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When the Anti-gun Crazy Gets Turned Up to 11

When the anti-gun crazy gets turned up to 11, it’s amazing what can sound like a good idea during an elevator pitch.

And isolation doesn’t make the crazy go away.

This should serve as a cautionary tale for any who identify with a particular ideology. There’s always the risk that you will limit yourself to conversations with those who already agree with you. This kind of echo chamber can make you believe that everyone agrees with you since everyone you know agrees with you. ”How could McGovern lose? Everyone I know voted for him” goes the quote attributed to a New York film critic in 1972. That critic and her liberal pals all inhabited the same little bubble and assumed that the universe was indeed contained within their little bubble.

A similar bubble universe has blown into existence at Robert Redford’s The Sundance Channel. For reasons that will escape anyone who isn’t part of that little universe, a “family drama” called Cold Dead Hands has been green-lighted by the powers that be at Sundance. The show…

centers on the fictional and polarizing head of the NRA, Trip Thibodeaux, and the drama that swirls around him both at work and at home. Trip is a father and husband — and he also happens to be the nation’s most powerful gun-rights advocate and the de facto CEO of the gun industry. A charismatic and polarizing figure, he’ll be forced to navigate a volatile landscape in American culture and politics, as well as crises of his own faith, when his rarefied world spirals out of control.

The show’s writer is a former reporter for the L.A. Times. Go figure.

Now there will be three reactions to this show: Praise, ridicule, and “That sounds kinda boring”. If you work at The Sundance Channel, write for the L.A. Times, or are majoring in gender inclusive medieval art history, then yours is probably the first reaction. You think that this is a wonderful idea and can’t imagine why it hasn’t been done before. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably had the second reaction. The majority of the country, however, will probably hold the third view.

Now this is something that gun rights advocates need to keep in mind. A majority of Americans don’t care all that much about who’s right on the 2nd Amendment. Unfortunately, their opinion tends to be whatever it was they last heard or read in the Media. The important thing for us is to make sure that they hear more than the Sundance Channel’s side of the argument. We need to keep them out of that little bubble universe. We also need to avoid forming one of our own. We need to have a better understanding of the public’s attitudes than the executives at Sundance apparently have.

A thorough understanding of the Federalist Papers is a good thing; but you also need to understand why your neighbor thinks guns are icky before you can do anything about it. This means popping a bubble or two.

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