Negotiation, An Essential Part of Our Society, Part III, Example Put in Practice - The Gun Debate

As I've written in my previous article on negotiation, being courteous is a top priority for facilitating a better dispute resolution. It is also a top priority in engaging in solution-oriented, and all-voices-equally-heared political debates and discussions. Living together in a society, is the most important negotiation every citizen is required to engage in. As a citizen of the United States of America, the subject of our civil rights, as well as the safety of our country has always been close to my heart. The purpose of this article is to throw a glimpse behind the scenes of the controversial subject of gun control. Due to my limited experience on the subject, I have not formed concrete opinions which would place me on one side or the other of the debate. This article therefore is an effort to discover and relay thoughts on gun control as I probe through the statistics and other sources proponents on both sides of the debate appeal to or rely on in order to formulate their opinions on the subject. Since legislation is closely tied to the public's socially constructed reality, the theme of this article is to investigate the influences behind the public's socially constructed reality and how the fate of gun control legislation rests on this reality.

Firearms have always served a symbolic role in the culture of our country since its foundation, but especially from the early 20th century on, their negative image as represented in more and more laws which restrict and control their use in reaction to certain violent events which have inspired an inquiry into the truth about their role in crime. Many wish negotiation would prevent and resolve any kind of dispute, and that either guns did not exist, or that, if, as a necessary evil, because it has been so far proven impossible to eliminate all guns, only responsible and in their right mind people would be allowed to use them, and only under certain extreme circumstances. Many also say evil cannot be cured by legislation because legislation only responds to the symptoms, not the underlying cause. In the same time, they also believe that legislation which accurately reflects the opinions of educated citizens is a necessary evil for maintaining the public health, safety and welfare of our country until the underlying cause is identified. It is suggested that perhaps the will of the people would be better represented in the laws that govern our country if the average person had time left over after working and taking care of the family to educate themselves on all aspects of every issue that concerns them, but the average person usually does not have this extra time.

Peace begins with an examination of oneself, but for someone who works hard all day it is more convenient to escape what is in one's head and seek peace in an external reality by watching something on television or on the Internet. For the person who has a little bit more time than that, the person may seek out information that reflects their biases on a certain issue and perhaps consider, but mostly disregard, the argument on the other side.

We have duties as citizens required by the law, but our voluntary responsibilities as citizens, in order to help maintain the quality of government and society, include being aware of what influences our decisions and biases. We must be well informed in what is happening in the community and the country. We must also know where to get this information in order to act upon it and to support our opinions, to know our rights to help preserve them, and to vote in order to participate in the government decision process. In addition, we must be prepared to respect the rights of others.

The author Francis Scott Fitzgerald said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It seems as if the gun control debate if not already, will reach a stalemate. In order to avoid, or move beyond this stalemate, we must consider our opponent's viewpoint and perhaps reach an agreement which addresses the underlying cause of an issue. This is easier said than done, but apathy or a closed-mind might lead us to live in a world similar to the one in the book, Rebelfire 1.0 Out of the GRAY ZONE by Claire Wolf and Aaron Zelman. The media and political process provides fertile ground for the gun debate.

My first step on the journey behind the scenes is into a forest of statistics. The forest represents the tangled reap that each side of the debate has sowed whose roots are hidden underneath the name-calling and blaming discourse that is so fueled that it is about to burn the entire forest down. Both sides want a solution to crime in our country but they disagree on the effectiveness of the gun control laws on crime. Statistics based on polls and survey questions commonly serve as premises for a logical argument, but more often than not when truth is logical, what is logical is not always truth, just as it used to be logical to think that the world is flat.

There is a kernel of truth at the heart of every statement, but some sources take you closer to that kernel of truth than others. For example, according to Sorry, Wrong Number Why Media Polls on Gun Control are so Often Unreliable, analytical polls paid for by anti-gun organizations achieve results remarkably similar to polls paid for by pro-gun organizations,” because they are scientifically conducted polls which can measure real public opinion on the gun control issue with “reasonable accuracy.”

Gun owners are sensitive to survey questions because of the approximately 300 different state gun control laws to 20,000 total gun control laws defined as those that affect the manufacture, design, sale, purchase, and possession of firearms in America. The wording of the questions in the analytical polls paid for by anti-gun and pro-gun organizations take into account the complex public attitudes which reflect the public feelings and competing values of the gun control issue.

The media polls, Mauser and Kopel argue, “are polls which are produced either by or for the media, intended to run as news stories” are methodologically flawed because most likely they are conforming to cost constraints. For example, the media polls exaggerate the scientific accuracy of the polls by shrinking their maximum survey error from a complete consensus of the target population to only a sampling size. Mauser and Kopel also cite in their article Peter Hart, pollster for the Dukakis campaign talking about how “You can come up with any result you want” depending on the wording of the question.” Another example of media polls misrepresenting the public's true opinion is publishing the results of a question about one issue as support of the public's attitude on an completely different issue.

