FORBES 6 Hours Ago
Dangerous Rhetoric Damages Obama's Gun Control Proposal Package
by James Poulos
Under the gun.
Playing to type, President Obama is urging Congress to act and unloading a suite of executive actions — this time, in pursuit of a regulatory response to the Sandy Hook shootings that saddened the nation and plunged many into fear.
Whatever you make of the proposals — which range from lowly measures like reviewing gun safety to sweeping, sensational moves such as banning so-called “assault weapons” — one thing Obama’s laundry list is not is an “anti-gun sneak attack,” in the words of Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX). Even the left’s most reviled Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, avowed in his controversial Heller decision that the Second Amendment leaves plenty of room for gun control. Rather than accepting Obama’s measures as what they are — a basket of policy preferences — Republicans are in danger of letting their fears run away with them completely.
Of course, conservatives are correct to point out that too many liberals and progressives remain in the grip of their own wildly exaggerated fears. But that fear isn’t best understood as gun-specific. It’s part of the same general political terror that dictates so many of our partisan struggles — the fear that everything is a slippery slope, because the guiding principle of party politics is to keep the initiative, maintain momentum, interpret every loss as a prelude to catastrophe, and treat the other side as wholly captive to whichever fringe will stop at nothing to achieve total victory.
In such a climate, “compromise” is always compromising — and anything short of an outright defeat for the enemy is the beginning of the end.
Sadly, what motivates that view is a deep, bipartisan paranoia about our most basic ideas of identity and security. On the one hand, we fear that any risk to any of us amounts to an existential threat to us all. (This is the most powerful legacy of 9/11.) On the other, we fantasize that anything which helps even one of us represents a moral triumph for all of us. This is a strange but predictable consequence of our broadly statistical view of the world. The notion that the purpose of policy is to reduce risk carries bizarre moral connotations — as critics of the current crop of gun control rhetoric have pointed out.
“As President Obama has made clear,” Sen. Patrick Leahy says, “no single step can end this kind of violence. But the fact that we cannot do everything that could help should not paralyze us from doing anything that can help.”
Anything?
Obama himself says: “if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Really?
Piers Morgan: “if these measures stop one mass shooting, or save one child’s life, it’s worth it.”
Two problems: first, none of these people actually believe this. There are a host of ridiculously draconian measures that would vastly increase our security. They’re not being proposed. They wouldn’t pass. They’d be fiercely opposed by big majorities of voters. But even worse, those who deploy this kind of willfully illogical rhetoric don’t feel any moral responsibility at all for the risks and dangers posed by its excesses. Rather than a serious risk to some particular freedom — like the right to bear arms and use them — rhetoric that champions any measure that helps just one person, or reduces risk by any degree, poses a dramatic, immediate risk to the very concept of freedom. It recasts liberty as an obstacle to achieving security and securing our identity. Liberty transforms into whatever is not controlled, whatever is not known, whatever ‘runs loose’ among us. It’s the inevitable consequence of the rule of fear over our emotions and our politics.
The upshot for too many supporters of swift, impressive gun control measures is a retreat into snark and sarcasm when confronted with criticism of the dizzying disparity of power between government and citizens. Consider Matt Yglesias’s response to claims that the president is an elitist and a hypocrite for proposing new gun controls while sitting at the center of a military-industrial web of total security and control: “Elitist hypocrite Obama gets a private Boeing 747 and I don’t. So unfair. Also access to nuclear launch codes.” Point: missed. This is how democratic deliberation is destroyed.
The proper way to initiate new gun control measures is with measured language. Not by announcing that any means and any end is sanctified so long as one person who might have been killed winds up alive instead. Not by implying that anyone who opposes any particular measure wants to increase the likelihood that any or each of us will be killed. This goes far beyond gun violence. The panic surrounding guns in America makes no sense except as yet another instance of the broader panic surrounding our fears of premature death, of tragedy, and of the senselessness of suffering. Capping magazine capacities, toughening mental health screening, and similar measures need not be loaded with that kind of weight. With guns as so many other issues, we Americans are complicit in placing a burden of earthly salvation on politics that it just can’t bear.
Yet we wonder why ‘politics is broken.’
