Losing strategy loses again

Hmmm… That sounds like the start to a good meme.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has written about how The NRA Wins Again in the post-Sandy Hook push for fresh, new, gun laws. But first a few corrections to that: It’s gun owners and the American People who won. Your NRA has been working overtime to make sure that happened. The more important correction is to the idea that the outcome could have been any different.

Friedersdorf writes that…

In the aftermath of a gun tragedy, there isn’t anything wrong with proponents of gun control trying to persuade Americans to change their position in light of what happened. But after Newtown, many gun-control advocates tried to shame rather than persuade, as if the “correct” position was obvious to everyone save retrograde idiots.

On guns, that strategy has never worked.

Friedersdorf also notes that rather than pushing gun control efforts forward, most State legislatures pushed gun rights forward. But why wouldn’t that happen. Friedersdorf makes the same mistake that he accuses gun control advocates of making. He simply assumes that gun control ought to happen; that it’s just a matter of finding the right strategy. He even ignores the words of Businessweek’s Paul Barrett that he quoted…

The smart response is not scorn or exaggeration. For better or worse, gun ownership has come to symbolize a range of deeply felt ideas about culture and government authority. Making fun of people who view their firearms as emblems of liberty and traditional values (however they define those values) will neither change minds nor repeal legislation.

Though, to be fair to Friedersdorf, Barrett also makes the assumption that gun control laws simply ought to happen But that isn’t the case.

Gun control fails as a legislative agenda not because of strategy, but because gun control fails as a policy. You cannot fix what cannot work to begin with. Gun control advocates are always telling us that just one more law is needed. “If only those inbred gun owners would get out of the way and let us ban ( Fill in the blank ), then everything would be sunshine and unicorns.” This completely ignores the fact that gun control hasn’t worked. And it hasn’t worked because it can’t.

250 years ago, the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria wrote on “the false ideas of utility”:

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.”

And yet gun control advocates continue to wonder why their laws don’t work. That’s rather like wondering why your tennis racket can’t make a decent cup of coffee.

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