them.

I believe the Republican party and conservative groups use this technique on their supporters to a greater extent than the Democratic party and liberal groups, mostly because Republicans and conservatives tend to be more organized and better at executing such plans more so than because Republicans and conservatives are more evil than Democrats and liberals.

The next response from Edd started with:

The NRA doesn’t even necessarily represent gun owners. They represent people who believe in the American Constitutional model.

He believes that the NRA’s primary goal is to defend the Constitution, and specifically the Second Amendment. The traditional argument we hear around this gets into the wording of the Amendment itself and the intent behind it. Did the authors intend it to mean that common folk should be able to be armed if they are going to help defend the country, or to mean that common folk should be able to be armed if they are going to defend themselves and their families?

The thing is, there isn’t necessarily much of a difference, other than whether there is an organizational scheme around the defense. The bottom line seems to be whether you believe the government is responsible and capable of keeping you, as an individual citizen, safe.

I believe the government is responsible, and in an ideal world, capable of keeping me and my family safe. Not sure where Edd stands on the government’s responsibility, but it is clear (from this and later responses) he does not believe they are capable.

They [the NRA]do get support from manufacturers. The manufacturers have no real choice. One of the laws being floated about is a liability program that would allow anyone hurt by a manufacturer’s gun to sue that manufacturer. Such a law would end the production of new firearms. Would you be willing to make a firearm if a court had the authority to assign a financial cost to its misuse?

It leaves the gun manufacturers in a curious bind. When Democrats are elected gun sales skyrocket, but these same Democrats could very well enact legislation that could put them out of business permanently and without the NRA’s voice the average person in America wouldn’t even realize it had happened until it was a done deal.

So Edd sees gun manufacturers as likely victims of legislation that would make it hard for them to stay in business. Whereas I see gun manufacturers as greedy capitalists who want to make more money at any cost.

If the debate were gun owners against gun haters, there would be no debate. If every gun owner in America voted with the NRA no anti-gun legislation anywhere in the country could possibly get any traction. We have that many guns in our homes. Some of the polls try to suggest that’s not true, that a handful of super gun owners are buying the new guns, but I think you’ll find when you look into it that people are reluctant to give that kind of information to an unknown caller. Plenty of people exist who don’t have an interest in any form of gun hobby. They don’t really want to learn about guns, hear about gun safety, actively keep one handy for defense or, and would prefer their friends and acquaintances not regard them as a gun owner, or know that they own them, and will always vote for any anti-gun measure, yet they will always keep a gun stashed away in a closet or a drawer just in case.

Edd alludes to something that I figured out a while back while watching and participating in the gun debate. Not every gun owner is an NRA supporter, and whether or not a person owns a gun does not predict how they would vote on gun control issues.

The attraction of the term gun violence is that it seems less harsh than gun crime. If someone is convicted of a gun crime, he can be put away for a long time. Many of us see our prison populations as the most unfortunate people in society, and the idea of adding to those numbers makes us uncomfortable. If life on the street could somehow be made safer by disarming these people that’s just so much more appealing. Whether such a solution would work is less of a concern than whether a possible attempt would make us feel good. If you don’t devote time to studying a gun law and the hard history of similar laws enacted in the past, they all seem like possible solutions, and that makes us feel good, which is after all the major goal with most of us. We want to assume an expert we trust will see to the details and plenty abound who will promise to do just that.

Here Edd speaks to a common stereotype for Democrats and liberals — that we are the feel-good people; we want to follow our hearts whether there is science or logic behind our actions or not. But in a larger sense, he’s dead on when it comes to debates such as this between “common” citizens — often our passion for the topic far exceeds our knowledge of it or our willingness to really dig in and do the research on it.

He seems to believe that a lot of the gun control measures being discussed would ultimately lead to unintended and unwanted consequences such as increases in violence, crime, and the prison population.

There’s also the economic and social consequences of gun ownership. Economies historically reward those who reach its upper levels with far more than redundant material wealth. They control the social and political power. It just seems offensive that rural Southerners and Westerners, people who anywhere else in the world would belong to a serving class, hold the kind of power they do. When a politician travels through this world, he has to shake hands and kiss babies.

If all these people weren’t armed, the government, the instrument of the wealthy, could teach them their place. Some of us like this kind of America. Some of us are offended to the core.

But it is the last part of his response here that really opened my eyes.

