How Can You Advocate For Gun Control Unless You Know The Facts? You Can’t.
The first time I got involved in advocacy was 1958. I
was a 14-year old big shot. I got on a bus with a bunch of other kids and some
adults, Blacks and Whites, and we ‘sat in’ at a lunch counter in a diner on
Route 1 in Towson, MD. That’s right – in those days you could take a ‘freedom
ride’ to Maryland.
Then civil rights morphed into the anti-war movement.
And because I went to graduate school in Chicago, I was at the meeting in
Lincoln Park with Abby, Jerry, Dave Dellinger, John Froines and Tom Hayden,
along with a bunch of undercover cops posing as anti-war protestors, when we
planned the demonstrations outside the Democratic Convention in 1968.
In the 70’s, I was back in New York
and stayed active by going to various meetings where speakers like Bella Abzug
and Gloria Steinem gave stirring speeches about why women had the right to
choose, as well as the right to get paid as much as men for doing the same
work.
The advocacy for gender equality then took a slight
turn in the 1980’s when folks, including me, began marching for the right to
follow one’s own sexual orientation. My greatest Harley experience wasn’t going
out to Sturges, it was driving my Low Ryder from Greenwich Village to Times
Square alongside the New York City Lesbian Harley Club during the Halloween
Night parade.
All of these advocacy movements shared one thing in
common: you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that dropping
napalm on a peasant village, or depriving people of the right to vote, or
telling a woman that someone other than her would decide whether she should
give birth, or making a gay man or woman hide their most precious and personal
feelings was – wrong! It was as simple as that. It was wrong. Period. No
questions asked. Wrong. Okay? Wrong.
But this is where the gun-control advocacy movement, of
all the advocacy that I have experienced over the last sixty years is
different. What makes it different is that the moral issue of ‘right’ versus
‘wrong’ is simply not so clear. What creates a muddle in this respect is the
fact that gun violence occurs because people own guns. And most folks who have
access to a gun aren’t breaking any laws. In fact, au contraire, they
believe that not only do they have a legal ‘right’ to own a gun, but this right
is both enshrined in the Constitution and acknowledged to be correct by the
same liberal legal scholars
who have supported civil, gender and gay rights.
So how does someone advocate against guns (and please,
spare me the nonsense about how you ‘support’ the 2nd Amendment)
that can stand up against such a potent argument from the other side? What you have to do, it seems to me, is take
the trouble to learn about guns – how they are sold, why they are sold, what
laws exist which regulate guns, which laws need to be improved, you get the
drill. The point is that if you get into a discussion with a pro-gun person and
you don’t know these facts, you end up in an emotional exchange which goes
nowhere very fast.
Every person concerned about gun violence should sign
up for the online study exercise
created by our friends at the Hopkins-Bloomberg school. In fact, Giffords,
Everytown, Brady and all the other gun-control groups should insist that
their members spend a few hours drilling through the curriculum, taking the
self-help tests and sending feedback to the faculty who worked overtime to
create this course. Oh, you don’t ‘have time’ to do this self-paced exercise
and God forbid replace some of your own feelings with the facts? Give me a
break.
And while you’re at it, let’s not forget to watch
this video and send
the group in Florida a few bucks. If you have time to read my column, you
can’t be that pressed for time or cash.
