"Their point, apparently is that "guns are dangerous to children and other living things. Guns KILL. Everything else is survivable."
The answer I usually get is, "Yes, they would have a better chance at surviving."
This is a core belief and you can't successfuly attack a core belief. You have to find the reason they believe it so strongly. Usually, it is some level of non-violence or pacifism that causes them to see guns as capable of producing more violence that anything. Guns are loud, destrucitive and operated at a distance. Bombs are generally ignored."
Bombs are also generally a non-issue, so basing general policy around them is IMO misguided
. You are absolutely right about needing to understand --and
respect, people-- the core beliefs of your opposition. You can't change it, and you can't steam-roll these people with your numbers, so you gotta learn to work with them, or around them. The core belief of most of these has
got to be that it is impossible/improbable that individuals can defend themselves, or need to defend themselves (the former stems from personal helplessness, the latter wishful thinking, or more disturbingly, self-hatred). I don't say that either is due to ignorance of people defending themselves, the proof of that is self evident. This is a fundamental belief; that people
cannot or should not be trusted to defend their own lives, or that only
certain people cannot be. It's as basic as 'murder is wrong' and is quite possibly genetically derived (look up the recent scientific studies of partisan brain patterns). Even if you present a perfect argument, it will be filtered and distorted by them internally by dissonance. The only way to get them over their natural mode of thinking is to give them a reason to work against it.
I was once against possession of handguns in my youth; I didn't understand the fascination either side had on rifles, since mass-produced handguns were causing all the carnage, after all. I eventually purchased a rifle and handgun, convinced that every person should at least know how to shoot a gun, just like everyone should know how to drive stick. I very quickly realized that my preoccupation with handguns was just lazy thinking, which is how every anti arrives at their misguided conclusions. It was confusion of cause and result; because one of them was identifiable (the hand gun) by brain keyed in on it being the part of the equation requiring modification. Humans naturally look for patterns, so when someone sees a very common element to problem --people killed with guns-- and it is readily quantized ('people' is difficult to pin down, 'guns' is not) they will hone in on it. It's a very effective way of solving person-level garden variety problems without wasting time, which is why we evolved to think this way, but it isn't the same as true logic (or 'game theory' which is basically logic applied to social interaction)
As an engineer, I very readily understood both how similar all firearms were, and how simple of machines they were; barely higher on the register of 'human creation' than knives. That is what convinced me that such a basic --and therefore
inherently endemic-- part of modern man could not be the problem, which left only the man and his motivations in the "people killed by guns" problem. I found that attempts to focus on the human element tended to be more effective than those focusing only on his means to action ('enslavement' to be blunt) and that a good chunk of the reason crime-ridden areas were so bad was because they'd been effectively walled-off like the Thunderdome by the fearful crime-free areas. When you remove all the 'fair players' from a game, cheating prevails, and any fair players brave enough to enter are at a tremendous disadvantage.
But to return to my point, the only reason I came to this conclusion, was because I went out to buy a gun and get into the hobby (I'd shot before, so I at least knew it was fun, but the defense aspect was totally foreign to a softie-suburbanite like myself). If I were just some guy reacting to stuff I was told, my thoughts would doubtless key in on the 'gun' as the problem element, and demand 'the people in charge take care of it by whatever means they feel is necessary' (also lazy thinking
).
If I don't think about it much, it is very easy to take comfort in statistics and pretend violence won't visit me personally. But if I do, I realize that it only won't visit me until it does, and that the stakes are high enough that modest provisions against it are small potatoes (especially since mastering those provisions happens to be fun
). If I truly thought I would do nothing but wilt when attacked, and am so reckless I would be doomed to harm another through carelessness, I would likely see myself as unfit for a firearm. If I felt "normal" I would project those characteristics onto society and general and deem
them unfit for firearms. Except for those police officers in snappy uniforms so-much-braver-than-I, of course
Now that I
have thought about the topic a great deal, and heard arguments from both sides, and thought about it some more... then heard more arguments and taken notice which ones I can pick apart more thoroughly, I have come to realize guns are a necessary part of human interaction; the infinite consequence for the most intolerable behavior. I refrain from the phrase "necessary evil" because felling someone who has broken the most fundamental laws of society to the extent they require immediate and permanent action to prevent additional harm, seems to be about the most noble affirmation of humanity there is. It is terrible that one person, any person, must bear the burden of using violence on another let alone actually killing them, but it is far worse for both them and others if they do not. If you accept that man has killed man since the beginning, and shows no signs of stopping, guns can have a place in your world view. If you subscribe to the latest hubristic philosophy destined for the trash bin, you may believe that we have finally evolved beyond something so fundamental and can leave the weapons behind us.
TCB
