Sleeping 'Til Noon; How Reasonable Gun Control Eludes Us

It remains a tough sell to convince gun owners that mandatory gun sale background checks are not the end of American freedom as we know it. Despite the gun attack that very nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords while she was meeting with constituents in broad daylight on a city street and despite all the shootings since, culminating in the horrific elementary school attack in Connecticut that killed several six-year-olds, the US Senate still managed, in April 2013 and despite overwhelming public support for the legislation, to gut the centerpiece background check provisions of a fairly modest bipartisan proposal.

Support for that proposal should have been a no-brainer. Yet certain members of Congress persist in their opposition to background checks even though 85 - 90% of their constituents are in favor. Apparently, the Congressional contingent that actually represents majority citizen opinion doesn't have the votes to overcome this opposition. Let's give legislators the benefit of the doubt and assume they have enough integrity not to be bought out by a super-lobby like the National Rife Association (NRA). How, then, do we account for lawmaker opposition to any regulation of gun sales at all, in what would appear to be such profound disconnect with the desires and attitudes of a super-majority of their constituents?





The "slippery slope" is an oft-used NRA argument against even the most reasonable and limited controls on gun access: if you take that first step, the slide to the bottom will inevitably follow. Logicians recognize this argument as a logical fallacy: "A inevitably leads to B, so we shouldn't do A." The fallacy, of course, is that hills are everywhere, and the mere decision to navigate one doesn't have to mean an inevitable loss of head and footing. We can proceed with our eyes open and take our steps consciously.

Well, there's an old Irish saying that "if you've the reputation of an early riser, you could sleep 'til noon." In other words, outdated impressions and ways of thinking tend to stick in the human mind long after a new reality should have dislodged them.

New Hampshire's Example

Up until around the year 2000, New Hampshire was, by far, the most conservative state in the Northeast. It always voted Republican, and its residents were ambivalent about, even overtly hostile to, federal government - despite the fact that such a government is provided for in the Constitution and despite the very real (though largely unrecognized) benefits New Hampshirites enjoy from being part of a federal system.

In those days, the legislature's enmity toward the state university, which legislators considerd a hotbed of radicalism and subversion, was very nearly palpable. This is the no-tax, live-free-or-die state that would once rather have seen the state university and the state mental hospital lose their accreditation than allot the funding it took to keep them in good standing. (I should know; I grew up in New Hampshire and attended the state university, and I vividly remember sweating out the university's accreditation every one of the fours years I attended.) Historically, the state has also been hostile to social welfare programs, of which New Hampshirites had long been suspicious as nothing less than an invitation to freeloading.

In the last decade or so, though, the political demographics of the state have shifted markedly as people from more liberal regions outside the state have moved in. So why haven't NH legislators, state and federal, caught up to this shift? Why don't they seem to know, to get back to our original question, that a majority percentage of their constituents are, contrary to trends 20 years ago, now solidly in favor of background checks for gun sales? And how do legislators such as New Hampshire's junior Senator Kelly Ayotte, the poster girl for unrestricted gun access, get elected in the first place, despite their being demonstrably out of step with "the will of the people?"

The Persistence of Stereotype and the Power of Loud Voices

To get to an answer to these questions, we need first to understand the dynamics of stereotype - why, despite the fact that someone has been sleeping in for years, he/she retains the reputation of the early riser. Counter-intuitively, irrational prejudices are often impervious to education and evidence. Sociologists would tell us that people deeply wedded to their own long-held perceptions simply view any contrary facts in light of pre-existing beliefs. In this process, the contradictory data becomes just that much more grouting for a wall of brick-solid bias.


An apt image for how sterotype functions: the brick wall, in which every piece of new data, no matter how apparently contradictory, just becomes more grouting to strengthen the existing wall.

Kelly Ayotte grew up in the state during an era of rock-hard conservatism, and the persistence of prior belief and her own inner stereotype of the state could account for her failure to catch up with current realities. As to why and how she could achieve a majority of votes in an election from the state as it exists today, we have to consider the effect of a very highly motivated and vocally persistent regressive element in the state's politics, especially in the most rural areas where people have the least exposure to opposing points of view. These rural areas are numerous enough and motivated enough that their votes can even offset the effects of more liberal demographic shifts in the state's few urban centers. Two of my sisters still live in Northern New Hampshire, and I often have occasion to listen to visiting neighbors share their sentiments about the federal government and all its "goings on." It is impossible to overstate the degree of their disaffection. Their voices are loud - and they vote.

The "core faithful" of both major political parties (the "true believers," the hard-core voters who will brook no compromise on any issue) have become adept at amplifying their own views. In this way, the loudest voices are made to appear as the most representative; because more reasonable voices tend also to be quieter even when actually more numerous, they're harder for lawmakers to hear over the din of a screaming minority. As it happens, people with the biggest mouths and loudest voices are also too often the only real voters, meaning those motivated to get themselves to the polls in both interim and Presidential elections. Counting on the majority of people to sit out elections is another way the voice of unreason amplifies itself, further reinforcing lawmakers' own stereotypes of the electorate.

Crying Foul without Reason

At this point, one must consider the counter-argument that gays and black people are minorities who, according to the regressive "core faithful" have managed to "impose their values on the rest of us," a process usually referred to by said core faithful as "shoving their agenda down out throats." This warped perspective on civil rights is what accounts for the us-or-them militancy of regressive elements in the electorate; nothing disaffects the disaffected more than thinking that someone is getting benefits they're not. "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," they would say with a sniff and a huff. Forgotten in this argument is the Declaration of Independence, which affirms that certain rights (among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"), are inalienable; that means, they just so are in an ultimate moral sense that we dare not even risk them to a vote. If we subjected civil rights for any group to a vote, many states would, to this very day, be governed by of Jim Crow, wherein people of color (among others) would, for all intents and purposes, not have a vote, let alone a voice.

Martin Luther King didn't inspire the Civil Rights movement by screaming louder than the racists. He did it through the moral force of his position and his non-violent and persistent refusal to be turned aside. So when this commentary refers to the "loudly vocal minority," it means to refer to those who oppose human progress, not those who promote it.

Would it be okay with you if your basic liberties and Constitutional rights (to vote, to marry, to have children, to travel freely, and so on) were subjected to a voter referendum - even if you thought you'd win?...Something to think about!

Where to from Here?

Lawmakers like Kelly Ayotte seem especially prone to confuse listening to loud noises with representing the interests of their constituency as a whole. Other members of the New Hampshire Congressional delegation are more inclined to compromise than she is (and here, I'm using the term compromise to mean the positive and indispensable grist for the legislative mill, the absence of which accounts for much of our current Congressional gridlock), but Ayotte is arguably the most visible and vocal of that delegation. While she's taken a lot of heat from reasonable constituents about her regressive positions on background checks for gun sales and other issues, one might cynically observe that she also understands the cachet among the "core faithful" (deeply conbservative voters, in other words) of presenting herself as a willing martyr to their pet causes. To counter such a strategy, the reasonable majority of constituents will need to overcome the forces of inertia, indifference, and demoralization that normally attend congressional elections and, at last, make themselves heard by the sheer volume of their vote.