This piece seems to be reasonably well reasoned, and if you are a left-winger or an anti-gunner, or if you know one, I’d suggest giving it a read.
6 Reasons Your Right-Wing Friend Isn’t Coming To Your Side On Gun Control
As the title suggests, six reasons are given. But I think the first one is perhaps one of the most important:
The most destructive, divisive response when dealing with Second Amendment advocates is the notion that we aren’t on your side of the issue because we “don’t care” about the tragedy and loss of life. Two years ago at Christmas I had a family member, exasperated that I wasn’t agreeing about gun control, snarl, “It appears that if your [step] daughter was killed because of gun violence you wouldn’t even care!”
Me, I’m a jerk. I’ve long since ceased to really care about convincing people who disagree with me to agree with me, because to a large degree politics has become so stultifyingly polarized that no matter what evidence is produced that there isn’t some phantom wage gap, or that nuclear power is the way to go, or that the United States isn’t the greatest evil in world history, or that the world is more than 6,000 years old or that vaccines aren’t going to give you autism or that a firearm I own isn’t going to jump up and shoot you or that maybe you should be allowed to keep what you earn and control your own stuff and destiny, there will be people who just will not accept it. A few decades of these fights have largely drained the hope from me that many people are even open to understanding anything that even comes close to libertarianism or conservativism or a rational scientific outlook. So I just throw the occasional bomb onto my blog and call it a day.
But if you actually hold out the hope of convincing The Other Side of your viewpoint, coming at them right out of the gate with “you don’t care about victims” is *exactly* the wrong approach. And for two reasons:
1: If the other guy doesn’t believe that you believe what you’re saying, he knows you to be a dishonest and disreputable liar.
2: If the other guy *does* believe what you say when you declare that he doesn’t care about actual victims, he’s going to assume that *you* are the actual sociopath in the situation.
And somethgin that has coem up in the comments section of this blog many times is also discussed:
5. We Seriously Don’t Care About Gun Laws in Other Countries
We really, really don’t.
We don’t.
Most Americans give precisely zero shits about “but everyone else in the world does X.” Whether “X” is:
- Fanatical devotion to soccer
- Disdain for American beer/chocolate/fast food/movies/music/culture
- Acceptance of anti-blasphemy laws and other forms of legal strictures on the expression of unpopular opinions
- What y’all think the US should do about gun laws.
We really, really don’t. Sure, some do, but we tend to sequester them in Hollywood where we can point at them and laugh.