So what do the statistics say about what are guns used for? The common uses for guns are for self-defense, hunting, or for sport. The use which has attracted the most attention in the gun control debate has been for self-defense. It makes sense that self-defense has been the hot topic for the gun control debate because it goes to the heart of the Second Amendment of the Constitution which in essence is “the right to bear arms.” Because we live in a society which comes from a strict-on-guns British system but now relies on police protection to provide safety to the public, the subject of using firearms for self-defense in this case creates competing values.

This article mentioned earlier the importance of statistics reflecting the competing values of the public. The following example illustrates the difficulty in discerning fact from fiction when dealing with competing values: While gun control advocates often rely on the National Crime Victimization Survey results from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for bolstering their argument on defensive gun uses, gun rights advocates appeal to the Kleck-Gertz figures. The Kleck-Gertz study showed much higher defensive gun uses than the number offered by the National Crime Victimization Survey.

Cook, Ludwig, and Hemenway question the “2.5 million Americans use a gun defensively against a criminal attacker each year” statistic in their study The Gun Debate's New Mythical Number: How Many Defense Uses Per Year?, claiming that the number results from a problem of “false positives.” They analyzed the data gathered from the National Survey of Private Ownership of Firearms and found that statistics to certain questions were more than what was provided from the National Crime Victimizations Survey.

John Lott Jr., an American economist and gun rights advocate argues that many gun control studies “that examine time-series data … make no attempt to relate fluctuations in crime rates to changing law-enforcement factors like arrest or conviction rates, prison-sentence lengths, or other obvious variables.” He also points out the limitations of cross-sectional analysis, and highlights the “endogeneity,” problem. He further contends that the solution is to “combine both time-series and cross-sectional evidence and then allow separate variables, so that each year the national or regional changes in crime rates can be separated out and distinguished from any local deviations.”

That means then Lott's analysis is flawed, according to Andrew McClurg, who contends that more calculations create potential for bias and error and that Lott is “guilty of fallacious post hoc reasoning.” Furhter, McClurg and Kopel talk about in their discussion notes how almost all public health studies report results support greater gun control or a restriction on guns in homes because they are frequently cited by the media and gun control organizations.

Statistics on both side of the debate at least agree that crime in general throughout America has been going down. Is it because more people are owning guns? Is it because of the some states who have stricter gun control or is it due to some states having lax gun restrictions? Or is it for other unidentified factors altogether, or a combination? Who knows.

Upon initial reflection, one can see how statistics are not very helpful to the average citizen, who has no time to investigate the data themselves, or who, like me, do not know enough about statistics to know which tree to cut and which to leave standing. For the purposes of this article, I will not attempt this endeavor, however I do think that these studies are useful to the average citizen who takes the time to read them because they raise awareness of the hidden agendas behind the surveys and the fact that they should not be taken at face value.

Stepping out of the statistical forest, I ask, how then do these agendas arise? Why, as McClurg and Kopel remark, do both sides in the gun control debate use “emotional, inflammatory rhetoric to influence public opinion?” McClurg and Kopel ask a good question, namely, “Why are there no newspaper editorials calling for 'bike control'? Why are there no groups dedicated to reducing the proliferation of bikes or to keeping bikes away from children, or arguing that all bikes should be locked up when not in use so as to prevent unauthorized access by children?”

Bernard Dick in his book, Anatomy of Film, describes how the gun has been portrayed on camera in the western movies, in crime film, in combat film, and film noir.” According to Dick, just as the gun in the western reflected a user's personality, “the gun in the crime film can be a projection of the user's neurosis or sexuality.” Dick talks about the movie Gun Crazy, where the character's captivation with guns take him a carnival ride with a male sharpshooter and ends his life in a foggy swamp. He seems to make the point that guns in films have been mainly portrayed in a negative light, starting as a symbol of rebellion beginning with the western films, to a symbol of horror in combat films.

One of the few mainstream medias that sheds light on some myths about guns is Cracked.com (of all websites). So how do these myths effect the reality of the average citizen who does not have time to question what is shown on television? The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics state that “more than two out of three Americans feel that television violence is a critical or very important cause of crime in the United States.” Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice discusses the theory that “people create reality based on personal experience and from knowledge gained through social interactions.” More and more social interaction is taken place behind a computer or television screen. One's socially constructed reality, or what one considers the “real” world is a combination of the events that occurs in one's life and the symbolic reality of outside influences such as the media.

Jeanne Carriere, in her Law Review Article talks about the symbiotic relationship between law and film. She proposes that “one strand of law-and-film scholarship with a long pedigree sees American movies as a source of behavior that triggers legislation in response.” Jeffrey O'Holleran in his article in the Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law summarizes the whole gun control debate perfectly:

“the ability to convey information through a newly devised medium, especially vivid multi-sensorial media like films and video games, is a powerful tool that has the potential to create great anxiety in a society, which in turn leads to political pressures that are catalytic in the formation of laws."

