Guns, Government, and The Boogeyman

I was reluctant to wade into the discussion around guns because I really wasn't sure what else could be said.  Everyone's politics are extremely entrenched, the statistics are clear and compelling to those who favor gun control, and utterly irrelevant to those who favor gun ownership rights.  But then I read an interesting commentary in Vox that explored a particular tension in the American political perspective: Most people actually favor many particular gun control policies.  Some proposals, like requiring background checks for purchases at gun shows or restricting the sale of guns to people with mental illness, are supported by more than 80% of the American electorate.  But somehow, these instrumental discussions about how to make our country a safer place disappear in discussions on the street, in the workplace, or on the floor of Congress; all is sucked into the vacuum of "Gun Control" writ large, considered in the abstract.  And that debate is much more ambiguous.

Astonishingly, even as mass shootings have come to dominate the news cycles of the past decade, support for gun ownership rights has climbed steadily in the minds of American voters; according to a Pew Research Center study cited in the Vox article, whereas in the late Nineties less than a third of people thought that gun ownership rights were more important than protecting people from gun violence, today we're essentially at a 50-50 divide.  In a post-Sandy Hook world, in a country where there is on average more than one mass shooting per day, how is that possible?

Negative Rights, that's how.  America's political identity, particularly contrasted against the other world powers against which we've competed over the years (first Europe, then the Soviet Union, now China), American politics has always been driven by a narrative of individualism and giving people the space to strive for success.  Rather than crafting policies intended to steer people toward success (positive rights), we've favored negative rights.  Pretty much everything in the Bill of Rights is framed negatively, aimed to prevent others with interfering with your life:

• people can't tell you what you're not allowed to say
• people can't force you to quarter soldiers in your home
• people can't unreasonably search you
• you can't be forced to incriminate yourself

and so on.  They say nothing about what kinds of things you should be entitled to (good health, social safety nets, etc.), only what other people shouldn't do to you.  The gun control debate is a classic example of a negative right (the right to be stop other people from messing with your property, i.e. ownership of a gun), from a positive right (taking away people's guns for the better of society, i.e. decreasing the likelihood that people will shoot each other).  Skillful lobbying by highly motivated groups has succeeded in framing the discussions around gun control in this context, and it's a tough sell in this land of ours.  Whether it's regulating corporate abuses or restricting gun ownership, it's nearly impossible to convince American that they should pass laws restricting freedom, even though people sometimes use that freedom to do horrible things with life-destroying, irreversible consequences for thousands or millions of people.

I certainly don't have the answer to the intractable conflict that erupts when we switch from focusing on commonsense solutions to abstract ideological framing, but I do think that everyone would benefit from zooming out even farther to consider what emotions drive the gun-control and gun-ownership ideologies.  At heart, we're all pulled and tugged by the same basic drives, no matter which side of the debate you're on.  Gun rights advocates and Gun Control advocates are both interested in living safe, happy lives, free from harmful interference (whether by an intrusive institution or by a malicious individual who means to do them harm); if we could re-frame the debate in that light instead, maybe we'd be able to rediscover our sense of community rather than seeing each other as boogeymen.