gun violence Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

All media (including “mainstream/lamestream”) support the NRA

Once again, a mass shooting, and, once again, a committed unwillingness or inability to deliberate sensibly about our policy options regarding gun violence. The most common narrative–and most damaging–is that we are at impasse because the issue is a zero-sum battle between two essentially hostile groups (“pro- v. anti-gun” or “pro- v. anti-gun control). The NRA, for instance, says that this (actually complicated) issue is a binary of people who are pro- or anti-gun. They claim that “pro-gun” is the same group as “gun owners.” They tell their base that gun owners are facing a binary: either support the NRA, or Obama personally kicks down your doors and takes all your guns.

All major media endorses that false binary and the resulting false narrative.

To the extent that media frame issues about gun ownership as pro- or anti-gun (or gun control), they endorse the NRA narrative.

This binary is false, and doesn’t describe our situation at all. The more we think our world is made up of two groups–people who want all the guns in all the hands and all the places, and a group that wants no guns of any kind for anyone or anywhere–the more we are going to stay caught in a trap we’ve set for ourselves. And that benefits the NRA, and guarantees lots more mass shooters.

In fact, the NRA does not represent gun owners–it has much more extreme stances on all sorts of policy questions about access to guns than most gun owners–but gun owners do tend to believe NRA demagoguery about the opposition wanting to take all their guns. Thus, to the extent that media describe our policy discourse about gun ownership as pro- or anti– (and especially pro- or anti-“guns”), it helps the NRA in its demagoguery.

There is a tendency to assume that, when it comes to gun violence, we have a polarized public. One side is reasonable, principled, and caring, and the other is irrational, intransigent, and extremist. Oddly enough, everyone agrees that’s the situation (it isn’t), but, if we agree that’s the situation then we just fight about who is sensible.

In pro-NRA rhetoric, gun owners are reasonable, and anyone who wants any kind of restrictions on gun ownership is in the group of irrational and fearful extremist. NRA rhetoric characterizes “gun control advocates” as “anti-gun,” who want to criminalize all gun ownership and repeal the Second Amendment. Any change in gun policies other than more guns is a step on a slippery slope to the world of Obama kicking in your door to take your guns. Many critics of the NRA accept the false premise of two groups, and simply flip the characterizations. They paint gun owners as irrational extremists who need guns because they are fearful and fragile, whereas gun control advocates are rational and realistic. As long as we begin with the false assumption that “the” gun debate is a battle between two groups, we’ll waste all our time arguing which one is the irrational one instead of reducing gun violence.

That media, all media, frame our complicated disagreements about policies as a binary of identities means that they are endorsing the NRA argument that this is an existential battle between people who own guns and people who want them banned.

If we focus on policies instead of thinking about this issue about identity, then two things immediately become clear. First, in terms of policy affiliation, there is not a zero-sum war between a group that wants no restrictions on gun ownership and another that wants no gun ownership at all. In fact, the majority of gun owners are advocates of gun control.

As numerous polls show, gun owners overwhelming support some restrictions on gun ownership. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center (“Views on gun policy”) shows that approximately 80% of the gun owners polled support background checks, preventing the mentally ill, people on watch lists, and people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Only 33% of gun owners endorsed permit-less concealed carry. Michael Siegel and Claire Boine’s The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the US (2020) shows similar levels of support for restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill, as well as for people at risk for suicide, or with certain kinds of criminal records; A majority support “red flag” laws, and background checks. As Boines and Siegel say, “The majority of gun owners supported every policy for which they primary aim was to keep firearms out of the hands of people at high risk for violence.”

In other words, most “gun owners” are “gun control advocates.” It isn’t a binary.

The second point follows from the first. The NRA’s policy agenda of responding to gun violence by getting more people to buy more guns does not represent the views of gun owners. Gun owners and the NRA are not a homogeneous group, despite what it (and too many of its critics) say. The binary of irrational gun owners who want all the guns for all the people in all the places versus sensible people who want some restrictions is also a false binary.

