Why I Oppose the Gun Control Lobby

M-16 Diagram by the US Army, via Wikimedia Commons

If you want to convince me to agree with you, it's easy to do. Give me a rational, evidence-based argument that makes sense. That's how scientists convinced me that anthropogenic global warming is a threat. They had good evidence and sound arguments. The people who dispute the reality of AGW, the Republican/Tea Party, had nothing to support their dispute except conspiracy theories and cherry-picked factoids. Science won that argument.

When it comes to the gun control lobby, I've almost never heard them make a rational case for any of their proposals. Their arguments consist of appeals to horror and the automatic labeling of everything they propose as "common sense". That's not a convincing case for me, and it shouldn't be for you.

The questions we should ask about any proposed law should be:

1. Does it accomplish its stated goals?
2. Will it have unintended and undesirable consequences?
3. Do the benefits of the law justify any restriction of human rights that it requires?

These are the questions that gun control supporters can't answer, which is why they don't get much legislative support except in the immediate aftermath of a horrible shooting. Theirs is an emotional case, not a rational one.

A good example of how bad the gun control lobby is at proposing laws can be found in the 1994 ban on so-called assault weapons. Besides prohibiting specific, named firearms, the law also banned weapons that had a particular set of features, things like bayonet lugs or flash suppressors. In response, some firearm manufacturers simply removed one of those features, which made their guns perfectly legal using the gun control lobby's own criteria.

The gun control lobby wasn't happy about that. President Clinton and California Senator Diane Feinstein in particular accused those gun manufacturers of somehow exploiting a loophole in the law. The truth, the rational truth, is that those gun manufacturers faithfully obeyed the law.

The 1994 assault weapons ban failed because it was based on emotions instead of reason.

Since then, the pattern has been the same. A tragic shooting makes the news, the gun control lobby claims that we need "common sense" gun laws to prevent such shootings, and after a brief emotion rally the issue fades away. The gun control lobby has been failing the same way for a long time.

Just as the Republican Party argues against science with paranoid conspiracy theories, the gun control lobby blames its persistent failures on the same sort of conspiracy theories. They'll claim that they were thwarted by the gun manufacturers who secretly work with the National Rifle Association to spread guns and blood across America.

Bullshit. The failure of the gun control lobby lies within their own movement. They fail because they're selling emotion instead of rational legislation. They fail because they slap the "common sense" label on everything they propose, even if their proposals make no sense. They fail, because they're more interested in  pissing off the NRA than they are in working to reduce gun violence.

If the gun control lobby wants attention from people like me, they'll have to back up and think about what they want to accomplish, and they'll have to propose some changes that actually make sense. They'll have to answer the three questions mentioned earlier.

I'm a sucker for a rational, evidence-based argument. If the gun control lobby ever makes such an argument, I'll be happy to listen. Until then, I'll continue to oppose them.