To perpetuate the fears embedded in the narrative, leaders of the political party—along with designated surrogates from different parts of society, including civil society, media, and academia—are used to emphasize the threats facing the chosen populace. In , for example, the European University at St. Petersburg, a private liberal arts college, had its teaching license revoked and was temporarily shuttered by Putin under the guise of failing to meet bizarre bureaucratic requirements.
Criticism is viewed as a form of treachery and a threat to the survival of the core identity the leader is claiming to protect. The situation in the Philippines again provides an example. Collectively, these tactics are regularly implemented in illiberal nations whose leadership is focused on stifling debate, with the extreme methods resulting in crackdowns on political rights and civil liberties in order to suppress a nation into submission.
This technique of controlling information around key policies has been successfully used by authoritarians and populists throughout the world. While the NRA is certainly not seeking complete control over a political system, a comparison to the messaging tactics of autocrats is still instructive, as the group is seeking to retain and maintain political power in order to challenge a growing movement to strengthen gun laws.
Therefore, the gun rights organization has needed to build a narrative capable of countering the realities of gun violence and the overwhelming evidence that weak gun laws are causing a public health crisis in the United States. Constitution—chief among them the right to bear arms. One existential crisis is represented by the security threats constantly facing the American patriot. This ostensible need to possess a firearm for self-preservation is connected to another existential crisis the NRA has constructed: The NRA has consistently undercut advocates for gun violence prevention and common-sense legislation in order to maintain power over the narrative.
To achieve this goal, the NRA has turned its political opposition into an anti-American enemy poised to seize guns and suppress freedoms through its anti-gun agenda. They are not. They ought to call themselves what they really are: the vanguard of the disarm America movement. No 2nd Amendment, no individual freedom, no civilian ownership of firearms period. The threats from many on the Left are turning to violence and intimidation.
While we try to fight fair with truth on our side, the Left uses a win-at-all-costs mentality. It means they no longer play fair. That is the greatest threat to our nation. The group uses both the Second Amendment and the constitutional right to bear arms as justifications for its lobbying and advocacy efforts around gun legislation.
The NRA has had astounding success at using its messaging to support advocacy for legislation that expands gun rights while endangering public safety. By using hyperbolic language and extreme examples that are often disconnected from the realities of gun violence, it maintains that guns are needed for self-defense and that legislation only burdens law-abiding citizens.
Last time I checked, both are enemies of the U. Yet even with these tangents into other polarizing political issues, the core message of the NRA continues to be about protecting the freedoms and rights of the law-abiding American—a message that makes it easy for discussions to be spun back into the gun rights debate.
The issue of security along the U. President Trump campaigned on the proposal of installing a wall along the U. The issue of immigration at the border presents an existential crisis for the so-called American patriot—a crisis narrative that is perpetuated by the president and his own staff, who have spread blatant falsehoods about the border and the scale of the problem of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
NRATV programming also often hosts so-called angel families, whose loved ones were killed by undocumented immigrants, to link the threat presented by the NRA to law-abiding American patriots.
This is an invasion. This is a national emergency. The goal of this interview was not to describe the actual problem but rather to depict an imminent threat to the American people. Yet these efforts neglected the fact that this incident was a tragic outlier and that cities with increased migrant populations do not see changes in crime rates.
The narrative spun by NRATV is devoid of facts, focusing instead on sustaining the myth of gun ownership being necessary for self-defense in an increasingly dangerous United States.
Unlike the demographics of asylum seekers entering Europe, the majority of migrants seeking asylum in the United States are women and children fleeing violence.
The NRA also projects images of vulnerable women and children under attack in order to propel its message of fear to the American populace. The image of the American patriot is largely linked to the concept of hypermasculinity.
The subtext of this narrative is related to imbalanced gender dynamics that frame men as protectors of their vulnerable families, thereby implying that to be a masculine man, one must also be a gun owner; otherwise, one is forsaking his duty as a man to his family. Check back tomorrow, when we look at what lessons the U.
There are many factors motivating new gun purchases among people of color: some buyers who spoke with ABC News cited concerns about safety in the U.
In , the U. There were 2, reported incidents targeting Black or African American people in the U. Hate crimes targeting the Asian community in the U. And hate crimes against Latinos dropped just slightly, but still surpassed incidences in both years. Police killings and xenophobic rhetoric have also intensified the racial and social divide in the United States -- spurring those in fear to make new firearm purchases, according to gun owners who spoke with ABC News.
