It's hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn't. So, for instance, if you have no idea what semi-automatic means, but you've heard it and it sounds scary, and you assume that it means some kind of machine gun, so you argue semi-automatics should be restricted, you've just conveyed that most modern handguns (save for revolvers) should be restricted, even if that's not what you meant. If you don't understand these terms already, why should you care? You should care because when you misuse them, you signal substantially broader gun restrictions than you may actually be advocating. You get people using 'semi-automatic' and 'automatic' without knowing what they mean, and you get the term 'assault weapon' thrown about as if it means more than whatever we choose to make it mean, which it does not. That's how you get a debate framed around gibberish like 'multi-automatic round weapons' and the like. No doubt some of them are being deliberately ambiguous, but I think most people just haven't educated themselves on the meaning of a relatively small array of terms. Many people advocating for gun control mangle and misuse descriptive words about guns.

That's because there's a terminology gap. I hear 'nobody wants to take away all your guns' a lot - which seems demonstrably false - but what guns do gun-control advocates want to take away, or restrict? Most of the time I don't know and I suspect that the advocates don't know either. If we had the 'reasonable gun control' I keep hearing about, what guns would be limited? I'm arguably not a complete idiot, but I can't figure it out. But don't pretend you're actually going to change anything. But is it working for you here? Reasonable gun control advocates, how far will you get with the message 'a vote for reasonable gun control is a 'fuck you' to the hicks'? Gun control opponents, for how long do you think you'll thrive with 'allowing gun control is like allowing gay marriage'? We use culture-bundling to get out the vote, or to associate one policy position with another one. Your intended message may be 'the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need,' nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns.' But what you are conveying is that 'the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays.'Ī lot of this is deliberate. The intended message may be 'fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets.' But your message is 'fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards.' In this bundle, guns mean Republican, guns mean conservative, guns mean not liking President Obama, guns mean religious, guns mean socially traditional, guns mean rural, guns mean football and Nascar and using fewer than five words to order coffee. It's a classic example of guns-as-culture. But it didn't persuade anyone - other than, perhaps, a few more people to vote Republican. I'm sure this felt good to the people who made it and distributed it, and to the like-minded people who saw it. I saw this on my Facebook feed last week: We use guns as shorthand for a bundle of ideas. Most of our talk about guns is cultural signalling. Gun Talk Is Cultural Talk, And Culture Mattersįirst, we'd have to stop framing the debate in terms that suggest 'I hate you and everyone like you. Imagine we wanted to identify our irreducible philosophical and practical differences, seek any areas of agreement, persuade anyone on the fence, and change some minds.

Say we wanted to have a productive conversation. Do you think it's going to build a majority on any issue? Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now. We yell, we signal to the like-minded, we circle our wagons, we take shots at opponents. Much of our modern American dialogue about gun rights and gun control is like that. It neither seeks nor finds common ground. It pleases me, it entertains like-minded people, and it reaffirms that which people already believe.īut it doesn't persuade. How could I? We just brought on Marc Randazza and the man swears like a drunken Newark stevedore with his dick caught in a French press.Īt least most of the time, I grasp that my self-indulgence doesn't accomplish much. My purpose is not to condemn such behavior. Boasting, bloviating, berating, shouting, snarking, and swearing are all pleasures, indulged with little if any guilt. I confess from the start of this: I enjoy unproductive talk.

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