Back in the Obama days, I didn’t worry nearly as much about what the government was doing and how it might impact me, because I agreed with a lot of Obama’s stated goals and initiatives, and there was no reason for me to believe that he had anything other than the common man’s best interest in mind when he promoted policy.

However, that is not to say that I believed the government was effective or void of corruption. Just the opposite, really. Having worked for the government at the State level, I have seen how personal bias, desire for power, ignorance, narrow-sightedness, and all other human foibles can play out within a lumbering structure built largely by a succession of lowest bidders.

I saw the government as flawed, but not as evil. Now, with the gross imbalance in party power and the the obvious influence of the wealthy, I believe it is broken and evil instead of just broken.

Edd seems to see a similar problem with the government, that it is in the hands of the wealthy who want to force the rest of us to live as they want us to. The difference is which side of the fence we believe these wealthy puppet masters stand on.

I replied to Edd:

From this, I get the feeling that a) you support the NRA and believe their motivation is protection of the second amendment, and b) forces that work to restrict gun use do so because they want a more controllable populace.

I believe that a) the NRA’s motivation is to promote the will of gun manufacturer who want to make more money, and b) forces at work to restrict gun use do so because they don’t want to see more gun violence.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

But you and I both agree that our government is currently in the hands of the wealthy that have only their own best interests in mind.

Edd came back with:

It’s a safe bet that when you outline a position that you’ll gain more acceptance if you espouse something between the extremes. While you haven’t called for an outright ban on individual gun ownership, bear in mind that the restrictions you’re pushing for are far to the left of anything likely to be politically feasible in any state of the union.

I also assume when you call for a restriction in the number of weapons an individual can own, you mean for such a law to have teeth and not merely be a law of sentiment. Enforcing such a law would call for government agencies to go into homes looking for these weapons, which would amount to a suspension of the Fourth Amendment, and no government agency is big enough to make one surprise sweep. To be effective they’d have to introduce means to get homeowners to surrender weapons hidden outside of the home, a suspension of the Fifth Amendment.

You outright say that you believe an American citizen has no right to carry a concealed weapon in public. Do you dispute that a person has a right to defend himself? Disallowing effective means amounts to the same thing.

The expression “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” offends you, and it does as far as I know originate with the NRA. It may be you say you reject this possibility because you never hear supporting incidents in the news. You won’t find an example on CNN or read about such a thing in the New York Times. A little research outside of a few mainstream outlets would give you thousands of incidents where someone honorably defended themselves with a handgun, but do you really need to? How many police agencies do you know of who are clamoring to get rid of their service weapons because they are heavy and ineffective?

If a good guy with a gun offends you, how about a bad guy? What would you recommend if someone stepped into a bank and demanded, “Hand ups. Give me all your money?” I suppose you could say that since his weapon is ineffective that nothing would stop you or anyone else who felt like it from walking over to him, beating the shit out of him, and handing him over to the police. But you won’t recommend that because you know a gun is damned effective and such an action would be tantamount to suicide.

At heart, I sympathize with you. You just want to be safe. The difference is you see your safety as the responsibility of the government. Even if they can’t do it, you’d accept a gesture that they’re trying — any sort of gun restriction, no matter how ineffective, would count as trying. The truth is the government can’t protect you.

If you do choose to study the situation beyond the superficialities what you’ll learn is that your safety and those you love is up to you. You’re the final line.

I replied to Edd and clarified that I had no interest in disarming police officers, and that I am okay with open or concealed carry in some situations, but not in others (such as in schools and on college campuses).

But he is right, I do expect the government to keep us, its citizens, safe.

Here was Edd’s next response:

…Refusal to think about man’s capacity for inhumanity unfortunately doesn’t diminish it. A long time police officer may feel that he knows most of the players on his beat and given a little more authority he could put them all in jail and make the community safer. To do so would require some suspension of innocent until proven guilty. The problem with this thinking is that such authority never eliminated crime in totalitarian societies. If anything, it made it worse, making additional criminals of otherwise ordinary citizens.

I’m also not sure how you’re imagining the government can protect us. A more aggressive approach to putting and keeping violent felons in jail and less plea bargaining would help, but there’s a lot of resistance to that approach and it’s only going to help so much at best. A violent crime can happen so quickly that even the fastest police response is usually too late. The police aren’t really set up to protect people but to enforce the law after the fact. I’m not sure I’d like a model that changes that because that would seem to mean living virtually in sight of a police officer at all times. Any ideas you have on this score would be welcome.

