The goal of gun control
What do gun control advocates want?
This question may sound entirely rhetorical, since the goal appears to be in the descriptive label, gun control advocate, but naming in politics is so rarely honest or accurate—see the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or the Democratic and Republican Parties—and in any case, the psychological motivations of political actors is endlessly fascination, if only because such information explains what drives people and whether or not it is possible to change their minds.
The problem with this is that without the ability to read minds or at least the opportunity to perform psychological tests, we have only the individual advocate’s statements, associations, and history to go on. When the football player Plaxico Burress was released from prison, following the sentence that he served for illegally carrying a handgun in New York City and negligently shooting himself, the cynical among us were unsurprised to see him joining with the Brady Campaign. I have seen nothing to suggest that he was pushed in that direction by the terms of his release, but as a public relations move, it did have the odor about it of a desperate play to rehabilitate the last years of a curtailed career.
The man who demanded that Burress spend time in prison, then Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has for years been both advocate and financier for limiting who may have what guns. Prior to taking up politics as a hobby, he made his fortune as an investment banker—allow me to admit right here that my bias is strongly against people who play fancy games with money for the purpose of accumulating large piles for themselves, but I have been called a socialist before. Bloomberg’s support for gun control is consistent with his general attitudes toward anyone whom he does not acknowledge as an equal. Speaking to the Aspen Institute in 2015, he claimed that education programs will not help uneducated adults, that minority male young adults lack the long-term focus to be allowed to have guns, and that his stop-and-frisk program—a policy that treated the Bill of Rights as a list of suggestions to be ignored—was a good idea. This might be seen as merely out of touch language in regard to the violence of our biggest cities were it not for a lengthy pattern of demeaning comments that he has made about female employees in his company. The conclusion that I reach is that he views himself as superior to anyone who has not risen to his level in the economy, a status that the poors should not question. When it comes to being armed, for example, his love for restrictions knows no bounds, unless they are applied to the security detail that he has hired to protect him—a detail that has included one off-duty NYPD officer who shot at his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend who was fleeing and one former city cop who was recently sentenced to ten years for assaults that he committed on Capitol police during the January 6 attack to stop the count of electoral votes from the 2020 election.
I have to ask whether Bloomberg runs background checks on his armed employees—or if he is prepared to admit that such checks are of limited value.
But all right, these are famous examples. Are they representative of the whole of the movement?
In my own experience of more than a decade discussing this subject with supporters of gun control, my observation is that the opportunists and control freaks are a significant bloc, but are not the only subdivision within the totality of gun control advocates, nor are they necessarily the majority. Social media, for example, does tend to bring out the fringes of any group, while also removing the cues that help determine veracity—a troll can promote extremes as well as a true believer. There is, however, at least one segment that we who care about gun rights must address: those whose concern is for safety.
Variations of a particular meme run about the Internet that are distinctly unhelpful here. An NPC figure asks how many children must die before we accept gun control, to which a bearded Norseman—sporting a comb-over because of his raging testosterone, presumably—replies, “All of them.”
Yes, the point is to say that rights are not conditioned on anyone’s perception of safety, but phrasing things in any form of that response is not going to win votes for gun rights. Given that our elections frequently get decided by less than one percent of the total ballots cast, we cannot afford to reject the sincere people who simply wish to see a more peaceful society. I have offered my own solutions to our problem of violence before, and, once again in my experience, they—schools, social welfare, and greater economic equality, along with treating romantic-partner violence seriously—have convinced more advocates to see my point of view than have dismissive snark or threats of civil war.
If I may speculate here, I would suggest that weapons create in some a sense of unease. As a practical matter, acting as if this psychological state is either not genuine or is a sign of inferiority will get us nothing good. We have the burden—again, as a practical matter—of being the calm voices in the conversation who are glad to provide evidence—from good sources—and sound solutions if we are going to preserve the exercise of gun rights.
This does mean that Trump supporters would best aid the cause of gun ownership by sitting these conversations out.
I call that job security for my work as a leftist missionary for gun rights.