gun industry – Engaging Peace

People at the Pearly Gates, noting NRA doesn’t allow for gun violence research. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Jmaaks.

First of all, perhaps we should stop harping on “gun control.” The hard-core right-wing NRA devotees will never stop fighting all kinds of control. That’s a dirty word to millions. It’s in their bible: “Don’t you dare try to control me you weak-kneed, government-pandering, lily-livered mother-lovers.”

It just doesn’t matter to them how many children are accidentally shot by their parents or each other or wives by their husbands, or even …. men and women by their dogs.

Accidents happen, they pontificate.

What is important to these don’t-try-to-control-me-my-gun-is-my-life devotees is their freedom—their freedom to bully, to threaten, and to “defend” themselves against all the threats, known and unknown, that seem to lurk everywhere. You know, the freedom they are sacrificing every time they let some smooth-talking, race-baiting, fear-promoting tyrant tell them whom to fear and whom to hate, and what to do to feel better.

If we want to get real freedom from fear and danger, maybe we can start with an alternative term for “gun control.”

“Gun reform” probably appeals to a lot of progressives, but “reform” is sure to sound leftish to the hard-lined be-ready-to-kill-anybody-if-they-look-at-you-wrong advocates. Not to mention its association with schools for delinquents.

Maybe we should talk about “gun sanity.” Maybe a gun sanity movement can remind people that nobody is perfect, that even gun-lovers who advocate gun-safety can end up accidentally shooting themselves.

Better yet, how about “gun sense”? or “gunsense”? Sounds like a no-nonsense expression, linked to commonsense, which should appeal to everyone.

And, actually, there is a grassroots gun sense movement emerging within several states, including Texas , Georgia , and Vermont , a movement that may succeed in promoting sanity at local levels while the U.S. government waffles under the control of the NRA.

Plus there are a whole lot of moms around the country demanding action against gun violence and who can argue against the power of moms?

For those who believe the nay-sayers claiming that you can’t legislate morality or even do anything to reduce violence, check out this study And this one

and think about what you can do to promote sanity, commonsense, and gunsense.

In his new book, Moral Disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves, psychologist Albert Bandura does a masterful job of showing how, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) promotes moral disengagement to promote arms sales at all costs.

For example, leaders of the NRA have offered moral justifications (or at least pseudo-moral justifications) for unlimited arms sales, asserting, for example, that if the German people had been armed during the Holocaust, “we wouldn’t have had the tragedy we had there.”

NRA spokespeople also make generous use of euphemistic labeling to sanitize the activities of the gun industry—essentially equating guns with free speech, and portraying gun laws as a form of governmental gag order.

The NRA leadership also make ample use of the moral disengagement process of advantageous comparison, suggesting that if it was not immoral for people at Honeywell to make nuclear weapons components, then there certainly can’t be anything wrong with making and selling guns. Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA, invoked the Nazi persecution of Jews as a rationale for buying arms.

Another moral disengagement mechanism that Bandura identifies in the NRA arsenal is diffusion and displacement of responsibility. How could it be the fault of the gun industry, NRA proponents ask, if guns fall into the wrong hands and good people don’t have the guns they need to protect themselves from the bad guys?

In our next post, we will consider additional mechanisms of moral disengagement used by the arms industry to get people to arm to kill, and ways to combat their tactics.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Had enough massacres yet?

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 1.