If most gun owners are gun control advocates, why don’t we have the policies about which there is so much disagreement? And the answer is demagoguery.
While the majority of gun owners reject the NRA’s policy agenda, they believe its representation of the Other.

According to Boines and Siegel, “the majority of gun owners have accepted the NRA’s rhetoric that the ultimate aim of firearm violence prevention advocates is to take away their guns and eliminate the Second Amendment.” If gun owners believe that there are only “two sides” on “the” issue of gun violence, then they are unlikely to advocate the policies they actually want, since those policies would seem to be letting anti-gun extremists win a skirmish. And, to the extent that advocates of restrictions on gun ownership accept the false binary of identity, the fears of gun owners are confirmed.

We don’t step out of this trap by trying to understand the Other side better, or attributing better motives to Them, or any other approach that assumes the problem is hostility and misunderstanding between two groups of people. We stay out of the trap by understanding that reducing gun violence means enacting policies and funding programs about which we can agree.

[There’s a longer, and more sourced, version of this argument in Rhetoric and Guns.]

Gun deaths and deliberative cowardice

Imagine that, despite your spouse’s resistance, you took a big risk, and moved cross-country to take a relatively specialized job with a high salary, pressuring your spouse to give up a good job they can’t get back. You spent everything on buying a house at a price you later realized was inflated, and then you discover it’s a toxic af workplace, and staying there will probably kill you.

You might try to talk to someone at work, but in a toxic workplace, that might cost you your job. It’s the kind of place that fires people who are looking for other jobs, so if you look for another job you might get fired. If you quit or get fired you might be able to find another job, but definitely not one that pays as much, so you’ll have to sell the house. You can, at best, sell the house for what you paid, so it will cost you money to sell the house, money you don’t have.

You can keep adding details–my point is simply to imagine (or remember) being in a bad situation that has a lot of possible solutions, and all of the possible solutions have high costs. What we tend to do in that situation is: nothing.

If we’re facing a problem, and we don’t like any of our available options for solving it, then we find ways to deflect thinking about it pragmatically. We don’t want to think about it at all. It’s as though we’re swatting away even considering that it’s a big problem about which we have to make some uncomfortable decisions. And that’s our situation with gun violence.

We know how mass murders happen. Troubled men (not necessarily ones who were bullied, by the way) get access to fast-firing and powerful weapons, and get access to a community that valorizes mass murderers. They believe that engaging in mass murder will gain them fame and admiration. Sometimes a person with violent tendencies is threatened with losing everything and decides to harm the people or person whom they irrationally blame (the situation in many workplace or domestic violence shootings). Sometimes the guns are illegally obtained or modified, but not always. Sometimes they’re weapons that used to be illegal (e.g., assault weapons), but not always.

Given that the situations are very different, there is no one solution that will solve all of them. Deliberative cowards say, “Welp, nothing we can do then.” But they don’t say that about other social problems, and that’s how all political problems work—there are always multiple contributing factors. Fatal car accidents have a lot of causes, and we haven’t chosen, as a culture, to say, “Welp, nothing we can do then”.

We identify the various causes (unsafe drivers, roads, and cars), and pass laws that regulate the drivers, roads, and cars. And we provide the resources necessary to enforce those regulations. There are still fatal car accidents, but far fewer than if we didn’t try to do anything.

Similarly, sometimes people say that the real issue is that the murderers are mentally ill, or that they were bullied. Were the people saying this genuinely concerned about mass murders, then they’d promptly advocate significant changes to our mental health policies, or how we handle bullying in schools. But they don’t. They don’t because both of those options would cost a considerable amount of money. Advocating the necessary expenditure would alienate the “starve the government” bloc of the GOP, as well as the people opposed to delinking health care from having a job (since people who are seriously mentally ill tend not to be able to keep a job). It would mean advocating a massive social safety net, which is about as popular with GOP voters as an abortionplex.

