​There is something deeply human and meaningful about work when it is rewarding and rewarded, something good about using your talents and energy to produce something real. Even if you don’t make a physical product, getting paid for good work is a source of deep satisfaction. A paycheck that is earned just feels different than a gift or a handout. A day of hard work is not often fun or thrilling, but it resonates with something deep in us and creates a sense of accomplishment. It feels right and good for the soul, like the way eating healthy and exercising feels good for the body. 

Beyond the pleasures of success, the fact that not everyone and every venture succeeds – and that markets punish failure – is not itself a problem, either: building a successful business is rewarding in part because it can fail at any time. The possibility of failure (and of failure stinging, at least a bit) is part of what makes success sweet. If your business was going to persist and your life was going to be the same whether or not you worked hard to make it good, then its success and survival would mean significantly less. The gratification of providing a good product or service is greatly reduced if people have to buy what you’re selling, no matter its quality.

I grew up in a midwestern  community steeped in these values. For many local businesses, advertising was a waste of money. If you did good, honest work, then you would build a reputation and a loyal clientele. If you did shoddy or dishonest work, then it didn’t matter how much you spent on advertising; you weren’t going to make it. The contractor who built my parents’ home, for example, recently came back to do a repair, fifteen years after the house was finished. He asked my dad if there were any other issues with the house. My dad thought for a minute, then told him the garage floor had never sloped enough to drain completely, but it hadn’t seemed worth mentioning. In any case, the legal period for saying something had long passed. The builder responded, “well, there’s what’s legal and there’s what’s right,” and sent out a crew to tear up and repour the concrete the next day, all for free. Largely due to stories like this, his crew builds almost all the new homes in the area. Yes, his relationship with my parents was mediated by money, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also an expression of care and social responsibility. It was a moral as well as monetary interaction.

My point is this: the market isn’t just about greed and making money. Capitalism doesn’t just encourage vice. It is about people doing their work well, expressing who they are, providing what other people need, and earning a living because of it. The market, when it works well, helps to forge a connection between virtue and reward, between doing what’s right and living well. Work teaches valuable skills and it can contribute to weaving together the moral relationships that make up the fabric of society.  

Given all this, it can be hard to see any legitimate reasons for people to want to replace the free market with a more collectivist, socialist approach - especially when so many of these other kinds of economies failed so spectacularly. Is it just something like laziness, a desire to live off the work of other people, or a failure to recognize human goods deeper than a full belly? 

For an answer, we have to see that capitalism is a problem for many people, precisely because they value exactly the sort of economy I described at the start of this piece. 

What do I mean? Well, if you think of capitalism as just a marketplace of craftspeople and small businesses, like what I described at the start, then you need to know that Karl Marx himself wouldn’t have had any problem with it.[1] Marx was not anti-work, anti-productivity, or anti-virtue. Marx believed labor was an essential feature of human life. He believed humans are naturally laboring, social creatures who work and make things as members of social relations. The opportunity to benefit yourself and your community through work was what he wanted to protect and restore. 

To see why he opposed capitalism, you have to see his context. Marx wrote what he did because, by his day, most local economies of independent production and exchange had already been replaced by the faceless and dehumanizing wage labor of mechanized industry. Economies in which people found satisfaction in what they built and what they could contribute were quickly disappearing. The industrial revolution was making them obsolete. In much of industrializing Europe, the majority of people were becoming part of a laboring class that was little different from slavery. You were born, toiled, and died in the sooty shadows of factories and tenement houses. You began working sixty or more hours per week in dangerous conditions as a child and continued until you died, which was often from health hazards related to your work. You were paid only enough to stay alive to keep the machinery of production churning. You would spend your life in debt to the company store to the point that you couldn’t legally quit your job if you wanted. You wore out your body as a living part of the factory machinery and accumulated nothing to show for it. You were, in Marxist terms, alienated from the product of your labor and from your existence as a member of the human species. In plain English, you got all of the hardships and difficulties of work, but none of the benefits. 

The economy did not reward hard work; it rewarded ownership. Economic reward did not accrue to those who worked the machines, but to those who owned them. What matters in in these forms of capitalism is not primarily virtue or work; what matters is capital. The hardest working, most honest, efficient, and reliable laborer is rewarded far less than a lazy, dissolute, and dishonest person who happens to inherit stock in the company. If you wonder why Marx wanted to separate reward from hard work, the easiest answer is that he didn’t. Industrialized capitalism had already separated them. Marx in fact wanted to reconnect reward to work by making it so that the people doing the work were the ones who reaped the reward.[2]

Marxism does not appeal to people for whom the market is a realm of freedom and possibility because it was never meant to. Marxism appeals to people who have experienced capitalism as a crushing weight of alien and inaccessible economic power, an immense, impersonal machine in which their life is reduced to one industrial commodity among others. It appeals to a permanent laboring class in the West and to the victims of Western imperialism in places like Asia and Latin America. The Chinese introduction to capitalism, for example, didn’t look like the description at the top of this post; it looked like the Opium Wars. 

I imagine most everyone wants to live in a society in which good, hard work is rewarded and happens within relationships that encourage honesty, industry, and usefulness to the community. For many disagreements about economic systems, the differences are not in the goals.[3] We want people to live rewarding, healthy, virtuous, and productive lives. The main source of disagreement is over whether the market will meet those goals when left to its own devices. For some, the answer is yes. For many others it seems obvious that capitalism will tend to favor the owners of capital, that industrialized, corporate wage labor can be dehumanizing, and that there is no reason to think companies will voluntarily pay a living wage in cases where the supply of labor exceeds demand. 

In conclusion, let me say that it is clear that many Marxist revolutionaries got (and get) a lot of things wrong. Many state-run economies proved massively inefficient, for example. However, this doesn’t mean we should think that any criticism of unregulated, industrialized capitalism implies promoting a system in which we'll surely end up driving terrible cars to wait in line for beet rations under the watchful gaze of the secret police. We can find middle ground. The world is full of countries with hybrid economies. You can support markets and good public schools and healthcare. You can believe in private property and progressive tax structures. You can think business failures should sting, but not be lethal. 

