The Asymmetry of the US Gun Debate

Why extremism has hijacked the conversation and rigged the game.

Photo by Jay Rembert on Unsplash

Without ever having to seek it out, news of gun violence finds you in America. And if you’re actively on the watch for it, you’ll see it everywhere you look. For my own part, I try to avoid it wherever possible, including its often heated discourse. I’m not usually of the doom and gloom disposition, but on the issue of US gun violence, the lure of pessimism is strong. Amid such an insurmountable status quo, the impotent futility of following the media coverage, wading through the waves of carnage, and screaming at strangers online seems only to add to the depravity of it all.

With 45,000 deaths per year¹, and over 920 million firearms in civilian circulation², the task of curbing gun violence is herculean. The kind of substantive federal legislation required to begin making inroads is politically dead-on-arrival, in part because of lobbyists, partisanship, and government gridlock, but primarily due to America’s thriving gun culture. Before we can change laws or amendments, we must first change minds. That, too, is an all but impossible endeavor, because the structure and dynamics inherent to the gun debate represent a rare case in politics where uncompromising zealotry is advantageous.

There is a spectrum of thought on most political issues, with two extremes at either end, and a continuum of positions in between. Those at the fringes are nearly always in the minority, and must join with more moderate factions with whom they only partially align, in order to achieve the closest version to their preferred policies. Under ordinary circumstances, the failure to compromise and build coalitions results in defeat — and the refusal to do so results in irrelevance (See the American far left). When it comes to firearms, however, gun rights hardliners have a number of prohibitive built-in advantages. For one, they have the Constitution on their side. For another, they have the backing of the NRA, the gun lobby, and the $70 billion per year firearm industry. Perhaps most notably, they have the guns on their side, and they’re holding society hostage.

There is a very real and credible threat of violence, both implied and sometimes verbalized, in reaction to any suggestion of gun control. The moment anyone proposes even the most modest restrictions on firearms, millions of heavily-armed Americans begin foaming at the mouth and rushing hair-on-fire to their local gun store to stock up. The rhetoric one hears from the most ardent gun fanatics, both online and off, is best encapsulated by Charlton Heston’s famous refrain “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands,” or the popular tough-guy taunt “Come and take it.” Get one of these Punisher-skulled, Gadsden-draped bedwetters talking, and they’ll soon spell out delusions of grandeur involving armed rebellions against the government, or domestic guerilla insurgencies. While much of this bluster is little more than the bark of so many beer-gutted chihuahuas, it only takes a small percentage — which could still easily translate into hundreds of thousands of people, if not more — to conjure a sword of Damocles dangling over the entire conversation. This is the asymmetry of the gun debate at its core. 

On one side of the table are people with nuanced views about enacting certain measures to restrict certain types of firearms from certain types of people in certain types of situations. (So few Americans want to “ban all guns” — the straw man often concocted by gun nuts — that pollsters don’t even waste their time asking the question. The closest they get is asking whether one supports a ban on handguns, a proposition that three out of four Americans reject.) If the gun control camp doesn't get their way, they’ll whine about it on Twitter, or write a scathing op-ed in the New Yorker (that’ll show ‘em). On the other side of the table are people who believe that either no new measures should be taken, or that those few that already exist should be repealed. And they’re so dialed-in that they’re willing to fight to the death over it, in some cases literally. It is difficult to express just how fundamentally deranging this is to the gun debate.

The truly hardcore gun people are not simply political conservatives, or Constitutionalists, or personal safety buffs. The dyed-in-the-wool zealots are mostly men, and what few women exist in these circles tend to parlay their zealotry into some kind of marketable gimmick. They use firearms as a proxy for masculinity, virility, religion, and self-esteem. Much has been opined about how wokeness is filling a religion- or meaning-shaped hole in the hearts of its most dedicated adherents. In the American gun community, this played itself out decades ago. For these folks, guns are their identity. Their sacred text is the Second Amendment (except the bit about militias). Their pronouns are lock/load.

In 2014, the Obama administration explained why they did not stop the Russian annexation of Crimea, which would have entailed military intervention, by emphasizing that Russia will always have more of a vested interest in Ukraine than the US does. Obama was right, and the same logic applies here. We Americans who are appalled by the level of gun violence in our country will never be as invested in drastically reducing the number of firearms as gun zealots are with protecting the right to bear arms to the nth degree. Guns are their religion. Not having guns isn’t ours. My views about gun policy are merely political opinions, informed by my values and the evidence. I draw no sense of meaning from it. It’s not part of my identity. I do not base my life around it. I’m certainly not willing to engage in violence over it. That passion-chasm confers an incredible advantage to Team Guns.

Only the loved ones of those slain by gun violence could rival this kind of intensity, but that population is not only easily drowned out numerically, they aren’t of one mind on the issue, either. Some parents of gunned-down children fervently wish to live in a relatively gun-free society. Others lament only that there wasn’t a “good guy with a gun” to blow the killer away.

I generally try to leave readers with something actionable, with some proposed improvement to the problem being criticized. But I will not peddle false hope where none is warranted.³ What I will do, however, is temper the gloom with some perspective. American gun violence, while shamefully high and seemingly intractable, is still far from the most likely thing to kill you. Gun violence doesn’t make the top 10 causes of death, and if gun suicides and homicides are counted as separate categories, they don’t even make the top 20. Gun violence is something we should all be concerned about, but not something we should be living in constant fear or crippling despair over. Even in the US, you’re more likely to be laid low by nephritis or the flu than by guns. If you want to safeguard and prolong your life and the lives of your loved ones, Meatless Mondays and seatbelts will do drastically more than raging into the online void or walking around with a flak jacket.

If you want my advice, move on from guns as an issue. By all means, vote for the political candidates whose proposals you most agree with. Tell pollsters what you think. But manage your expectations. Keep your emotional investment low. And unplug from the 24-hour news cycle. There’s no shortage of problems that can be realistically improved. Let’s triage for those, and face the reality that on the issue of guns, America is doomed.

See also: “Scientists Develop New Technology To End Gun Violence”

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1. The most of any Western country, and second highest globally, behind only Brazil. https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/six-countries-americas-account-half-all-firearm-deaths

2. The oft-cited figure one sees in the media is that the US has 393 million guns in circulation — close to half of all civilian guns in the world. This comes from a 2018 estimate gathered by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based independent research project globally tracking firearm data. This turns out to be a rather conservative estimate. A more recent letter penned by the Assistant Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revealed, much to the chagrin of gun rights groups, that the government has been maintaining a central record of firearm purchases. As of November 2021, ATF records indicate over 920 million firearm purchases in the US, a figure higher than what the Small Arms Survey estimated the entire global civilian gun supply to be (857 million)!

3. Before you email me about the bipartisan gun law that was recently passed in June 2022, take a look at what’s actually in the bill. A 90-year-old meth head has more teeth. The fact that this is the most substantive action on gun violence in nearly three decades only demonstrates the point further.