Sometimes people say that we have mass murders because our culture has turned from God, and they cite something they don’t like (tolerance of homosexuality, respecting the First Amendment) as an example of our cultural sinfulness. So, they wash their hands of the deaths of children when it comes to shooting. But they don’t say, “Oh, welp, abortion is just a consequence of our declining morals.” They haven’t spent the last fifty years just sending thoughts and prayers about abortion. They passed laws, violated democratic norms to get a favorable SCOTUS, and voted. They acted strategically to get abortion criminalized. If they really cared about mass murders they could act strategically to end them.

There are some fairly straightforward policies that we could deliberate. We could discuss spending the money necessary to enforce existing laws, restricting access to or banning weapons that are useful for mass murders, criminalizing the irresponsible storage of weapons, reducing bullying, requiring background checks, spending the money that would ensure people with serious mental health issues can get help. Any GOP politician who even talked about considering any of those policies would be making a career-ending move.

GOP politicians aren’t willing to be rational or principled when it comes to gun violence because they don’t really care enough about mass murders of children to take the electoral and media hit that would be the consequence of their being principled.

They’re more afraid of deliberation than they are of children being shot.

The SF Resolution, the NRA, and our culture of demagoguery

A really smart friend recently asked me about the SF Board of Supervisors Resolution about the NRA. Her question was:

While I think this is a really unhelpful designation that just feeds into the persecuted minority identity I think the NRA likes to use, I’m actually also really interested in this idea of what terrorism/inciting violence actually is. By creating a brand/identity/environment that’s welcoming to white right-wing terrorists, are they effectively inciting violence?

Great question. Technically, four great questions–exactly the questions to ask.

The portions of the resolution (pdf) relevant to the NRA are:

• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence, and
• WHEREAS, The leadership of National Rifle Association promotes extremist positions, in defiance of the views of a majority of its membership and the public, and undermine the general welfare, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association through its advocacy has armed those individuals who would and have committed acts of terrorism
[…]
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice defines terrorist activity, in part, as, “The use of any…explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device, with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property;” and
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice further includes any individual or member of an organization commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including communications, funds, weapons, or training to any individual has committed or plans to commit a terrorist act…

My friend was really asking four questions: 1) whether this designation contributes to the NRA fantasy of being gun owners being a persecuted minority; 2) whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization; 3) whether this designation is helpful; 4) whether the NRA incites violence.

As far as the first, a major theme in NRA rhetoric is victimization (if you want to get pedantic, masculine victimhood). Gun owners (who are dog whistled as white males in NRA rhetoric) are victimized by crime, Obama kicking down their doors and taking their guns (in 2008 and 2012), not being able to own all the guns, criticism. Those claims of victimization are disconnected from actual events, so nothing the SF Board of Supervisors could make NRA’s base supporters feel more victimized. They’ve already got that turned up to eleven.

The question of whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization because it supports domestic terrorism is interesting because it points to how vague (perhaps strategically) the definitions of terrorism are. Technically, the NRA does fit the definition presented in the resolution. Of course, the resolution hasn’t presented all the characteristics that constitute the DOJ definition, but that’s typical of how arguments work in our culture of demagoguery: if you can find one characteristic of a definition or historical analogy that the out-group fits, then you can declare them that thing. Hitler was a charismatic leader, so the out-group charismatic leader is Hitler (but not our in-group leader).

We could consider more criteria than the SF resolution does. And it’s still plausible to argue that the NRA fits the DOJ definition.

The other criteria are:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;

We are in a world of domestic terrorism, and the NRA is engaged in actions that could argue enable that terrorism, and so, technically, the NRA does fit the DOJ definition, and that’s why the DOJ definition is a bad definition. It’s much too broad, and would mean that, for instance, the truck driver who drove through protestors was a domestic terrorist, and therefore his employer was a supporter of terrorism and could be condemned as such by an over-active prosecutor. What he did was assault (perhaps even attempted murder), and his employers should be subject to civil suits.

