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Gun Owners: Nuts or Hypocrites
R. Alex Whitlock
The anti-gun crowd reached the peak of influence in the 90's and has since lost ground as Democrats have come to realize that there are a lot of gun owners in swing states.
I was reading Ebert's
review of anti-gun movie American gun and ran across these couple of sentences:
All three stories ask the same question: How do you lead a reasonable life in a world where a lot of your fellow citizens can and do walk around armed? There seem to be two possible answers: They should be disarmed, or you should be armed. A third answer, implied by some gun owners, is that they should be armed but many other categories of people should not be. They never include themselves in those categories.
I wonder if that's going to be the new line of the anti-gun crowd: moderate pro-gun folks are hypocrites.
It creates a wonderful catch-22. Either you believe that everyone up to a convicted killer ought to be able to have a gun in which case you're a nut, or you agree that there ought to be some limits in which case you're a hypocrite. The only way to come out of this without coming across as mentally or morally lacking is... ta-da... to support the position that nobody should be able to own a gun.
Or perhaps Ebert is saying that gun owners are implying that only suburban whites should be able to own guns and urban blacks, immigrants, and other people they hate (because conservatives hate people not like them) should not be able to. While a number of conservative views on race put me ill-at-ease, gun ownership is not one of them. I've been running in Republican circles for several years and I've got to say that I have never even heard the implication that race itself is a factor in their support of gun ownership. Laws like the Brady Bill and whatnot were proposed by liberals and generally accepted by conservatives (sometimes begrudgingly so) to placate those fears. Maybe it does "disproportionately affect minority groups," but you can't assign sinister motivations to a group that begrudgingly signed on to an idea after the political landscape made its implementation was all but certain.
Observations
To you it's called a "catch-22."
To politicians on both sides it's called "framing the debate." The trick is always to try to get one of your pet talking points framed as a basic leg of the discussion, rather than a bone of contention.
It falls into a category of rhetoric very close to "lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Making something a catch-22 is certainly an attempt to frame a discussion, which is why I referred to it as "wonderful" -- wonderfully effective, I meant. Though I think that this is less a framing of a "talking point" and more the framing of who is on what side. One of the most irritating and successful stances one can take (if one can take them successfully) is that you should agree with me because people that agree with me are better people.
Unfortunately, that's what a lot of the "culture wars" is about. Not that there aren't very real issues on the table, but a lot of it comes down not to trying to get to like your ideas, but rather get them to want to identify more with you than the other guys.
On the other hand, I don't think this is all calculated. Liberals often really do believe that conservatives are inherently spiteful, hypocritical, and so on -- that's why they're liberals! Conservatives also often really do believe that liberals are godless, amoral, which is why they are conservatives.
As I plan to post on at some point in the near future, our politics are often defined by those we wish to be identified with and identified as being against as opposed to an independent evaluation of each of the issues.
I think the lack of current legislative pushes has a lot more to do with the fact that we haven't had another Columbine. It was "timely" in the 90's. Right now, folks have other things going on. But, if some kid opened fire in school, it's be right back on top of the heap.
Er, "it'd" be. Damn, my lack of proofreading.
For future reference, Aldahlia, you can edit/correct your own comments by going in to the Admin section.
As far as the gun control debate goes, I don't disagree that the circumstances are significant. The wave of support for gun control was built on an unusual social phenomenon that ran its course. In 2000 the Democrats did the calculations and determined that it was not a winner. 2000 was before 9/11 and not all that far removed from Littleton/Jonesboro/etc. I consider that to probably be the normal state of affairs until our generation takes over. Then who knows?
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