Nikki Duncan, a Black woman who is a member of NAAGOA and the Strong Arms Gun Club, says these groups have helped her and others get acquainted with their guns and learn safety practices among those who understand the needs and nuances of different racial or ethnic groups.
Gun rights might be subject to the same kind of at-the-margins tailoring. Thanks in part to an NRA-supported push beginning in the s, more than 42 states have enacted broad firearm preemption laws. These laws are a far more significant impediment to local regulation, and to gun regulation more generally, than the Second Amendment.
Their effect has been to force cities to have the same generally permissive rules as rural areas do. Broad preemption laws prevent carefully tailored gun policy, they limit community self-governance, they break from longstanding American tradition, and they make compromise even harder in a debate in which common ground already seems hard to find. They should be repealed or revised to permit the kinds of local solutions suggested by policy, politics, tradition, and the Constitution.
Thinking about firearms localism requires a shift in mindset. As with many other regulatory issues, some people instinctively look to the federal government for answers. Democrats, who are far more likely to support both gun regulation and federal action, may be particularly susceptible to this reflex. And, to be fair, there are some kinds of gun regulation, including background checks and manufacturing requirements, that depend on a degree of national uniformity.
But, practically speaking, many bread-and-butter regulations can be passed and enforced at the local level. Permit requirements for public carrying, bans on particular kinds of weaponry and equipment high-capacity magazines or assault weapons, say , age restrictions, and so on can be jurisdiction-specific and enforced locally without the need for nationwide coordination. Of course, regulatory choices in other jurisdictions might blunt the effectiveness of these local rules.
Moreover, some policies are not as susceptible to externalities. A ban on open carrying in New York City can be enforced on the spot regardless of what North Carolina chooses to do.
Gun rights supporters have often succeeded by thinking two steps ahead: Not just winning particular battles, but establishing favorable terrain on which to fight — and the passage of the preemption laws is a perfect example.
Advocates of reasonable gun regulation can do the same. And the strongest terrain, it turns out, may be close to home. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea vox. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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An employee at a Longs Drugs store developed pictures of DeGuzman posing with his guns and homemade bombs. She and a coworker called police. DeGuzman was arrested when he returned for his photos.
A remarkable number of those averted attacks—at least seven out of 24—involved would-be killers directly inspired by Columbine.
I also looked around for examples of educators who stopped gunmen with their own guns, along the lines of the Air Marshall analogy mentioned by our reader. I found this AP story from :.
Luke Woodham [is] the year-old who is charged with slashing his mother to death with a butcher knife and then opening fire on his classmates with a rifle.
He is accused of killing Lydia Dew, 17, and his former girlfriend, Christina Menefee, and wounding seven other students, leaving them bleeding on the polished floor of the school cafeteria. Fearing Woodham would come for him next, [principal Roy] Balentine ran to his office to call the police. As he dialed, more shots rang out. More students fell. Minutes later, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick chased Woodham down outside the school, held him at bay with a.
If you know of any better examples, please let me know. To that I would stretch the comparison to a larger liberal vs. Pro-lifers, which generally are politically conservative, rail against Roe v. Yet, in D. Heller , conservatives applauded when the Court, through naked judicial activism , overturned plus years of precedent and history and decided for the first time in history that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual rather than a collective right to firearm possession.
They embrace Roe v. Gun-control activists i. I have to take slight issue with your reader who asserted that the Supreme Court, in Heller v. A right to individual self-defense was held in common with the idea of a well-regulated militia—you could not have the latter without the former—and was incorporated into the state constitutions of a number of the original 13 colonies. A further Pennsylvania provision gave an obligation to Pennsylvanians to keep and bear arms, or provide a fee if they refused due to conscience.
Vermont also incorporated similar language. North Carolina and Massachusetts the first in the Americas were explicit in the obligation to keep and bear arms as well, linking it directly to the defense of the commons, because at the time there was no distinction between the two.
As early as , Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware required all men 16 and over to keep and bear arms. Rhode Island did not require you to own a gun, unless you wanted to attend a public meeting or travel more than two miles, in which case you had to appear with one.
From the time of its transfer from the Dutch, New York required all men from 16 to 60 to be keep arms. In Maryland, you could not own land unless you could prove you were armed.
