On gun control and cultural shift

[danthered]

Updated 2017

Most gun control discussions get as far as acknowledging that gun worship is deeply entrenched in US culture, then fizzle out with a shoulder-shrug of defeat and inevitability. This essay's author does one of the better jobs I've seen of framing the issue as a matter of public health. His main point is that cultural entrenchment is

Comments

[danthered]

I think there probably is substantial robust data regarding the public-health effect of proliferative guns, which-as with the knowledge of tobacco's effect on public health-is highly inconvenient to the gun industry and its apologists, so it is loudly dismissed preëmptively on generally fatuous grounds; it is difficult, as Upton Sinclair observed, to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Nothing new there.

As for the hapless homeowner or shopkeeper's need to be able to defend himself, his family, and his property effectively and efficiently in the absence or tardiness of police: that is a real and genuine need, and I don't dispute it. I look askance at the real, practical frequency with which such self-defence successfully takes place, and even if I assume it happens with any significant frequency, I dispute the notion that this need can or should be addressed by firearms of (or near) military capability and specification.

I don't agree that images and data about car crashes (we don't say "accidents" -- it implies a faultlessness that is almost never actual) by themselves were very effective. That's the approach that was fruitlessly and exclusively tried from the early '60s through the early '80s. The first belt-usage law was New York's, which came in 1984. Once belt-usage laws began to coerce people into using their belts by threat of nothing more than rather minor fines, eventually a tipping point was passed where enough people were using their belts that it was the norm rather than the exception, and then data and images began to be effective.