Paul Lebel's article examines the popular media's “incitement to citizenship.” It also explores “the cultural effects [of distorted versions of historical events in commercial cinema] on the formation of a national image, and the relationship between law and culture that shapes the milieu within which those effects occur.” He mentions how “popular media can play an important role in the construction of attitudes toward the legal system in general, [but] particularly striking is the media reinforcement of a perception of the legal system as the forum for resolving fundamental political and cultural conflicts.”

Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman in their book, The Rise Of The American Police State talk about the connection with the news media portrayal of violent events and the federal gun legislation passed following immediately after or in response to.

Much of the political process depends on a theory described in Eugene Volokh's article, The Mechanism of the Slippery Slope and the theory of the Overton Window, developed in the mid-1990s by Joe Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Volokh talks about the little attention paid to small changes in legislation, which does not mean that the “small shifts [necessarily] persuade people to eventually support the next shift, and [the small shifts] don't move the law to a politically unstable position,” but rather it is apathy. He follows that the media exploits this apathy of the public's interest of small changes because both the media and public seek the utility of the novel.

Many think that the solution to more appropriate gun legislation and perhaps crime in general is for the average citizen to take a little bit more responsibility in questioning their reality, because, after all, our thoughts shape our reality. Jonathan Seiden also makes a good point in his article: “even with more self- regulation, it will ultimately be up to parents to protect children from what they feel is questionable material. Parents play an important role in monitoring what films their children watch … 'It falls back on the judgment of parents. We can't legislate the lack of parenting.'” It is the opinion of many as well that the solution is parental encouragement upon their children to question, examine, and investigate external influences, as well as to engage in open-minded reflection and in educational discussions and informational debates.

WORKS CITED

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. (1966) describing the theory: “Man's self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations.”

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation,” (Thomas B. Reed, 1886).

Andrew McClurg and David Kopel, Gun Control & Gun Rights, p. 3, New York University 2002 “You will also see that there is wide disagreement on the reliability of the methodologies employed and conclusions reached. Statistics and statistical analyses, like everything else in life, run the gamut in quality from shoddy to outstanding. Even well-constructed statistical analysis, however, conducted by well-intentioned researchers, may be subject to error and flawed construction.”

David B. Kopel and Gary Mauser. Sorry, Wrong Number: Why Media Polls on Gun Control are so Often Unreliable Political Communication and Persuasion 9 (1992): 69-92. Available at

https://saf.org/journal/6/6_MauserAndKopel.htm (Retrieved July 31, 2014). See footnote 2.

Jon S. Vernick and Lisa M. Hepburn. Twenty Thousand Gun-Control Laws? The Brookings Institute Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy. Available at

https://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gunbook4.pdf. Retrieved August 6, 2014).

Kopel and Mauser

https://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

According to the Article: “Gun Ownership and Use in America” by Joseph Caroll

McClurg and Kopel, p. 13 Criminologists Gary Kleck

https://www.justfacts.com/aboutus.asp#Standards_Of_Credibility

https://www.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/backissues/86-1.html

p. 42 John Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws.

(1998).

p. 49-50 Andrew McClurg, “Lotts” More Guns and Other Fallacies Infecting The Gun Control Debate. (1999).

p. 77 providing an example by Don Kates in his book, Guns and Pulic Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda

“Five Fallacies about guns and violence (July 31, 2012)

https://www.decisionsonevidence.com/2013/04/study-finds-strong-link-between-state-gun-laws-and-gun- violence/

Eric Rhode, A History of The Cinema. Hill and Wang. (New York) p. 14 (1976).

Bernard Dick, Anatomy of Film. Bedford/St. Martin's. (2005).

https://www.cracked.com/article_19168_6-myths-about-famous-places-you-believe-thanks-to-movies.html and https://www.cracked.com/article_20052_5-weapon-myths-you-probably-believe-thanks-to- movies_p2.html

https://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/tost_2.html#2_i

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=151861

https://meganslawjournal.com/2013/10/25/law-in-media-is-crime-receiving-the-justice-it-deserves/

Jeanne Carriere, Cold Comfort: Law and Community in Ethan and Joel Coen's Fargo, Utah Law Review Society (2003)

Jeffrey O'Helleran, Blood Code: The History And Future of Video Game Censorship, Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law (2010).

Paul Lebel, Misdirecting Myths: The Legal and Cultural Significance of Distorted History in Popular Media, Wake Forest Law Review (2002).

Claire Wolf and Aaron Zelman. The Rise of The American Police State.

A Monopoly on Arms. Mazel Freedom Press, Inc.

Eugene Volokh, The Mechanisms Of The Slipper Slope, Harvard Law Review, (2003).

https://www.mackinac.org/7504

Johnathan Seiden, Scream-ing For A Solution: Regulating Hollywood Violence; An Analysis of Legal and Legislative Remedies, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (2001).