Reducing Gun Culture

This blog had been mainly inactive until the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.  After that, I was doing so much reading about gun use and regulation, I decided I might as well report on my findings.  I’m not writing so much about guns now, but it’s still a recurrent thread.  A few days ago, I recommended an article by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker website.  (Link below at “Guns, More that a Correlation.”)  I thought Gopnik’s article was so good, I barely quoted from it.  I just said “read it.”  Now Gopnik has another post, and I recommend it as well, but I’m going to try picking out some relevant quotations, ones I can send to my legislators. 

One of the oddities of the gun-control debate…is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million—or was it two million? It kept changing—bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don’t….Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot—and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.

And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily “cultural.” Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered

And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power.  

As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.” 

It's hard to stop quoting.  The article is so clear and insightful.  Gopnik believes we need to be open to understanding gun culture even when it is foreign to our own experience.  Then we to to work toward changing it.  He also points out that statistically, massacres such as Newtown are not the main danger of our gun culture.  But massacres like these, like 9/11, take a toll that goes beyond the actual loss of life as tragic and heartbreaking as it is.  Here is part of Gopnik’s conclusion. 

Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small.