It frankly surprises me that you’re not completely against concealed carry. Open carry for practical purposes is gone. It upsets too many people. About the only place I open carry anymore is on agricultural land I own, and then only in hot weather. Most places that do allow concealed carry forbid it in schools. My tendency is to avoid places that don’t allow concealed carry because those are the most likely places for a mass shooter to try to rack up the score. As time goes on, the only places that it’s going to make sense to ban concealed carry are those places like courthouses which take measures to insure that no unauthorized people have weapons.

I’m not above relying upon some government protection. When I encounter game & fish law violators, I usually don’t approach them, but instead call it in. Invariably, after they get a citation, they’ll show up at my front door wanting to talk about it. The implicit message is, the game warden is gone. I’m here. I can come back. I never show these people a weapon or speak in an overly harsh manner . . . but they know. If I were in bad health, unarmed, or in any other way vulnerable, they’d make their point, and most of the time with most people the case against them would be dropped.

To which I replied:

I should also mention training and certification.

I grew up in rural Missouri, and at the time we all had to take a gun safety course in middle school. Requiring a gun test similar to a driver’s test would at least ensure that gun owners have a basic respect for the guns themselves and are aware of how they are supposed to be used.

And I have to acknowledge that my perspective comes largely from my day-to-day experience. In Topeka, Kansas, I am seldom anywhere that I don’t feel safe, and so the need to protect myself and my family is not as readily apparent as it would be for those in areas where they might encounter folks like you mention who are armed and likely to use their weapons to threaten or coerce. So if I were in a large city, or in a very rural area, my perspective would likely be different. Which is why I am not 100% opposed to either open or concealed carry in general.

Edd, you appear to be a reasonable and intelligent guy, and if every gun owner was like you, then I doubt I would have much of an issue with guns. What worries me are those folks who are likely to use them against themselves and others and who don’t possess the faculties to see the dangers inherent with them and/or who are too egocentric and selfish to control themselves and their weapons.

It sounds like what worries you are those same people, thus the need to be armed yourself. And if I lived where you did, and saw what you did every day, then I might be singing from the same hymnal as you are.

And here is Edd’s last response on this chain:

You’re a good man. You think and you question, and some of the questions you ask are sometimes tough to handle for someone who grew up in another belief system. Bear in mind, when Charleton Heston pushed the Kentucky flintlock over his head at the NRA Convention and said, “from my cold, dead hands” he spoke to the choir. An outsider wouldn’t understand. The men who listened to him that day were men whose antecedents faced fire in places like the ‘canal, Belleau Wood, or with Andy Jackson at New Orleans. Many of us are ugly in temperament and uneducated. Your questioning, valuable as it is, comes to another generation finding its own way to old truths. We often only know how to respond to a questioning of tradition with anger. In other circumstances, the value of these men might become more apparent to you. They won’t, however, be always able to handle your willingness to consider everything.

Training, no man who picks up a gun ever really has enough. The only formal classroom training I’ve had, like you, is a basic NRA gun safety course. Since we’ve had it, it’s been refined, and in particular their Eddie Eagle program for young children has reached thirty million children. I’d like to think these training programs have a direct effect on the national reduction in accident figures.

Part of the problem with gun safety is the way we want to train our children about the world. We want to teach the importance of attitude, and there’s that ever present hope we want to offer that if you say you’re sorry and promise to do better you can be forgiven anything. It’s the world as we wish it was, and not as it is. A gunshot is final. No amount of saying you’re sorry will ever bring back a human life.

Beyond that, while I recommend training, I don’t accept the idea that a government agency should be given the authority to decide who is trained and who isn’t. That would be offering a level of trust I just cannot give.

In terms of my individual life, I’m pretty good at picking up when someone doesn’t fully comprehend the destruction power of a firearm, and they’re just careless. When I see that, I will refuse to be in the same room with them if they have access to a gun. One of the things I like to do with new shooters is take a gallon milk jug full of water and shoot it with something like a 30–06 at close range. The jug just disappears. You might find the cap or fragments of plastic.

I came away from this exchange encouraged and hopeful. Here we are, two American citizens coming from very different perspectives, both inundated by biased reporting and representation of “the other side,” and yet we were able to have a calm, rational conversation about gun control. And not just a conversation, for me at least it was an educational experience. I have a better understanding of where some gun advocates might be coming from, and feel that I am better informed and better prepared to continue this conversation with others.

Thanks, Edd!