Rather than folks on the left believing that those on the right are driven by greed and those on the right thinking that people on the left are after a free ride, it would be better (and I think more accurate) for both sides to see that they often share a goal: an economy in which work is internally rewarding and externally rewarded, one that respects and promotes human dignity. We have to be realistic about the inefficiencies and alienation that can come from government overreach, of course, but we also need to take seriously the reality that we don’t live in a Arcadian world of individual craftsmen plying their trade, but in a global industrialized economy in which the dignity and value of work and workers must be protected and preserved. 




[1] We might call it the “Paul Harvey describing a Norman Rockwell painting of Mike Rowe reading a book of essays by Wendell Berry” economy (or the “PHDANRPOMRRABOEBWBE”), pictured at the top of the article
[2] Note: Its collectivism does not come out of a dogmatic denial of human individual dignity; it comes out of the realization that industrialization required cooperation. Individual smiths could not compete with the efficiencies of hundreds of factory workers on an assembly line. If production had to be collective, then the only way the laborers could own what they made was if ownership of the machines and factories was also shared.
[3] I don’t want to deny that materialism, laziness, greed, or self-interest are factors in shaping the systems people want. I just mean to say that there is significant agreement that the best economy is one in which working hard and being useful allows you to live well.

​
For example, say one day I can’t find my wallet. I recall a pattern of robberies in my area, and I immediately interpret the event as a theft. My wife, however, recalls a pattern of my own absent-mindedness, and immediately interprets the event as me misplacing my wallet. We both jump to tentative conclusions, and then look at the facts to test our hypotheses. Which conclusion one jumps to depends upon how one frames the event, that is, which pattern one sees it as the latest instance of, and this initial framing can play a big role in determining what one ultimately believes.
​
There are many patterns people use to interpret Dr. Ford’s testimony, among them: (1) a victim, silent for years, courageously coming forward out of civic duty, (2) a troubled person seeking attention, money, or revenge by lobbing false accusations, (3) a politically correct feminist making a big deal out of teenagers being teenagers, and (4) part of a ploy by the Democrats to discredit Trump’s nominee in order to gain political influence.

There’s lots of valuable research and advocacy being done on why people believe or disbelieve (1), (2), and (3). Gender dynamics, rape culture, structures of silencing, effects of trauma, mass media, sexual ethics—all of these are crucially important to making sense of Dr. Ford’s story, Judge Kavanaugh’s reaction, and Americans’ responses. I’m grateful to the many people who know more than I do about these topics, from research and experience, who are bringing passion and clarity to the conversations surrounding these hearings. (see, among others, these three links)

The work that I do focuses specifically on why people believe (4). Why do so many people immediately conclude that a political party is knowingly trying to obstruct and deceive? Where does this pervasive mistrust of political opponents come from and what can be done about it? What narratives are people using to frame events, what truth is in these narratives, and what other frames might be more conducive to understanding? How does political conflict become so all-consuming that more and more gets interpreted through the lens of partisan competition, and what effect does this have on our relationships, our theologies and ethics, and our ability to discern the truth?

The question of Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence is not a Republican-versus-Democrat question, but millions of people painted it in red and blue before they learned how to say “Blasey.” Even if you don’t think Republican-versus-Democrat is a helpful way of thinking about things—maybe especially if you don’t—it’s worth paying attention to how these two “sides” and the mistrust between them get mobilized to influence how people think.

​
This is a beautiful correlation, but not the one we would want. As Christianity has decreased, our
society has actually become less violent. From 1992-2016 the proportion of Americans who identify as Protestant dropped by a third. Over the same years, violent crime dropped by nearly half.
 
The same pattern holds in other areas as well: racist attitudes have declined and divorces and abortions are both down over the same period. The country has gotten richer as well:

In a variety of measures, then, we are safer, healthier, wealthier, and generally better off than we were thirty years ago, when more of us were Christian.
 
Now, some things have certainly gotten worse. Economic inequality is at an all-time high. Wages have stagnated over this period. Opioid abuse is up. If you want to show things are getting worse, you can certainly pick a set of problems that fit that pattern (though, for whatever reason, people don't seem to blame the issues that are actually getting worse  on the decline of Christianity, at least that I’ve seen).
 
I want to be really clear about what I’m saying here and what I’m not. I’m not saying Christians are bad or that Christianity makes people violent, racist, or divorced (it would have been weird for me to have become a Christian ethicist if I think Christianity makes people less ethical). I think the correlation of Christian belief with these other trends is spurious, like margarine consumption with divorce in Maine.
 
The factors driving society are many and not just reducible to levels of church membership. Because of this, preventing crime and building strong civil society are difficult tasks that depend on our ability to create and maintain transparent and responsible government and strong institutions, in addition to whatever cultural factors are in play.
 
The problem with giving credit or blame to religion and morality as the decisive factors driving societal trends is not that the numbers don’t work in this case, but that it is too simplistic in every case. Even if things like crime, the economy, failed marriages, and so on were getting worse, it would still be a reductionist simplification to blame them on the decline of Christianity. Such simplistic explanations deflect our attention from the hard work of pursuing the broad range of pragmatic and effective solutions our problems require. It just happens to be particularly unwise to use such explanations in the present case, when so many things are actually getting better, not worse, even as the number of those who identify as Christian declines.
 
So, to my fellow Christians: please, please stop saying things are getting worse because we have abandoned Christianity. I’m afraid people will accept your premise that society improves or declines in step with its religion, check the numbers, and conclude Christianity is bad for us. Instead, let’s abandon the premise altogether and get down to the serious work of responsible citizenship that we share with people of all faiths and none. 




​

 * Anybody remember Carman?​

As long as this myth, this way of telling the story, is seen simply as historical record, compromise on guns will remain unlikely. Thus, the possibility of reaching common ground on guns depends on people seeing this myth as optional, as only one way of telling the story among others. The best way to make that happen is by offering an alternative story. Toward that end, let’s consider a different myth of the revolution:

In the 1700s, American colonists came to realize that our relationship with Britain was costing us more than it benefited. We declared and pursued independence through collective political action in the form of the thirteen colonial governments and the Continental Congress. While private guns did play a (minor) role in the fighting, the organized forces (militias and regulars) under Washington – funded by the colonies and the Congress – carried almost the full burden of the war effort. Far from being a fight carried out by patriots with guns, it was in fact a long war of attrition between armies in which desertion and dissent were common. In the end, we prevailed because of disciplined cooperation, both within and among the colonies and between the colonies and France. We won because we figured out how to work together to build consensus, raise taxes, print money, equip an army, conduct diplomacy, and so on.