This designation of the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization is sheer political theatre (unless it’s in service of arguing that the DOJ definition is too vague), a performance of in-group loyalty that is about looking right rather than being effective. So, as far as the third part of the question, no, this isn’t effective.

People think this kind of political theatre is “effective” because they have weird (and generally false) narratives about political change and how it happens.

This hope that “if we take an irrational stance and commit to it passionately that will have an important impact” appeals to the false narrative that political change happens because an individual or small group stands up and says, “This is wrong.” That makes great theatre, fiction, and movies, but that hope is harder to defend historically. Political theatre, that is, the political power of taking an irrational and anti-pragmatic stance, works very well on behalf of parties in power.

The Birmingham bus boycott didn’t happen because Rosa Parks suddenly one day decided she was done with segregation refused to change her seat. It happened because there was an organization that had made pragmatic plans about how and when to have a boycott. That doesn’t make her individual protest any less brave or important—she risked a tremendous amount, and her actions cost her (and the other protesters) a lot—it makes her protest smart. The Stonewall riots were part of an arc of gay rights political action. Again, they were crucial, and brave and dangerous, but they neither began nor ended the struggle for gay rights. the beginning of a political movement. Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his theses to a door, but what caused the Reformation wasn’t Luther’s standing tall before the Diet—Jan Huss had done the same thing and been killed for it—but that he had important political support. What Luther did was brave and risky, and it worked because he had a movement behind him, not because he engaged in political theatre. Political theatre is effective when it’s part of an effective political movement.

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail protesting the Mexican-American war, rightly recognizing it as being a war fought so that slavery could expand. And he wrote a great essay. And no one else spent a night in jail. And he only spent a night. And most people reading his essay don’t even know it was about slavery. There was very little cost to him for this protest—it wasn’t even that bad a jail. His piece had little or no impact on American history until it was picked up much later, the 1900s.

The SF resolution isn’t a Rosa Parks moment. I don’t even think it’s a Thoreau moment. This resolution has no cost for the SF Board of Supervisors. The resolution is demagoguery. And while demagoguery isn’t always harmful, this one might be, but not because it could alienate supporters of the NRA.

It does, however, aid the rhetorically cunning strategy of the NRA to try to get “gun owners” and “NRA” equated. The NRA has a lot of problems, including that it really isn’t a political organization as much as representative of manufacturers. The political base of the NRA is shrinking, so they’re trying to expand it by persuading gun owners that everyone is out to get them—that gun owners face existential threat. The NRA rhetoric is that it represents all gun owners. It doesn’t. It represents a minority of gun owners. Their claim that the world is divided between gun owners who agree with them and people who want Obama to kick down their doors and take all the guns is sheer demagoguery. The NRA’s extremist policies don’t represent all gun owners, even ones who are very pro-GOP and pro-gun, and gun owners aren’t necessarily supporters of the NRA all guns all the time solution to everything.

This leaves the fourth question of whether the NRA incites violence. And that’s complicated. NRA rhetoric has long involved claims of apocalypses that didn’t happen, demagoguery, fear-mongering. (I was going to link to those claims, but I’m really not comfortable doing that–you can go onto the NRA site and go back in their archives or google Obama take our guns). The NRA can’t support its arguments with rational argumentation, and so it doesn’t even try. The NRA never accurately represents opposition arguments.

The NRA isn’t alone in that move. We’re in a culture of demagoguery and an economy of attention, in which our dominant political imaginary is that every side can be reduced to two sides (good v. bad people, aka us v. them), and, therefore, the best way to get vote, donations, clicks, likes, and shares is to say that there are only two options–us or them.

