Contributors

Saturday, January 09, 2016

Town Hall Frustrations

My initial thoughts on the president's town hall on gun violence are ones of frustration. While I am pleased that the issue is getting more attention and it appears that it's going to be a center piece to the 2016 presidential campaign, there are two core points that are not being addressed.

The first is illustrated in Taya Kyle's portion of this video. As Chris Mooney noted in his book "The Republican Brain," people let emotion drive their reasoning process and this was never more true than with the gun issue. I was hoping that Ms. Kyle would have learned the lesson that her husband and Nancy Lanza did not learn and that is that the gun culture creates a myopia. Neither Mr. Kyle nor Ms. Lanza used reason in their judgement regarding gun safety and allowed mentally ill people to operate firearms. The ideology of the gun rights activist (one devoid of reason and more rooted in paranoia and chest thumping emotion) is a chief cause of mass shootings and gun violence in this country.

Instead, Ms. Kyle spoke of needing a gun for protection and spoke of the hope of declining gun violence. The former is, of course, ridiculous as has been proven time and again by study after study. If you own a gun, you are more likely to kill/injure yourself or a loved one than protect yourself or a loved one. Believing the latter is, again, an emotional response driven by some sort of need for empowerment. The latter I found to be incredibly insulting to the families of the now weekly victims of mass shooting. How can anyone say it's getting better? This is especially befuddling behavior of someone who lost their own loved one to the myopia of gun rights ideology.

I think the president knows this because he's obviously an intelligent man. I get that saying something like this would be a bad PR move but it is the truth and we have to face the fact that this ideology is a threat to our national security.

My second frustration is that the NRA and other gun rights supporters are essentially getting what they want here: enforcement of current laws. Despite their faux protestations, they have successfully shifted the argument so far to the right, that "compromise" is something they've actually supported for years. They've been employing a political tactic that needs to be countered immediately.

Instead of allowing them to set the table with talk of totalitarian governments and dystopic futures (see: appeal to fear), gun safety advocates like the president should be talking about mandatory, minimum training, liability insurance, registration, and even altering the 2nd amendment so that only people who want to devote a considerable portion of their lives to community protection own firearms. These things may seem like a pipe dream now but gun safety advocates need to cease starting from a point of capitulation.

It's clear that the gun issue is going to have ongoing prevalence. I only wish that it wasn't due to the regularity of gun violence and our inability to accept what we need to do to solve the problem.

Here is the full town hall...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You mean the gun-related violence rate that's dropped by nearly half in the past 20 years, except for a sudden uptick of 'Ferguson-effect' and 'Baltimore-effect' crimes in places where police are no longer willing to do more than the absolute minimum? You're not bothered by the brigades of strawmen deployed by the President, such as the mythical felons buying guns off the Internet? I love this forum where there's no give and take, there's no opportunity to respond to Presidential "misstatements of fact".

Mark Ward said...

Feel free to do so. The president is a public figure which means this site allows any sort of criticism towards him. Comments of a personal nature directed towards the writers of this site or any commenters are not allowed.