I won’t be coy about my thoughts on these two myths. This is not a case for a “they both make good points” judgment. To say that we won the war because private citizens had guns is to push the truth to the breaking point. It is not just selective history; it is bad history.[1]

We should all be clear: the threat of violence by armed individuals can never be the basis of freedom. Political freedom has to be achieved and guaranteed politically, that is, collectively and institutionally. We only remain free when collective power checks power, when the influence of government, money, and the citizenry are balanced and regulated by transparent and accountable enforcement institutions.

Someone might find comfort in the thought that he can shoot back when the government comes for his land, but what happens when economic forces beyond our control (and even functional comprehension) come for it? Who can be shot when the country moves gradually toward plutocracy (the rule of money), even while it maintains the superficial appearance of democracy and liberty? If we hang on to the right to buy a gun in part because gun companies can buy senators and congressmen, what liberty is left for us to protect with it?

We live in a massive, rapidly urbanizing and diversifying modern democracy, one embedded in an overwhelmingly complex global economic system. Privatization, deregulation, and changes in campaign laws have given sprawling business conglomerates unprecedented political power. Consumer protections are being rolled back in ways that favor big businesses that politicians depend on for reelection. There are revolving doors between the financial, energy, prison, and other industries and the government agencies meant to regulate them. We have forfeited our civil liberties because of fear. Our sources of information about the world - a basic condition of free choice - are becoming propaganda wings of political parties.

It is clear from all this that we should be worried about encroaching tyranny. Threats to our freedom are constantly taking new, subtle, and dangerous forms. That said, it is a naïve fantasy to think the gun collections of American citizens can play any sort of meaningful role in protecting us from them.

While gun control is an important issue with serious consequences, I really think the more fundamental danger here is the naïve view of power, freedom, and influence at play in these debates. We can argue about the benefits and dangers of guns, but what should be beyond debate is the error involved in thinking that we live in a world so simple that modern forms of tyranny can be met with an AR-15. If we think gun ownership is a necessary and sufficient defense against tyranny, how can we possibly see any value in the vital, boring work of government ethics oversight, consumer protection agencies, or campaign finance legislation? The institutions, norms, and checks that hold government responsible to the people can disappear without a moment of confrontation in which guns could conceivably play a role.

The irrelevance of gun ownership to issues of freedom and tyranny means it is possible to keep our guns and succumb to tyranny or to give up our guns while fortifying our freedoms. Please note that I am not saying that keeping guns will lead to tyranny or that giving them up will help our freedom. I mean to say only that there is no reason to think – on the basis of the Revolution or anything else – that gun ownership is a significant factor one way or the other in government accountability and the freedom it makes possible.

The only thing that can hold off the threat of tyranny today is the only thing that ever has: informed, collective participation in transparent and accountable political institutions. That’s the real lesson we should learn from the American Revolution.

************************************************************************



[1] I often hear gun control advocates counter this use of the myth by saying something like “well, that worked back then when citizens and the military both had only muskets and rifles; now the military has drones and tanks.” This is a mistake, I think, because it grants the possibility that armed individuals could, in principle, regulate the government. I think it is better to say that the Revolution is a bad historical parallel and talk instead about the Whiskey Rebellion. It was the same time period, same weapons. There were no federal law enforcement agencies and no standing army at the time. The government wanted a policy to take effect; armed citizens saw the federal government claiming for itself a new power and stood up for themselves. It was the ideal situation gun advocates have in mind. It did not go well for the rebels. ​

​​The problem with this question, as with much problematic racial thinking, is that it looks at the different races as if they are neutral and natural categories instead of divisions invented for a purpose and which have significant histories. Our racial labels are not equivalent to each other precisely because they were created for that specific purpose (other countries with their own racist purposes, like South Africa, created  different categories).  ​Blackness was a legal and political category created to enslave and exclude. To celebrate blackness is thus to appropriate a label meant for harm and to make it into something good. It is to celebrate the way in which a people have taken their oppression and turned it into beautiful art, music, and literature. There is nothing about that effort that makes it racist or exclusionary.
 
Celebrating whiteness is different because its history is different.
 
There are dozens of books and articles about the origins and growth of the category ‘white’ in America.[1] I won’t bore you with the details here, but you should read at least a summary at some point. Here are some highlights: during the colonial era, it was deemed necessary to define ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘mulatto,’ and so on, in order to designate who had rights and privileges and who did not. Within the larger category ‘white’, it remained common until the mid twentieth century to talk about categories like ‘Irish,’ ‘Saxon,’ ‘Italian,’ or ‘Jewish’ as separate races. Some of these races were considered more or less ‘white’ than the others and the less ‘white’ ones faced real racial prejudice (especially and most obviously Jewish people). However, by the middle of the twentieth century, racial lines had been redrawn around only a few major groups (‘black,’ ‘white, ’ ‘Asian,’ etc.).

1. “_______ causes more deaths per year than guns, so why don’t people ban that?”

I see versions of this argument all the time, especially in images shared on social media. You’re more likely to die from tobacco, alcohol, a car crash, or medical malpractice than from gun violence, the argument typically runs, so why do gun control advocates fixate on guns? Hammers and knives are used in more homicides per year than rifles, or so we are told. So why not ban hammers?

Well, there’s a good answer to this question. Hammers and knives and cars all serve valuable purposes, and Americans largely agree that the benefits that come from these tools are enough to justify keeping them legal. There is a ratio between the utility an object has (UO) and the likelihood it will be used to kill innocent people (LKIP), and it is this ratio—not the absolute number of deaths caused—that we take into account when we discuss the legality of objects. We apply this ratio whenever we think about making laws limiting or regulating the possession of items.

For example, this is why chainsaws are legal, but not on planes. A chainsaw is useful for cutting trees and logs, so we have no problem with responsible people keeping chainsaws in their sheds (UO > LKIP). But there are no trees on a plane. So if someone has a chainsaw in their carry-on, the probability that they’ll use it to do something bad outweighs the usefulness it could have in that setting (LKIP > UO).