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina required masters to give firearms, shot, and gunpowder to indentured servants upon the completion of their service. Indeed, since the beginning of colonization, individuals armed for the defense of the commons was a hallmark of regulation, just as much as the secure storage of them was also regulated. While the original states all expressly tied the keeping of arms to an obligation to defend the commons, and there were laws regarding their use i.
Pennsylvania actually had a separate article regarding hunting, and Boston had laws regarding careless discharges of firearms , none inhibited the personal possession of arms or their use in self-defense.
It would be sophistry to claim that only in the case of the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms solely based in a need for common defense. The Supreme Court has made many rulings directly and indirectly affecting the right to bear arms.
In Guorko v. This was re-affirmed by the same court in Thompson v. Where Heller arguably deviates is from precedence from the Supreme Court Presser v.
Illinois, Miller v. Texas , U. Miller that affirmed the ability of states to regulate the carry of firearms. As Jim Elliott correctly notes , with both issues you have camps opposed on first principles. In both cases you have camps that are unable to accomplish outright bans, due to a combination of constitutional barriers and public opposition.
Most regulations on abortion are arbitrary, simply meant to make the process as onerous as possible. Requiring abortion clinics to have admitting privileges is not meant to enhance patient safety. Mandatory ultrasounds, including those of the highly invasive trans-vaginal sort, are not intended to provide the doctor or the patient with important medical information.
Since bans are presently not feasible, anti-abortion activists will take any restrictions they can get. Much is the same with most gun control proposals. They rely predominantly on public confusion and disgust to pass, even though they make no practical difference. But any ban, no matter how pointless or incremental, is welcomed.
Stuck in the middle all of this is the American public. People desperately want to believe that there is a way to preserve a broad 2nd Amendment right to gun ownership, while keeping the guns away from the bad people.
The two goals are almost certainly mutually exclusive, so what we end up with is a bunch of meaningless tinkering around the edges. In a poll [in December ], 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban. But in the 10 years since the previous [assault weapons] ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from to made little difference. Little handguns do. Said scared young woman is unlikely to be deterred; she will just become resentful towards those who verbally abused her, and this will probably drive her to resist their cause even more than she would have otherwise.
Gun Control activists do the same thing. This name-calling will make someone who values their right to own a firearm wary of anything a Gun Control advocate proposes, regardless of how reasonable it may be. In both cases, the insult says more about the one issuing it than the one receiving it.
Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago confirmed the 2nd Amendment applied on an individual basis. Overturning either would require a Constitutional amendment that will not pass in the foreseeable future, so the tactic is to make exercising these rights as difficult as possible. I either laugh or shake my head in disbelief whenever a Gun Control activist starts talking.
If Pro-Life activists get what they want, women will go back to coat-hangers in back alleys. Both will create unfavorable situations. The email address is hello theatlantic. Jim Elliott responds to the criticisms from readers in these updates :. Many states—including California, which leads the nation in the number, but not rate, of gun crimes—already require background checks at gun shows. Cooling off periods are, again, useful for some types of gun violence—i.
Even their utility in reducing suicides was found to only be statistically valid for intended suicides by people 55 or older. Again … tinkering.
Many states do have more rigorous safety courses for people applying for carry permits, as well they should. Rifles, as a whole, historically make up about 2. Gun rights advocates know these figures. They know that if you want to make a substantial, serious impact on homicide and suicide in this country, you need to get rid of handguns. Full stop. Bringing me to your second reader. Medical progress has gifted women with the ability to choose whether or not they will bear the life-long consequences that come to their body from bearing a child, and not acknowledging those consequences is so cavalier it should render one ineligible to discuss the topic.
Let me be clear: While health is a crucial concern in choosing abortion, this does not diminish the fact that this very liberty— to choose not to bear the consequences of pregnancy, to set the course of one's own life—is what is at stake. A woman is choosing the course of her life over the potential life inside them. And vice versa. Any remaining thoughts on this thread? Drop me an email. Jim Elliott, a reader whose writing on guns Ta-Nehisi featured a few years ago under a pseudonym, rejoins the debate under his real name:.
Your reader's comparison of gun rights activists to pro-choice activists made immediate sense to me, as a gun rights liberal. Both gun control advocates and pro-life advocates primarily work upon first principles. They make a moral argument, not a pragmatic one.
As perhaps well they should. Pro-choice advocates, after all, weigh the potential for life against the liberty of a life already existing and choose the latter, whereas gun rights advocates weigh the potential for death against the liberty of a life already existing, and choose the latter. Sure, us gun rights guys can quote figures all we want.
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