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"If you don’t understand that, you can’t contribute to winning the gun control debate." [View all]
Must-read.
Thinking Like a Conservative (Part One): Mass Shootings and Gun Control
(snip)
Due respect to Kornacki and his outstanding production team, but when (the "No-Father's Day" card campaign) was presented as a frightfully clever campaign to change the hearts of conservative legislators, I fingered my rhetorical beat-down stick. I explained my frustration thus (edited for continuity):
“It’s really important to understand that Republican voters and Republican politicians are not necessarily persuadable on this issue by these kinds of arguments…. The mindset is completely different. I mean, a liberal looks at a card like this and says, ‘Isn’t it awful, these school shootings that keep on happenings? Let’s bring those to the forefront, because that helps us, and makes more people want gun control.’ But if you think like a conservative, and you think in terms of good people and evil people, the predominance of evil people makes you want less gun control, and more guns. And if the bad guys have a machine gun, you need a bazooka.”
The host got it: he replied, “The bad guy with the gun needs the good guy with the gun. And so every act of violence actually makes (more guns) more necessary.”
Yes: more mass shootings make right-wingers more attached to arming themselves yet further, yet more impassioned about defeating gun control, yet more paranoid about those who would “disarm” them and render them more vulnerable to the scary scary scary everywhere around them. If you don’t understand that, you can’t contribute to winning the gun control debate. And you may, like the sweet, blessed folks at NoFathersDay.org, channel precious financial and activist bandwidth to a strategy that will actually only make a conservative politician more determined to help his or her hard-working, honest, God-fearing constituents by preserving their unimpeded right to have bigger guns than the bad guys, lest their children face a fatherless future....
Read More: http://www.thenation.com/blog/176343/thinking-conservative-part-one-mass-shootings-and-gun-control#
(snip)
Due respect to Kornacki and his outstanding production team, but when (the "No-Father's Day" card campaign) was presented as a frightfully clever campaign to change the hearts of conservative legislators, I fingered my rhetorical beat-down stick. I explained my frustration thus (edited for continuity):
“It’s really important to understand that Republican voters and Republican politicians are not necessarily persuadable on this issue by these kinds of arguments…. The mindset is completely different. I mean, a liberal looks at a card like this and says, ‘Isn’t it awful, these school shootings that keep on happenings? Let’s bring those to the forefront, because that helps us, and makes more people want gun control.’ But if you think like a conservative, and you think in terms of good people and evil people, the predominance of evil people makes you want less gun control, and more guns. And if the bad guys have a machine gun, you need a bazooka.”
The host got it: he replied, “The bad guy with the gun needs the good guy with the gun. And so every act of violence actually makes (more guns) more necessary.”
Yes: more mass shootings make right-wingers more attached to arming themselves yet further, yet more impassioned about defeating gun control, yet more paranoid about those who would “disarm” them and render them more vulnerable to the scary scary scary everywhere around them. If you don’t understand that, you can’t contribute to winning the gun control debate. And you may, like the sweet, blessed folks at NoFathersDay.org, channel precious financial and activist bandwidth to a strategy that will actually only make a conservative politician more determined to help his or her hard-working, honest, God-fearing constituents by preserving their unimpeded right to have bigger guns than the bad guys, lest their children face a fatherless future....
Read More: http://www.thenation.com/blog/176343/thinking-conservative-part-one-mass-shootings-and-gun-control#
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