The closer the ratio is, the more likely voters and lawmakers are to regulate possession—consider alcohol, tobacco, cars, and prescription drugs. Most people agree that handguns and hunting rifles fit in this category; they can be used for killing innocent people, obviously, but they can also be used for self-defense or hunting. Honest, thoughtful people can disagree about how to weigh these two factors (UO : LKIP) and what forms of regulation are most reasonable, and gun laws are going to end up being the result of a compromise.

Given this reasoning—which, again, is not something I’m making up but what people have in mind when they say “common sense gun laws”—we need to confront the possibility that there are some objects whose LKIP is so disproportionate to their UO that they should be very heavily regulated to the point of being extremely difficult to obtain or legally possess. Heroin, for example, fits in this category. The damage it does, both to those who get addicted to it and to those affected by their actions, is vastly disproportionate to whatever utility it may have.

There are weapons that fit in this category as well. I have nothing against Elon Musk. But I believe, and federal law agrees, that he should not be allowed to own a nuclear warhead. The likelihood that people could be killed by it far outweighs the utility he’d likely gain from having one. A nuclear warhead is what we’ll label a WWLKIPVOCU, a Weapon Whose Likelihood of Killing Innocent People Vastly Outweighs Its Civilian Utility. In the eyes of most Americans, fully automatic weapons fit into this category, and that is why since 1934 it has been incredibly difficult for civilians to legally own one.

Arguments are now being made that the popular AR-15 should be considered a WWLKIPVOCU. Mass shootings perpetrated with AR-15s are evidence that its LKIP is rather high, and given the fact that AR-15s are not particularly useful for hunting or home defense, its UO is minimal. As Former Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently said on Fox News, “These weapons — AR-15 and similar weapons — are not for sporting purposes,” adding, “The purpose of the AR-15 series weapons is to kill and maim human beings. That’s it.” The same cannot be said of hunting rifles, of cars, of knives, or of hammers, even though these can also be used to murder people. That is why the “these things kill more than guns” argument fails to address the real factors being weighed in gun control debates.

2. Getting overly sloppy with, or overly pedantic about, the use of gun terminology

It’s common for advocates of gun control to use terms like “assault rifle,” “automatic weapon,” and “machine gun” indiscriminately, and without attention to the real differences between these categories. This frequently exposes them to ridicule and dismissal from those who are more familiar with guns and know the correct terminology.

In general, it’s a good idea to know what you’re talking about, especially when you’re advocating specific legislation. Laws need to be precise, and so should activists, not only to show their readers that they are credible but also in order that careless, reactive laws don’t get passed.

That having been said, I suspect that many gun control advocates resort to saying “assault weapon” or “military-style rifle” because they’re looking for a term that expresses what I’m calling a WWLKIPVOCU. We don’t have a word that means precisely that, so journalists grope around for the right words and end up writing articles riddled with mistakes.

It’s fair to criticize them for this, but wrong to completely dismiss them. Consider an analogy: a fifteen-foot-long snake is slithering through a library in rural Maine. A librarian is justifiably afraid and calls animal control, saying, “There’s an anaconda loose in the library!” “Actually,” a patron scoffs, “that’s a Burmese python.” The librarian, standing on her desk, replies, “I don’t give a $#!* what kind of snake it is, it doesn’t belong in this library.” In this instance, the problem is a real one even if the librarian doesn’t speak with herpetological precision. Whether the librarian gets all the details right is less important than whether animal control knows how to address the issue properly.

A good rule of thumb to apply in gun control discussions is: the more you’re advocating for specific legislation, the more exacting you need to be with your language. A person doesn’t need to know the difference between an assault weapon and an assault rifle to argue that something needs to change in America, and protest to that effect. But if you’re calling for a ban on bump stocks, you should be able to explain what a bump stock is.

3. “Where do you draw the line?”

People often resort to slippery slope reasoning when discussing gun legislation. Wherever one tries to draw the line between what should be legal and what shouldn’t be, that line can seem arbitrary. Why this gun and not these others? Why ten-round clips and not another number?

Sometimes it can be difficult to draw precise lines between moral and immoral behavior, but when it comes to writing laws, we need standard regulations in place. Take age of consent laws, for example. In Wisconsin, the age of consent is eighteen, and this means that anyone having sex with a seventeen-year-old is committing statutory rape. If a Madison boy who just turned eighteen has sex with his girlfriend who’s only a few days younger than he is, he’s breaking Wisconsin state law. It’s counter-intuitive, perhaps, but for the purposes of the law we have to draw lines somewhere. It’s part of elected officials’ job description to draw lines for legal purposes. Nobody believes that something magical happens to Wisconsonians the day they turn eighteen that suddenly makes them old enough to have sex. But there’s still a logic behind the law—the number eighteen wasn’t just picked out of a hat.[1]

Voting laws seem even more arbitrary. Are there fifteen-year-olds who are informed and responsible enough to vote wisely, and fifty-year-olds who aren’t? Of course. But we have to draw a line somewhere, and that somewhere is subject to continued re-evaluation. If someone argued that the voting age should be raised to twenty-one, their proposal is not necessarily the first step down a slippery slope toward nobody voting at all. Nor are arguments for stricter gun laws necessarily steps toward prohibiting guns entirely, or arguments for more lax gun laws necessarily steps toward a country-wide Mexican standoff.

Those responsible for writing gun laws have to draw lines between legal and illegal, those lines won’t make perfect sense, and good people will be inconvenienced. The best we can do is make laws that make the most sense, and to do so guided by precedent and expert analysis.

4. “Abortion kills more people than gun violence.”

This is a legitimate point, unless one uses it to wave off demands for more reasonable gun legislation. It’s entirely possible to view abortion as a more significant issue than gun violence while still believing that we should take efforts to reduce gun violence. It’s fine to say that the rights of the unborn ought to be a higher priority than gun control, but that doesn’t mean gun control shouldn’t be a priority nor that people are misguided if they focus their attention on gun violence. (I’ve already written about this here, so I’ll move on.)

5. “Criminals will find a way to kill people no matter what the laws are” / “The problem isn’t the guns, it’s human evil” / “Criminals will just get guns illegally”

The statement that people can kill without using guns is obviously true. Timothy McVeigh, for example, killed 168 people using a bomb he made from fertilizer, fuel additives, and stolen explosive equipment. In 2014, a group of eight attackers in China killed thirty-one people using only knives. No legislation will ever successfully prevent murder or even mass murder.

