A 30-day good faith gun discussion challenge

Because arguing is hard, and fruitful arguments about guns feels pretty much impossible.

When what you’re trying isn’t working, it’s time to try other approaches. And what we’re trying is definitely not working.

This is one attempt at a new approach.

Let’s dub April fruitful gun conversation month.

I’m looking for a couple dozen volunteers who want to participate in a 30-day, online, asynchronous, proactive conversation about guns that is inclusive of all positions. It kicks off April 1st! Has something like that ever happened before? Will it work? Who knows! Join this Facebook Group to find out more and possibly make history! The goal will be to improve the quality and outcomes of the conversation about guns over the long term just a little bit, in a way that can scale online.

This challenge might be for you if the following is true:

• You want to have a fluid, ambitious, inclusive, and respectful conversation about guns, but it feels very unlikely to happen.
• You want to get smarter more than you want to make other people feel dumb.
• You want to get a better idea about why people have arrived at different positions from your own, in order to identify your own blind spots.
• You want to get better at talking about guns with other people (even when you don’t agree) (ESPECIALLY when you don’t agree).
• You want to learn about, discuss, and contribute to proposals for reducing violence and increasing protective measures as it relates to guns, crime, mental health, and public safety.

This challenge is as much about how we talk about guns as it was about the content and specific positions within the gun debate, but we’ll cover both parts as part of this challenge.

Here’s how it’ll work:

Week 1: Smarten up about guns, violent crime, suicide, and related topics.

We need to assume that everyone participating in this discussion has a basic understanding of gun statistics, laws, proposals, and arguments for and against. We’ll be creating and maintaining a public set of resources in a shared Dropbox Paper folder for this purpose. The goal being that it will start simple and evolve over the course of the challenge.

Week 2, first half: Invest in understanding your own position.

It’s not good enough to just react against other people and events in the world, you will need to spend some time on your own to think seriously about what you really believe on your own. This doesn’t have to be a vision quest or anything, but everyone in the challenge will be expected to have a public “position” on gun control legislation, and be expected to keep it up-to-date if/when positions change.

Week 2, second half: Invest in understanding other positions.

You will be expected to spend some time thinking deeply about other peoples’ positions on guns (their output of step 2). We will do this in the spirit of understanding how and why different people believe what they do, and will not be trying to change their position if it differs from yours.

Week 3, first half: Identify long-term outcomes.

A group discussion where we attempt to identify the best long-term outcomes that a successfully implemented gun control legislation would bring about. Things like: drastically reducing the number of gun-related deaths per year, or drastically reducing the number of violent crimes per year. We should have between 1–3 clear outcomes that everyone agrees would be steps in the right direction, and participants can choose one to focus on in following steps.

Week 3, second half: Build proposals to achieve long-term objectives.

Based on the output of the previous step, we’ll break out into groups of 3–7 and attempt to articulate proposals for new legislation that would have the highest impact on the objectives. Write it up as a “wish” that you would ask an evil genie to grant you, with the assumption that the evil genie would grant it as literally stated but would attempt to twist it to be as disastrous as possible within those constraints. Define and select your words carefully.

Week 4, first half: Read all the proposals as the evil genie.

In your same groups, read through other proposals and identify as many ways to misinterpret them to lead to the most disastrous outcomes. Submit them back to the original proposers for discussion.

Week 4, second half: Create a “best” merged proposal.

Merge all of the proposals, clustering similar atomic legislative items together, as well as the worst of the evil genie outcomes associated with each. Publish it along with necessary context for additional feedback.

Week 5, as needed: Retrospective.

Now that it’s all done, let’s discuss how it went and give candid feedback on how to improve the process in the future, as well as identify any next steps that naturally flow from the challenge.

Interested in learning more?

Join this Facebook Group! Things will get started on April 1st. Facebook has been in the news lately for being sort of awful, so if you have deleted your account and still want to participate let me know and we can find some other way to make it happen!