How Pro-Choice Activists Are Like Pro-Gun Activists, Cont'd
By Chris Bodenner
Jim Elliott, a reader whose writing on guns Ta-Nehisi featured a few years ago under a pseudonym, rejoins the debate under his real name:
Your reader's comparison of gun rights activists to pro-choice activists made immediate sense to me, as a gun rights liberal. Both gun control advocates and pro-life advocates primarily work upon first principals. They make a moral argument, not a pragmatic one.
As perhaps well they should. Pro-choice advocates, after all, weigh the potential for life against the liberty of a life already existing and choose the latter, whereas gun rights advocates weigh the potential for death against the liberty of a life already existing, and choose the latter.
When you’re essentially arguing against a moral axiom such as life, you’ve just picked the losing team. Just as a pro-choice advocate can’t really argue with the picture of an aborted fetus, neither can a gun rights advocate argue against the picture of a weeping parent. Nor should they; as Ben Carson and Jeb Bush just learned, it’s basically impossible to not be an ass if you even try.
Sure, us gun rights guys can quote figures all we want. I could point out that according to the National Institutes of Justice, the use of firearms in non-fatal violent crime is down, drastically:
The number of nonfatal firearm-related crimes has dropped from a high of 1,287,190 in 1994 to a bottoming out of 331,618 in 2008. And even though that number has since increased, it remains at around a third of its peak. In 1994, the firearm crime rate was 7.4; in 2011, it was 1.8. And, interestingly, firearm use in non-fatal violent crime remains consistent with its historical range of between 5-8 percent of overall non-fatal violent crime.
But those facts won’t matter.
I could point out that murder and non-negligent manslaughter are down from a 1994 peak of 23,326 to 14,196 in 2013, according to the FBI. I could point out that, also according to the FBI, 8,454 of those deaths in 2013 were caused by firearms—just under 60 percent of them—and that this remains consistent with the historical average of the percentage of murders that are done with firearms.
But that won’t matter.
I could point out that this coincides with a period in time where there has been a monumental growth in the number of people with concealed carry permits, or that such individuals are not any more likely to commit violent crime. For example, out of the state of Texas’s 584,850 permit holders in 2012, 120—0.021 percent—were convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, with only a few of them charged in murder or negligent homicide.
But that won’t matter.
I could point out that your chance of being criminally killed by a firearm is 0.000267 percent. I could point out that accidental firearm deaths account for 0.6 percent of all accidental deaths in the U.S., and that such deaths are down from a peak of over 2,000 in 1981 to fewer than 600 in 2013.
But that won’t matter.
It won’t matter because I’m basically being an ass: Behind every one of those data points is the story of a life lost. There’s a mother or father who’s not coming home, a son or daughter who won’t be tucked in tonight. How do you argue with the moral equivalent of Dick Cheney’s One-Percent Doctrine couched in the image of a woman screaming in the parking lot of an elementary school [in Newtown, Connecticut, in the photo seen above]? You don’t. Unless you’re a complete ass.
Gun rights activists have to realize this. We don’t have a good answer. We may not even have a right one. We can either avoid this discussion by flinging first principles at one another like good fundamentalists, or we can recognize that the gun control folks aren’t wrong. Unlike with abortion, we can’t fall back on different axiomatic definitions of what a zygote is. Gun control advocates are responding to the loss of what are indisputably innocent lives. We have to respect those lives by recognizing that.
October 13, 2015 at 09:39AM
via The Atlantic http://ift.tt/1ldcvqG