Visions of utopia need to be humbled by these reminders. But these reminders don’t constitute an argument against stricter gun control.

The point of gun control laws, as with almost all laws, is to make it more difficult for people to do the illegal activity. We have laws against drunk driving. Can people still drive drunk? Yes, but they are disincentivized from doing so, and there’s substantial evidence that strict, well-enforced DUI laws decrease the number of fatalities from drunk driving. Similarly, we have laws against the possession of meth. Can people still acquire meth? Yes, but it’s not easy. Let’s imagine I have a terrible day at work and decide to drown my sorrows in bourbon. I walk to the liquor store and buy bourbon, simple enough. Now imagine I decide instead to drown my sorrows in meth. So I grab my keys, put on my jacket, and head out to pick up some meth. What are the odds that I would be successful, against the odds I’d end up arrested or fearing for my life? The difference between the bourbon scenario and the meth scenario is a difference of law.

This analogy isn’t perfect, because meth is something ordinary people can make in their basements, whereas semi-automatic weapons for the most part need to be made in factories. Laws are more effective at restraining access to guns than restraining access to drugs because the laws can more effectively shut down domestic production of WWLKIPVOCUs.

No law can totally prevent people from killing other people. Strict gun laws won’t ever make it impossible for dedicated, well-connected people to get access to military-style weapons. But these laws might make it more difficult for teenagers to get access to these weapons.

This “more difficult” needs to be remembered by those who make utopian projections and by those who dismiss gun laws if they are anything but 100% effective.

6. “You care more about guns than kids”

This is a refrain I’ve heard a number of times in the last few months from gun control advocates, especially in the wake of the Parkland shooting. I understand the attitude expressed here, but this slogan doesn’t do justice to the viewpoints of those it criticizes.

Those who argue for more lax gun laws genuinely believe that children will be safer if surrounded by vigilant citizens who have the training, experience, and equipment to protect them when an attack occurs. They also believe that people will be less likely to commit violent crimes if they know that civilians around them are prepared to interfere. That is, a well-armed citizenry is an effective deterrent to violent crime and an effective safety net to have in place when violent crimes happen. (See, for example, the “More guns, less crime” hypothesis.)

We can and should argue about how realistic these beliefs are, and whether this vigilant, armed citizenry is the kind of country we want to live in. This is an interesting conversation, one that brings up issues of authority, trust, prejudice and fear, the meaning of community, and self-reliance. But it’s the kind of conversation that gets prevented when activists only attack straw men and don’t engage with the competing visions of a safer country that different Americans hold.

7. “Don’t blame the guns”

Like point #6 above, this is a straw man argument. No one blames guns for gun violence in any crass sense. Everyone knows that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The argument for stricter gun control is about limiting people’s access to the means of killing others, so that when people get the urge to kill, their capacity to kill is limited.

No one blames the semi-automatic SIG Sauer MCX for the Pulse Nightclub shooting. The question is, had Omar Mateen not been able to obtain that weapon legally, could he have killed forty-nine people and injured fifty-eight others as easily as he did?

(More thoughts on the issue of blame can be found here.)

8. Presuming people aren’t sincere in their beliefs, but are only doing the bidding of some larger organization with a sinister agenda

I’ve seen this sort of argument a lot. On one side, many point to NRA funding of politicians, declaring that legislators won’t do what they know is right because they’re too dependent on NRA endorsements and donations. On the other side, many see recent gun control activism as a result of government indoctrination of students, or as somehow orchestrated by the same powerful agitators who allegedly pay protesters.

We’re often tempted to see collusion and hidden agendas when the more obvious explanation is people agreeing with one another. It’s not the case that these legislators actually believe stricter gun laws will lead to safer schools, but don’t take action because they are being controlled by the NRA’s lobbyists. Rather, the NRA endorses them precisely because these politicians already agree with the NRA, either with the idea that more guns leads to greater safety or the idea that the freedom to own semi-automatic weapons is an inalienable right.[2] You’re free to argue that the NRA and these politicians are wrong about these ideas, maybe even dangerously deluded, but they genuinely believe them and are not simply motivated by profit or political power.

The same goes for the March for Our Lives. This was not a stunt staged by George Soros and orchestrated by socialist agitators to use a false pretense to bring down the pillars of American freedom. Those who were marching sincerely believe that reforming gun laws in America will make America a better country. There’s no hidden agenda; people just want safer schools. You’re free to argue that the laws they’re proposing are counter-productive and will lead to greater loss of life, or that they fail to recognize that further gun regulation will push us over a tipping point toward dictatorship. But they genuinely want people to be safe, and they don’t believe these laws trample on fundamental rights any more than the existing ban on fully automatic weapons or the prohibition of guns on flights does.

Here’s a general rule: rather than inferring insincerity and seeking to expose it, give people the courtesy of believing they’re wrong.

9. “Instead of changing the gun laws, what we ought to be focusing on _________”

​There are a lot of ways to fill in the blank. Mental health. Bullying. Racism. Culture. Capitalism. Toxic masculinity. Over-prescription. These are all valuable topics worth addressing. But, like #4 above, we create a false dichotomy when we treat these issues as mutually exclusive. If you say, “We need more reasonable gun laws” and I respond, “We need kids to be kind to each other,” I’m not arguing with you, I’m just changing the subject. That’s part of what’s so strange about the “Walk Up, Not Out” response that emphasized anti-bullying efforts—where does this “not” come from? When Rick Santorum says that we should focus instead on training kids in CPR, why is this an “instead”?

Imagine if I ran a restaurant, and I told my employees I don’t want anyone to get sick, so they all need to wash their hands regularly. Someone chimes in, “Instead of washing your hands to prevent disease, we should exercise and take vitamin C and zinc to keep our immune systems functioning.” My response would be “Okay, do that stuff, but WASH YOUR HANDS TOO.”

This is how gun control advocates feel when they are dismissed with these false dichotomies. It’s certainly the case that gun violence in America is a multifaceted problem and that no one solution—legislative or otherwise—will be sufficient to address it. But arguments like these rest on the false assumption that the need for non-gun-control ways of addressing gun violence counts as a case against gun control.