Trump advocated a second amendment solution in regard to Clinton. Anyone who can get two neurons to fire and is not wrapped in a mummy cocoon of ideology knows he was approving of someone shooting Clinton. But here is what is important about what Trump said: had Clinton said there was a second amendment solution to Trump, Trump supporters would have eaten their own heads off in rage. As would have the NRA talking heads. Did Trump really mean it? That doesn’t matter. What matters is that his supporters would have condemned exactly the same behavior on the part of Clinton.

NRA rhetoric is irresponsible, rabidly demagogic, blazingly tribal, voraciously demagogic, and gleefully evasive of what Christ said we should do. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it’s culturally dominant, fosters violence against the outgroup(s) insofar as it encourages people to believe that violence is an appropriate strategy for dealing with every conflict. But the NRA is hardly alone in its demagoguery, and it’s scapegoating to pretend it is.

That’s what makes the SF resolution political theatre, or virtue signalling, or performance of in-group loyalty, or whatever term you want to use. But the NRA condemning the SF Board for engaging in propaganda and sound-bite (sic) political action is such unprincipled in-group factionalism it could make a cat laugh.

The best evidence is that mass shootings are performances of in-group loyalty on the part of people who live in rhetorical swamps that breed toxic masculinity, the disease of notoriety , our culture of rage.

Does that mean the NRA is off the hook for their demagoguery? Not at all. The NRA might not be directly and explicitly responsible for persuading someone to shoot up a temple , synagogue, baseball game, places with women but it is doing everything it can to persuade anyone who will listen to them that the people who do want to shoot up places should have access to all the guns.

Whether the NRA incites violence is complicated, especially given how violent our everyday rhetoric is (as it always is in a culture of demagoguery) all over the political spectrum. But the NRA does enable mass shootings insofar as every mass shooting enabled by a weapon the NRA wants to make sure is easily available is additional evidence for how damaging the NRA is. (And the “we just need to have a more Christian nation and should enact policies” is an irrational stance and a great example of bad faith argumentation.) But that doesn’t make the SF resolution right. We are not in a zero-sum world of politics in which “the other side” being wrong means this side is right.

We are in a world in which we should be arguing policy, not engaging in competitions about who is more loyal to the in-group or arguments about which group is better.

Gun violence in the US is a major problem, and treating this issue as though it’s a zero-sum argument between the two political parties is like the crew of the Titanic making a decision about navigation on the basis of who won the on-board shuffleboard competition.

Pray away the guns

Many people who call themselves Christian, and think they represent all Christians, believe that, when communities are living by God’s word (which they understand, unequivocally, from God’s mouth to their ears, so to speak) then that community will not be punished with terrible things. Thus, they reason, if there are terrible things happening, we just need to get back on the right path, and those things will go away. That’s the argument being made by a lot of people about gun violence.

It’s a kind of bastardization (as Kenneth Burke would say) of the Jeremiad. The Jeremiad is a rhetorical narrative—our culture was once in touch with God, and following God’s laws, and we were prosperous and happy and there was no disagreement; but, we have fallen from God’s law, and now we are suffering bad things (especially disagreement, but also violence), and so we need to purify our culture from practices that God condemns, and then our problems will be solved.

The Jeremiad depoliticzes political issues. It makes all policy issues not issues about what policies we should have but issues of personal will and out-group presence.

The American fascination with the Jeremiad is usually attributed to second generation New England Puritan preachers saying that things were great with the first generation–who were pure of heart–, but now they’re bad because people aren’t pure enough. What’s really odd about that argument is that the first generation wasn’t good. They saw people drop like flies. They bickered over everything, and sued one another like the lawyers they were. A large part of The History of Plymouth Plantation was about their lawsuits.

There never was a golden age in American Protestant religion when people weren’t dying, killing, suing each other, and, for that matter, buggering various animals (the most entertaining part of The History of Plymouth Plantation). The Jeremiad is a historical narrative (people followed God and things were great, now we don’t, and things are terrible) that is indefensible as an argument about history.

