Gay marriage lost badly at the polls in 2004. No less than eleven states voted in referenda to prohibit people in gay relationships from marrying each other, and some sadly chose to make sweeping changes that would make even civil unions difficult. While most of these states were conservative places where the vote was a foregone conclusion, the fact that one state most people think of as relatively liberal--Oregon--voted the same way bothered me, a staunch supporter of gay marriage, quite a lot.
In the weeks afterward, here on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the blogosphere, the general consensus was that electoral defeat didn't mean that we liberals should abandon the principle of gay marriage rights. Freedom to marry the person you choose, it was argued, was a bedrock principle that should not be abandoned by liberals or the Democratic party. Since I strongly support that principle and want it firmly embedded in the bedrock, I was delighted to see this.
This is quite a contrast to what I have seen on this site when gun control is discussed. (More after the fold)
In a post about liberal principles after the election, Kos himself summed up gun control with these words: "The NRA won, let's move on." I was stunned. On a site that stands up for liberal values, how could Kos support declaring defeat on a liberal value that has worked, is successful, and hasn't lost at the polls? I then found that whenever I took pro-gun control positions on the site, some posters--never all or very many, but some of them--would attack gun control, and sometimes me personally. They would say that it was a "political loser," had cost the Democrats the west (and the south and the midwest and practically everywhere except New England), and so on. I was astounded by the discrepancy between how the gay marriage issue was handled and how the gun control issue was handled, especially since gun control hasn't been a political "loser" at all, as I will argue below. I've even seen people defend the NRA as a good and decent group of people who fight gun control because they believe sincerely in local and state autonomy, a laughable idea. Worst of all, I got personally attacked a few times on the site, and someone even called me a "fundy" (apparently ignorant of the fact that every actual fundy with any power--George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, and James Dobson, to name a few--strongly opposes gun control of any kind).
I wrote this diary to refute some of the most common things I've seen and heard about gun control, both in the world in general, and from a few people on this site. I find it a bit surreal to have to argue these points on a liberal web page (in much the same way that I would find it surreal to have to argue that AIDS is not divine punishment of gay people, to name one example), but we live in surreal times. That said, I know I am not the only pro-gun-control person on this site, and I refuse to believe that there aren't many others. If you're one of them, you can recommend this diary, or leave a "four" rating in the tip jar below.
Argument: "Gun control doesn't work."
Answer: In any event, here is the FBI arguing that the 1993 Brady Law (which included background checks and waiting periods) has saved lives.
http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress00/loesch062100.htm
Interestingly, neither Ashcroft nor Gonzales made the DOJ take this off the site (yet).
Also, here is a Boston Herald article touting the fact that Massachusetts has strict gun laws--and the lowest gun death rate of any state in the country. Are we to assume that this is just complete and total coincidence?
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=50073
Argument: "Gun control is a political loser."
Answer: First of all, countless polls show that wide sections of the American public, even in "red" states, support a wide variety of gun control, including waiting periods, gun show restrictions, and the assault weapons ban. Here's a pretty good summary (from 2000) of the history of the issue, from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:
http://www.csgv.org/docUploads/Public%20Opinion%20Fact%20Sheet%2Epdf
(CSGV also has an excellent page on which you can click to see gun control debates in various swing states at http://www.csgv.org/issues/elections/swingstates04/index.cfm)
Here is a 2003 poll from Field and Stream (a magazine with a generally pro-gun readership) showing high levels of support for gun control.
http://www.fieldandstream.com/fieldstream/hunting/article/0,13199,458217,00.html
(For more polls, including some state-specific ones, see the next argument, and also the links at the bottom of the diary.)
Of course, people can tell a pollster one thing and do a very different thing once they get into the voting booth, which is why I find it good to know the following:
--In 2000, initiatives to close the gun show loophole passed in Colorado and Oregon (two western states that are supposed to oppose gun control) by overwhelming margins.
--Florida voters overwhelmingly rejected the gun show loophole in 1998.
--In 2004, despite what right-wingers said (and what the press echoed), results did not show a huge victory for the gun lobby; in fact, they showed something altogether different, as argued here by Handgun Control.
http://www.bradycampaign.org/press/release.php?release=607
--There are even otherwise-conservative Republicans who consistently vote for gun control in red or red-leaning districts but never pay any political price for it (I would cite Richard Lugar and Henry Hyde).
Argument: "The Democrats' future is in the Western states, since the conservatism there is more libertarian, as opposed to the religious-right conservatism of the South. In order to win in the West, we need to throw gun control overboard, since the Democrats who have won in the rest in recent years are all anti-gun control."
Answer: I'm totally in favor of getting more Democratic votes in the West (and the South, and the Midwest, and New England, and everywhere else). However, I am not at all convinced that we have to abandon gun control to do so, or that gun control ought to be abandoned, even if it will win us a short-term political advantage. In any event, consider the following:
--In 2000, initiatives to close the gun show loophole passed in Colorado and Oregon, as described above.
--Last year, a Colorado Senate candidate who supported closing the loophole (Democrat Ken Salazar) won against one who supported continuing it (Republican Pete Coors).
--All seven of the Democratic Senators representing states in the Mountain West or Pacific Northwest (Jeff Bingaman, Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, and the aforementioned Salazar) support gun control in varying degrees, and all of them except Cantwell easily won their last election or re-election races.
Argument: "The NRA care deeply about states' rights, and will get off Democrats' backs if Democrats just back off on gun control."
Answer: The NRA is just as crooked and hypocritical as any other organization on the right. The fact that Kerry didn't emphasize gun control much in the campaign certainly didn't lead the NRA to leave him alone. Similarly, for a group that professes to love state and local rights, they certainly don't have a problem overturning local gun control laws:
http://www.dcvote.org/media/release.cfm?releaseID=138&keywords=gun%20control
http://www.nraila.org//issues/factsheets/read.aspx?id=72
As always, I am interested in what people have to say on this issue, and if you absolutely must leave me yet another "gun control is a loser/f*** you, fundy" comment under this diary, feel free to do so (although I'd be a lot more impressed if you actually refuted some of the evidence I have gathered above). If you are going to leave a nasty comment, please take note of the following:
--I SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE. The opening of this diary was not meant to suggest otherwise, only to contrast how that issue is handled by folks on DailyKos with the one I talked about in this diary.
--Supporting gun control doesn't mean, and has never meant, that supporters "want to take everybody's guns away," anymore than supporting driver's licenses means that you want to take everybody's cars away, or than supporting safety regulations for toasters means that you want to take everybody's toasters away. That is a GOP talking point that has no place on this site.
--Feel free to disagree with me, but please do not attack me for being some kind of "troll"; I'm not sure how I could possibly be a troll for advocating a LIBERAL position on what promotes itself as a LIBERAL web page.
--Like other gun control advocates, I have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING against somebody having a gun in their house for their own protection (although I am aware of the research that says such a gun is much more likely to hurt that person, or someone in their family, than it is to hurt an intruder). I also have nothing against hunting, although it's not something I enjoy myself.
--I welcome ideas about how best to frame and sell the "gun control" idea, and I am not attached to the words "gun control" so much as I am attached to the principles behind them. As other people on this site have rightly pointed out, however, the idea of dropping the phrase because it "sounds bad" strikes me as letting the GOP frame the issue, something we should try to avoid.