__________

We need to retire these nine arguments—not because gun laws in America are impossible for people of different political views to think through together, but because there are shared concerns, systemic issues, and troubling facts about guns in America that we desperately need to be talking about. These nine superficial, dismissive moves get in the way of sustained engagement with these deeper questions. Here are a few questions to start more constructive conversations about gun laws and gun culture in America:

1. Gun control laws give the police and military access to weapons civilians lack. This is something NRA leaders and leftists alike are wary of, and with good reason. What kind of accountability should be in place for these armed members of society? Are the checks on government-sanctioned violence what they ought to be?
2. Opponents of stricter gun control often refer to two possible scenarios: the government turning explicitly tyrannical[3], or a riot or all-out anarchy during which civilians require heavy-duty weaponry in order to defend the innocent from multiple attackers. These hypothetical situations would tilt the UO over the LKIP, to use the categories from #1. How likely are these scenarios, and how should we weigh these possibilities against the realities of mass shootings? How confident are we in the nonviolent checks that prevent this kind of tyranny (democratic accountability, for example) and what could be done to strengthen these?
3. The United States is largely unique in its relation to guns. Why is this the case? What country, if any, do you think gets gun laws and gun culture right? Alternately, what countries (past or present) are you worried that the U.S.A. is becoming? What can be done to prevent that?
4. Given the evidence we have, which specific gun laws should be changed, removed, or added? Rather than jumping to slippery slope arguments, changing the subject, or trying to discredit spokespeople for various organizations, let’s talk about which specific laws Americans should pass (like all laws, subject to subsequent revision) to maximize both freedom and security for the most vulnerable among us.

[1] It’s obviously in honor of Green Bay Packers #18, Randall Cobb.
[2] Even as I write this, I recognize the reality is more complicated. For a deeper investigation that complicates my point, see “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” by Ziva Kunda.
[3] In the film Captain America (2011), Stanley Tucci’s character says, “So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own.” This domestic invasion, and the possibility of it happening in America, is often alluded to in NRA literature. 

Following Obama’s lead, newspapers and popular magazines started telling us how reading novels would make us more empathetic.[1] Frans de Waal, a primatologist, published a widely-read book called The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society that was picked up by Oprah’s O Magazine.[2] Experts rushed in from all corners to confirm the importance of this twenty-first century virtue.

In 2018, the excitement about empathy already seems like ages ago. While empathy continues to be a watchword for dissecting what exactly happened in the presidential election of 2016, Americans nowadays are much more attuned to the “deficit” that Obama spoke of rather than to empathy itself. Donald Trump’s presidency embodies what his predecessor warned us all against. Especially since his inadequate response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, “empathy deficit” has resurfaced in political headlines.

The absence of empathy is not universally mourned, however. Many have argued against the idea that empathy is all that helpful in the first place – whether as a cultural virtue that helps us to connect with the stories and voices of others,[3] or as a basis for ethical decision-making.[4] The awkward problem with empathy is that it actually doesn’t necessarily make you a kinder person, nor do you need to be especially empathetic in order to be a moral person.

I think that it’s only fair for us to admit that the critics of empathy (the ones who have really thought about it… not the elected officials who simply seem to lack it) do have a point. People who think of empathy merely in terms of “kindness” offer a superficial understanding of the concept. Empathy is, most basically, about being able to live into another’s situation and track with the actions of another. We are most prepared and most inclined to do this, though, with people who are immediate and familiar to us. First our family, then our community and culture, and also the groups with which we have regularly associated – our community of faith, or school, or sports team. In real life, then, empathy plays out in kinship relationships and tribalism as much as it does in the sort of cosmopolitan ideal that Obama touts.

When a group of kids is choosing teams for dodgeball on the playground, each captain is going to go with their clique of friends first, and inevitably leave an outsider until the end. In this case the captains may fail to empathize with the unfortunate kid that no one wants on their team, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that this schoolyard pecking order was also a result of empathy as much as it was a failure of it. The team captains did empathize with their own clique. Some kid was picked first, because the captain knew them and knew they could work with them.

With greater consequence, we can look at how the crack epidemic was portrayed during the 1980s and '90s in contrast to how the current opioid crisis is being portrayed in the media. The abuse of crack cocaine was largely associated with inner cities and African American populations, triggered moral panic, and was met with heavier punishments than powder cocaine (which did not have the same demographic associations as crack). Current public discourse about opioid abuse, on the other hand, associates the problem with rural and white populations, and the proposed responses are not heavy prison sentences but rather public health initiatives to prevent overdoses. Public discourse tends to be laudably empathetic toward victims of the current opioid crisis, that is. Perhaps this is because more of these victims are white. More optimistically, perhaps we have learned from the mistakes of the war on drugs and gained some empathy as a result. Regardless of how we came to empathize, though, we can see that at the very least human empathy is rather limited and often too late. For every example of empathy with victims of tragedy, there is probably a lost generation or an ignored community that stands outside the boundaries of our sympathy.

But let’s return to the limelight of political celebrity. A television personality who suddenly becomes president may not be able to empathize with immigrants or the working class, but it’s not exactly correct to therefore say that he lacks empathy altogether. He very well may be able to establish a significant rapport with authoritarian personalities[5] or with those who share a tax bracket with him. This is empathy as well. But if the president is empathetic with the Who’s Who of global authoritarianism, it is quite difficult to simultaneously be empathetic with democratic protesters against oppressive regimes. We have actually seen President Trump try to achieve this sort of moral gymnastics, and fail. In his response to media questions following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last August, he said that there “were very fine people, on both sides.” This claim fell flat because empathy with one “side” – an ideologically ethno-nationalist mob – excluded the very possibility of empathy with those who stood outside of the white nationalist vision of that side. In a discussion last August about “Understanding ‘Both Sides’” that is worth re-reading, David Barr and Russell Johnson helpfully clarified that Trump “fundamentally misunderstood what was morally significant about the weekend.”[6]

It seems true, then, that empathy can lead to misunderstanding or to social isolation as often as it can lead us to higher or more universal ideals. Empathy is a foundation stone, and you can use that foundation to build a wall just as easily as you can build a bridge with it.

* * *

So what is the use of empathy? Should we abandon it? If it can serve to reinforce the very self-centeredness that we are trying to avoid, to what extent is it really a virtue?

Empathy is important because it offers us a possibility. It allows us to describe understanding between persons – within the relatively small sphere of fellow humans we encounter in our daily lives, as well as the much larger and potentially more significant group of people we only ever encounter secondhand: through news and social media, or works of art, or history books.