MAGA is a Jeremiad, especially when connected to notions about how when “In God We Trust” was on our money things were better, and crime has been going up ever since we banned prayer from schools (it hasn’t, and we didn’t). But, okay, let’s run with that argument. Things were better when there was slavery? Things were better in the 50s?

One thing I think we should ask white Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how we need to go back to when America was great, in the fifties, is: could they please explain how that time was better? What, exactly, was better, and more in line with what God wants, about segregation, about a time when people posed cheerfully in front of a castrated, flayed, and burned black body? Was that when America was great? When a man could rape his wife, even if they were legally separated, and he could know he would suffer no consequences? When employers could pay POC and women less for the same work? Where is that in the Bible? When “conservative” rhetoric could criminalize the very people employed in order to break unions?

Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how times were better and we used to follow God’s law are generally engaged in what I like to think of as narcissistic ethics (the world is good or bad as it is good or bad for them and people like them) and what others have called naïve realism (something is true if it seems true to you). Personally, I don’t think either of those is much in line with what Jesus said, but I’ll set that aside just to emphasize that, if you try to engage someone making this argument about how things were better when you could have a picnic while lynching a black man who hadn’t done anything, they’ll talk about abortion or gay marriage.

This isn’t an argument about history; this is a statement of personal commitment to an irrational political agenda that is supposed to stand for a relationship with Christ.

It also a statement of personal commitment to an irrational narrative of causality. The dumb version of the Jeremiad says that things used to be great because people used to follow God’s law (and there is a short and ahistorical list of what that meant—we prayed in schools [no that didn’t happen everywhere], we had “In God We Trust” on our money [the history is pretty complicated], but appalling practices from those “good old days” are cheerfully ignored), and now things are all bad (they aren’t).

Thus, people who believe this false narrative say, the bad things that are happening to us are not because of policies for which we have voted, or the politicians we have voted to put in place, but because we have stopped following God’s laws, and so those things will go away if we all become more righteous.

Here things get a little murky. There are people who believe that gun violence is a scourge God has put on us because we allow abortion. (So, why wasn’t there this level of gun violence before abortion was outlawed?) Thus, the white supremacist Trump supporter drinking deep of toxic masculinity who could easily get a weapon that would enable a mass shooting is just an agent of God, not a consequence of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the eliminationist and victimization rhetoric he regularly consumes.

A person who says he is engaged in mass shooting because he believes his actions to be what right-wing pundits say he should do (like Jim Adkisson) has nothing to do with right-wing rhetoric. It’s about lack of prayer in schools. But, the same people who claim that right-wing shooters aren’t inspired by right-wing rhetoric will blame any shooter who can be labeled as leftist on leftist rhetoric (James Hodgkinson).

In other words, if there is a shooter, the first move for mainstream “right-wing” media (by which I mean Fox, Limbaugh, and the other main sources of information for many people—the most mainstream media there is) is, if possible, to say the person was a “lefty.” If that isn’t possible, say he was mentally ill, an anomaly, and it would have been prevented had there been good guys to shoot him.

But you also get the argument that he was an agent of God because bad things happen when we do not follow God’s law.

People say we politicize gun violence when, after a shooting, we want to talk about policies about guns, and many of them mean that because they sincerely believe that, if we all just believed what they believed (which they describe as having faith in Christ) then no one would do anything bad. They believe that we can pray away the gay and we can pray away the guns.

They believe that gun violence would simply end were we a culture in line with their vision of Christ. Therefore shooting isn’t a political issue (that is, one that could be solved through a change in policies), but an issue of personal faith and cultural commitment. Gun violence can’t be solved through policies about guns, but only by a spiritual rejuvenation.

Note, however, that they don’t think they can pray away abortion. Abortion is a political issue that can be reduced, they believe, through a change in policies. (It can, but not the policies they’re advocating.) They say they think gun violence is bad, and they say think abortion is bad, and so they are working (and have been working for years) to change the policies on abortion.

That’s because, they say, abortion is a violation of God’s will. And gun violence isn’t?