It’s Time To Stop Talking To Ourselves.
Here’s the takeaway from last week. The NRA dumped Ollie North, who turned out to
be a very good fundraiser for himself, and replaced him with a woman best known
for her involvement with a group which preserves a Confederate memorial that graces
the side of a mountain considered sacred ground by the Ku Klux Klan. On the
other side of the ledger, the House Appropriations Committee put $50 million
for gun research into the budget of the
CDC.
In the greater scheme of things, neither of these two
events will make a big difference in how we try to deal with the 300
intentional gun injuries that we suffer from each day. But they do symbolize,
to quote a Nobel-prize winner, as something ‘blowing in the wind,’ and the wind
seems to be getting a lot stronger every day. Maggie Astor got it right yesterday in the ‘failing’ (ha-ha) New York
Times, when she said that the national gun-control movement has now built
“an
infrastructure that had previously existed only on the conservative side of gun
policy.”
I see evidence of this
infrastructure in terms of the number of fundraising emails I receive (and I
get them from both sides), in terms of media coverage where outlets like The
New York Times now seem to carry a feature about guns and gun violence
seemingly every other day, and most of all, I see it in the pronouncements by
the 20-odd candidates who have announced their intention to chase schmuck-o Don
out of Washington, D.C. Just four years ago, conventional wisdom still
considered it to be a big risk if you ran for public office and were anti-gun.
That bit of received sagacity has disappeared. Fartig (read: finished.)
Before you read further, let me
make one point. My perspective on gun control and gun violence doesn’t date
back to Sandy Hook and 2012. It doesn’t date back to 1999 and Columbine or 1994
and the Assault Weapons Ban. It dates back to 1966 when Chuckie Whitman climbed
to the top of the Texas Tower and began blasting away. That’s when I first
started paying attention to gun violence, okay? So when I say that we are in a
very new and different state of affairs as regarding what to do about America’s
love of guns (including my love of them) I’m taking the long view, probably
longer than any of you. And my long view tells me this.
Sooner or later, if you want to
make a real dent in gun violence, the gun-control community is going to have to
start talking to gun owners not as enemies but as friends. And this doesn’t
mean just coming up with some ‘reasonable’ gun laws which allegedly garner
support from both sides in the debate. What it really mean is talking to gun
owners about why the ‘good guy with the gun’ narrative is a myth.
So here’s my challenge to my friends in Gun-control Nation. There are somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 gun shows held in the United States every year. This means that on any given weekend, there are probably 100 locations where 5,000 to 10,000 bone-fide gun nuts get together to play around with guns. I’m going to a nearby show next weekend, in fact. Here’s a calendar of upcoming shows.
I am willing to pay the costs of
renting a table at one gun show a month for the next 12 months. I’ll send a
check to the show’s sponsor which will be in the name of the gun shop that I
own. And then you come to the show, sit behind the table, maybe give out some
literature or whatever, and engage the gun owners who attend the show in a
discussion about their guns.
I don’t care what you say. I don’t care which organization you represent. Or maybe you’ll just represent yourself. Fine with me. But let’s stop talking just to ourselves, okay? Let’s see what happens when we talk to the other side. And by the way, I have been to hundreds of gun shows and the food is always great.