Empathy has often been described as the ability to re-present or re-imagine the thoughts of others. To get an idea of what this means, think of common strategies for active listening where Person A listens to Person B and then tries to helpfully paraphrase what Person B has just said: “What I hear you saying is …” The goal here is communicative – the conversation is intended to achieve mutual understanding. There is no ulterior strategy of trying to convince the conversation partner of anything. Philosophers have built grandiose theories of democracy out of this same therapeutic insight of active listening that shows up in elementary teacher in-services and marriage counseling sessions. Empathy is both a mundane practice that we achieve without even thinking about it, as well as the basis for more elaborate goals of creating better interpersonal relationships, or a more peaceful world.

* * *

This does not mean that empathy alone can make one a virtuous person or preserve the institutions of modern democracy. Empathy requires other aids to understanding. At the very least, it needs (and this is surely not an exhaustive list):

-Curiosity to press against the boundaries of our comfort and our current knowledge.
-Confidence, to recognize that our sense of self and identity doesn’t need to be jeopardized when we become disoriented (or even permanently changed) by stepping into someone else’s perspective.
-And even cold, hard rationality, so that we can recognize when we are falling into mere sentimentalism rather than genuine empathy.

Let me unpack this last one. Human rights are easy to affirm when we see photographs from liberated concentration camps or civil rights marchers being attacked by police dogs. On the other hand, images of a young male stranger cataloged in the news as “thug,” “suspicious,” “enemy,” or “radical,” begin to introduce nagging exceptions to our personal notion of human rights. Thinking about something like human rights in an impersonal, rational way could therefore be of service in cases where we can’t find our way to ideals through sympathetic feelings. It isn’t always so bad to think in universalizing, abstracted terms about what we owe our fellow person. In the rarefied environment of ethical theory or constitutional law, we can guard against our own worst instincts.

* * *

Everything you’ve read about empathy from the pundits and the former president is true.

It is true that reading novels, participating in cultural exchange programs, and volunteering at the local homeless shelter will do a lot to expand your horizons and give you new opportunities for understanding others. You might even become a kinder person as a result. You almost certainly will understand the world in a way you didn’t beforehand.

It’s also perfectly true that “reading literature won’t give you super powers,” as an Atlantic article recently cautioned.[7] Even Obama, the great proponent of empathy, recognizes this when he says to the graduating class of Howard University: “to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom.” The same goes for mundane empathetic understanding with no pretensions to bigger structural changes. Human connections need an ecosystem where they can thrive. They need legal space for free expression and free association. They need a cultural home (the much-maligned “safe space”!) where familiarity can create some traction for sharing experiences and goals. Empathy builds upon itself, which means that it depends upon prior human connections to build new connections.
​
The only untrue thing about empathy that you’ve read is in the clickbait headlines. Empathy has sometimes been marketed as a magic bullet, and it simply isn’t one. It’s a foundation stone upon which we can build both walls and bridges. But the potential to wall ourselves in or keep others out does not diminish the fact that empathy remains foundational for building bridges. Cynicism or worldly wisdom shouldn’t keep us from returning to it as the basis for a good argument, a good relationship, or a good society.
 
 


[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study
http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/
[2] http://www.oprah.com/book/the-age-of-empathy-by-frans-de-waal
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-psychologists-study-fiction/509405/
[4] http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy
[5]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-13/trump-to-meet-duterte-as-ties-warm-a-year-after-obama-dust-up
[6] http://www.forthesakeofarguments.com/blog/understanding-both-sides
[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-psychologists-study-fiction/509405/

David's essay "Evangelical Support for Trump as a Moral Project: Description and Critique" is the featured article in the January issue of the Religion and Culture forum. The article can be found here.

From the abstract: "The rise of Donald J. Trump to the presidency has caused a crisis of misunderstanding in American politics. From the perspective of his critics, his ethos, rhetoric, and politics are so self-evidently evil, they cannot imagine how anyone could support him from anything other than depravity or ignorance. This essay makes the case that there is a deeper meaning beyond this apparently obvious one, and realistic political analysis requires that we recognize it. Barr argues that many American evangelical Christians support President Trump as an expression of a positive moral vision for American government and society. Drawing on the work of political scientist Benjamin Lynerd, Barr shows the deep roots of the affinity for Trumpism found in the political theology of American evangelicalism. Those affinities explained, it concludes with a turn to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr and current research in the sociology of religion to show the errors and perils that result in and from it."

The Religion & Culture Forum is a digital publication of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It hosts conversations about the relationship between scholarly work on religion and global public cultures.

“When we consider the blood on the knife block, the victim’s handwriting on the grocery list, and the faint aroma of lemons on the divan, we must conclude that the killer was none other than the cook, Mrs. Shropshire.”

This is the sort of reasoning Sherlock Holmes does: taking stock all of the available evidence, and coming to the most reasonable conclusion about what happened or what will happen. It’s often called “inference to the best explanation.” Philosophers call this type of reasoning “abduction”–as opposed to deduction and induction, that is, not the kidnapping kind. We use abductive reasoning all the time: I come back to my apartment and my wife isn’t home. She hasn’t responded to my text, it’s a gorgeous day, and her running shoes are missing, so I conclude she must be out for a run.

​Or perhaps she’s been abducted (the kidnapping kind).

​It’s worth taking a second to think about abductive reasoning, because it’s often mistaken for bias. There’s admittedly a lot of similarity between these two. Both are ways of arriving at conclusions. But while abduction takes into consideration all of the relevant facts and constructs a reasonable account that holds all of them together, biased judgment skips this fact-gathering phase and jumps to conclusions based on a narrow set of facts and pseudo-facts.

