General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why we lost the gun debate in the Senate, and why we'll keep losing it. [View all]gulliver
(13,180 posts)The story needed a villain for both sides to unite against. The guns and magazines themselves don't make effective villains. One side of the argument is quick to see themselves holding (or potentially holding) these weapons while not being villains. They'll never go for an argument that frames the weapons themselves as evil.
We saw the Newtown families, but that is really not effective at all politically. If anything, it allowed the gun industry to circumvent the real arguments as you note. Without a villain to punish, the whole thing turned into a sentimental gesture.
The people who should have been front and center as villains in the debate are the killers and their enablers. We should have been asking what we can do to block villains like Nancy Lanza from stocking up on weaponry and "training" her crazy son in its use. Do we want to just allow people like Cho and Holmes to buy guns? Should we allow weapons to trade freely back and forth between criminals and the law abiding using the gun shows as a background-check-free conduit?
We should have had some pictures of the Lanzas, Cho, Holmes, Loughner, etc. in front of the cameras with the families of victims and wounded survivors. We should have had pictures of armed neo-Nazi skinheads and street gangs in the background behind the families of slain police officers. Then the victims in the room would have had a villain for the audience to want to see punished.