Why is "gun guilt" transferable?

[benEzra]

6. Actually, the fundamentalists did hold social drinkers as responsible for drunk driving

and the ~50,000-100,000 alcohol related deaths annually. Just read the writings and speech transcripts of Carrie Nation, or Billy Sunday, or whoever.

The fundies were wrong, but that's the mentality people have when they get on a self-righteous moral crusade against what they deem sinful.

There is a huge amount of overlap between the rhetoric of the alcohol prohibition movement and the gun prohibition movement, in terms of rhetoric, hatred for responsible partakers of the "sin" in question, legislative goals, and apathy toward negative second-order effects of their proposed legislation. The alcohol prohibitionists viewed social drinkers who were blinded or killed by methanol-spiked alcohol as acceptable collateral damage, and sometimes praised as a lesson to "those people"; the extreme violence created by the "War on Alcohol" was viewed similarly. Much of that rhetoric and tactics carried over to the War on Drugs, the War on Contraception (remember the Comstock Laws?), and the War on Guns.

The only difference is that gun owners are a lot more organized and politically active than social drinkers were, which is why we have been quite a bit more successful even though alcohol prohibition and gun prohibition draw about the same level of popular support. It also helps that gun ownership and carrying is a specifically enumerated constitutional right, whereas alcohol consumption wasn't specifically listed because no one seriously thought it would ever be questioned.