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I’ve gotten a great deal of pushback to my “Candor” post in which I argued that a “functional majority” of the country in fact supports the gun status quo. It’s not big money or the gun lobby. It’s us. This is what we seem to want. One longtime reader said my comments amounted to a city slicker demonization of rural America. Another good friend said I was discounting the role of opinion shaping institutions like Fox News. And yet another said I was mistaking preference for inertia.
I took these criticisms seriously because these are each serious people. As so often is the case the disagreements are as much semantic as they are based on different readings of the facts at hand. I said a “functional majority” since I’m pretty sure if we held a plebiscite the status quo wouldn’t come out on top. But we don’t govern by plebiscite. Pro-gun America has all sorts of built in advantages — regionalism, the rural-urban split, intensity and a lot more. Inertia is certainly a big factor too. And what about all the polls that show overwhelming, sometimes verging on unanimous support for things like red flag laws and background checks?
Each of these are good points. And yet they all fly in the face of a quarter century of high profile mass shootings during which gun laws have not only not tightened but have actually been loosened in much of country. You have to posit some fundamental brokenness to the architecture of American elections and government to explain why this doesn’t represent some clear judgment of the American public.
Needless to say, I’m not saying any substantial number of people likes school shootings. But almost no one likes fatal auto accidents either. And yet the great majority of us accept that in a country the size of the USA a lot of people will die every year in auto accidents. Many of us support even greater auto safety, road safety and more. And yet the great majority of us accept that a lot of people dying in auto accidents is the price of a modern and highly mobile society.
That’s the judgment with guns.
Some others insist that the pro-gun crowd is actually a pretty small part of the overall population — 5%, 20% of the population. But c’mon. It’s certainly true that the number of people who own a few AR-15s, hit the gun shows and/or are gun activists is pretty small. But that’s not the standard. Electoral politics tells us pretty consistently that there is a very big minority of the country that is simply opposed to pretty much any restrictions on firearms and — perhaps even more importantly — sees skepticism about or regulation of firearms as a cultural signifier that you are on the other team, “them” in the grand battle of “us” vs “them.” Is it a majority? I don’t think so. But it’s close enough to being one that the particularities of our national political structure allow it to function as one at the national political level.
You can define this as only a small minority wants this status quo but a much bigger minority or bare majority doesn’t want to cross the views of that small minority. Or the big minority is dedicated to protecting the hang ups of this small minority, even though they don’t share the hang ups. But is there a difference? I’m not sure what it is.
I don’t want to be a pessimist. And I’m not entirely one on this. I suspect at some point something will shift. But not now. And I don’t think we’re close.
We’ll know it when we see it, won’t we?