Dangerous Rhetoric Damages Obama's Gun Control Proposal Package
by James Poulos
Under the gun.
Playing to type, President Obama is urging Congress to act and unloading a suite of executive actions — this time, in pursuit of a regulatory response to the Sandy Hook shootings that saddened the nation and plunged many into fear.
Whatever you make of the proposals — which range from lowly measures like reviewing gun safety to sweeping, sensational moves such as banning so-called “assault weapons” — one thing Obama’s laundry list is not is an “anti-gun sneak attack,” in the words of Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX). Even the left’s most reviled Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, avowed in his controversial Heller decision that the Second Amendment leaves plenty of room for gun control. Rather than accepting Obama’s measures as what they are — a basket of policy preferences — Republicans are in danger of letting their fears run away with them completely.
Of course, conservatives are correct to point out that too many liberals and progressives remain in the grip of their own wildly exaggerated fears. But that fear isn’t best understood as gun-specific. It’s part of the same general political terror that dictates so many of our partisan struggles — the fear that everything is a slippery slope, because the guiding principle of party politics is to keep the initiative, maintain momentum, interpret every loss as a prelude to catastrophe, and treat the other side as wholly captive to whichever fringe will stop at nothing to achieve total victory.
In such a climate, “compromise” is always compromising — and anything short of an outright defeat for the enemy is the beginning of the end.
Sadly, what motivates that view is a deep, bipartisan paranoia about our most basic ideas of identity and security. On the one hand, we fear that any risk to any of us amounts to an existential threat to us all. (This is the most powerful legacy of 9/11.) On the other, we fantasize that anything which helps even one of us represents a moral triumph for all of us. This is a strange but predictable consequence of our broadly statistical view of the world. The notion that the purpose of policy is to reduce risk carries bizarre moral connotations — as critics of the current crop of gun control rhetoric have pointed out.
“As President Obama has made clear,” Sen. Patrick Leahy says, “no single step can end this kind of violence. But the fact that we cannot do everything that could help should not paralyze us from doing anything that can help.”
Anything?
Obama himself says: “if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Really?
Piers Morgan: “if these measures stop one mass shooting, or save one child’s life, it’s worth it.”
Two problems: first, none of these people actually believe this. There are a host of ridiculously draconian measures that would vastly increase our security. They’re not being proposed. They wouldn’t pass. They’d be fiercely opposed by big majorities of voters. But even worse, those who deploy this kind of willfully illogical rhetoric don’t feel any moral responsibility at all for the risks and dangers posed by its excesses. Rather than a serious risk to some particular freedom — like the right to bear arms and use them — rhetoric that champions any measure that helps just one person, or reduces risk by any degree, poses a dramatic, immediate risk to the very concept of freedom. It recasts liberty as an obstacle to achieving security and securing our identity. Liberty transforms into whatever is not controlled, whatever is not known, whatever ‘runs loose’ among us. It’s the inevitable consequence of the rule of fear over our emotions and our politics.
The upshot for too many supporters of swift, impressive gun control measures is a retreat into snark and sarcasm when confronted with criticism of the dizzying disparity of power between government and citizens. Consider Matt Yglesias’s response to claims that the president is an elitist and a hypocrite for proposing new gun controls while sitting at the center of a military-industrial web of total security and control: “Elitist hypocrite Obama gets a private Boeing 747 and I don’t. So unfair. Also access to nuclear launch codes.” Point: missed. This is how democratic deliberation is destroyed.
The proper way to initiate new gun control measures is with measured language. Not by announcing that any means and any end is sanctified so long as one person who might have been killed winds up alive instead. Not by implying that anyone who opposes any particular measure wants to increase the likelihood that any or each of us will be killed. This goes far beyond gun violence. The panic surrounding guns in America makes no sense except as yet another instance of the broader panic surrounding our fears of premature death, of tragedy, and of the senselessness of suffering. Capping magazine capacities, toughening mental health screening, and similar measures need not be loaded with that kind of weight. With guns as so many other issues, we Americans are complicit in placing a burden of earthly salvation on politics that it just can’t bear.
Yet we wonder why ‘politics is broken.’
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