            In the video, the narrator Dana Loesch talks about the liberal “narrative.” But the video reveals the NRA’s narrative as well. The seemingly disconnected scenes—each shown only for a second, tell a story. The story has three acts: First, seemingly normal footage of schools and city life. Then, scenes of Los Angeles’s film, news, and music establishments, signifying the liberal media, and scenes of typically liberal spaces like downtown Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. Third, and flowing seamlessly from the first two, we see scenes of riots, fires, and property destruction, culminating with a victim wearing a Trump t-shirt and immediately thereafter an American flag.
            The video makes use of what’s called the Kuleshov Effect, in which images shown in succession create impressions different than they would in isolation. The Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov discovered that, if people are shown images one right after the other, they will associate them in their minds and interpret the images in light of each other. Psychologists have tested this—if you show a person a short clip of a face making a neutral expression, then immediately follow that with an image of a puppy, viewers will report that the face looked happy. If you show them the same face but follow it with an image of suffering, viewers will report that the face looked sad.
            Directors and editors take advantage of this effect to cue audiences into characters’ motivations and emotions. They also use it to create associations between two things; for example, showing an American flag immediately after the image of a bloodied Trump voter effectively shows the audience that the man is a patriot. Connected together this way, images can tell a story. So the montage of images in the NRA video—starting with schools and media outlets, then liberal spaces, then quickly descending into destruction—creates in viewers a sense of connection, even causation. The string of images suggests to viewers that what seems harmless nonetheless carries within it the seeds of chaos. Hence, even though riots are few and far between in America, in this video they are treated as part of a much larger liberal agenda. At first, this agenda may seem innocuous—just a movie, just a textbook, just an article—but look where it leads. The message of the video is not “There are some people rioting in cities, so be prepared.” The message is “Society will crumble if the liberals have their way.”
            This story of how the left operates is also found in the verbs used in the video. Listen to the progression of verbs in order—teach, repeat, endorse, march, protest, scream, smash, shut down, bully, terrorize. The verbs are in this order for a reason. Were they scattered, it might seem like they could be separated—some liberals terrorize, some teach, some protest. But in this order, they build on one another. Presented in this way, the video suggests, in effect, “It starts with teaching and it ends with terrorism.”
            The story proceeds forwards, but the logic projects backwards. Consider a farmer who finds an unfamiliar seed and decides to plant and water it. Weeks later, the mystery plant sprouts a jalapeño pepper and the farmer discovers that it’s been a jalapeño plant the whole time. The true nature is revealed in the end result. This video treats liberalism the same way. According to the narrative presented in this video, the violence of anti-Trump riots is the natural outcome of the ideas taught in public schools and spread by the mainstream media. It’s all the same ideology, and its true nature is revealed in the end result. The video does not let us make distinctions between peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors and lawless mobs, or between John Oliver and the man who opened fire on a congressional baseball practice. They’re all part of the same plant, as it were, and it needs to be pulled out by the roots.
            This may seem like an overstatement, but there’s no denying that the video reinforces the idea that America is divided into two groups. There is an “us” and a “them,” and “they” are conspirators whose ultimate goal is to terrorize law-abiding Americans. Here’s a transcript with the “us” and “them” language highlighted.
​
“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse ‘the resistance.’
All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.
And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.
I’m the National Rifle Association of America. And I’m freedom’s safest place.”

            This tendency to split America into groups has been a central feature of NRA rhetoric for decades. Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, is typical in this regard. In his 1994 book Guns, Crime, and Freedom, LaPierre talks in terms of three groups of people: criminals, the government, and law-abiding citizens. Law-abiding citizens need to be armed, if for no other reason, because criminals and the government are armed. An armed, law-abiding populace acts, on the one hand, as a safeguard against lawlessness, and on the other hand, a safeguard against tyranny. Hence, though the government and law-abiding citizens work together to suppress crime, the partnership is an uneasy one.
            This threefold distinction helps account for the fact that the NRA video is not pro-police, or at least not unambigiously pro-police. Police officers are, after all, agents of the government. The police are shown as militarized and threatening, and Loesch makes it clear that police action is a last resort. The police are not part of the “us,” and they are not part of the solution, as Loesch implies when she turns from the police to “the only way we can stop this.”
            The “we” is law-abiding citizens, that much is clear. This category excludes not only criminals but also, it would seem, liberals. Movie stars, singers, teachers, CNN, the Women’s March, and Obama are all framed as being on the side of those who threaten law-abiding citizens. The differences between them are irrelevant, and whether they actually engage in violence is beside the point. They all contribute to the “violence of lies.”
            In conclusion, what is most interesting about this video is not what it argues for, but what it assumes. First, it assumes that the left is a monolith, a unified “them” with a single agenda. Second, it assumes a narrative of how liberalism culminates in chaotic violence. Seemingly innocent events become threatening when made part of this narrative: a TV episode about racism, a neighborhood rally for gun control, and a college lecture on totalitarianism get interpreted as hostile acts in the left’s multi-front war against law-abiding Americans.
            So is the video racist? Well, yes and no. The threatening “them” in the video is not racial minorities, but the political left. The scenes of destruction and violence shown in the video are predominantly perpetrated by white people. But characterizing those who denounce racism and xenophobia as part of a violent “them” seems to turn a deaf ear to their calls for justice. Nowhere in the video is there any sense that protestors may have a point or that they deserve to be heard. Furthermore, a few rioters’ acts—shown without context—are taken as representative of millions of people. The actions of a small subset are taken as revealing the essence of the whole group. That is the definition of a stereotype. At the very least, we can say that the logic of racism is at work in this video.[1]
            Does the video promote violence? Again, yes and no. There is no explicit promotion of violence, and “the clenched fist of truth” is clearly a metaphor. The video certainly doesn’t argue that one should grab a gun and start shooting liberals. But the rhetoric of “us” and “them,” with “them” being a monolithic, malicious threat to “us,” is a staple of wartime propaganda. We’ve all heard rhetoric like this before, and we know what it asks of us. If there’s an enemy and an imminent threat, viewers know how to finish the equation. If I told you a man is coming at you with a knife, I don’t have to tell you to defend yourself—the conclusion is implied. Finally, what a speech means depends to some degree on who’s speaking, and this video was made by the National Rifle Association. It would be a different video if it ended with “I’m Fox News, and I’m freedom’s safest place.” We can’t ignore what the organization stands for when we ask what the video promotes.
            This video is fascinating not because of what it asserts but because of what it assumes. It cannot be faulted simply for making assumptions—it’s just a one-minute ad, after all— but we need to get clear on what these assumptions are and what role they play in the message of the video before we can talk together about what’s true and false about the NRA’s “clenched fist.”


By Russell Johnson

[1]  I am speaking here only in terms of one sense of  "racism." For further discussion of what "racism" means, see David's blog post, "Why We Still Need Racism".