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Gun Control: Let the Debate Begin

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The National Rifle Association may want to change its unofficial motto following the recent Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. In a 5-4 decision the Court declared that gun ownership is an individual right guaranteed by the Second Amendment .

The gun lobby's testosterone-fueled credo served them well up to this point. With a constitutional right up for grabs, the NRA could, with a whiff of plausibility, portray every attempt to curb gun violence as one small but devious step in the plot to disarm Americans. Post-Heller, the NRA may want to consider a new slogan.

I suggest: "Be careful what you wish for."

Justices Scalia, et al., may have just pulled the slippery-slope argument out from under the NRA. A slippery-slope, after all, must descend to some horrific place if it is to instill fear and loathing. By itself, a slippery-slope is about as frightening as a snake-pit without the snakes.

For years, the NRA scared its members into action (primarily the opening of their wallets) with cries of "the gun grabbers are coming!" Now that the right to own a gun is settled law, opposition to restrictions such as waiting periods and background checks have to be argued on their merits. That cripples the NRA's ability to gin up the fear factor. It's hard to imagine even Second Amendment fundamentalists whipped into a frenzy over NRA alerts that "Those-who-would-make-gun-buying-inconvenient are coming!"

It's a point I first tried to make in 1993 at a gun violence symposium sponsored by the late Betty Friedan. Friedan had invited me to speak on the Second Amendment because I had just published a journalistic, i.e., non-polemical, book about the NRA, in which I discussed differing interpretations of gun ownership rights.

Friedan, the matriarch of the modern feminist movement, sat in the front row, perhaps ten feet away from the podium. What I remember most clearly is her reaction to my talk, which, in a nutshell, advocated conceding the point about the Second Amendment - agreeing that there existed a constitutional right to bear arms - and turning instead to the nuts and bolts issues of gun control and responsible gun ownership. It has long been a conservative trope that with rights come responsibilities. If one side doesn't recognize gun owners' rights, I argued, the other side won't discuss gun owners' responsibilities. I believed then, as I do now, that we need to move away from the endless bickering over whether or not a right to own a gun exists and turn to a more productive debate over what constitutes reasonable gun control.

(Friedan wasn't buying it - any of it. She made that clear by shaking her head without letup from the moment I began speaking until I was able to slink off the stage and take refuge in my chair.)

The book did well and for the next year or so, I became a semi-pro talking head speaking about the NRA and gun control. Network anchors and talk show hosts constantly tried to force me to declare myself as either "for" gun control or "against" it. Nothing prevents solutions to important social problems quite so well as artificially constructed dichotomies. Nothing crushes intelligent debate or empowers extremists so completely as convincing people that there are only two sides to an issue, and that they have to pick one and then spend the rest of their lives defending it from all comers.

A decade ago, having a nuanced view in this particular battle could make you many enemies but few friends. Discussions rarely got to the point where I could even explain that I was willing to concede the argument on the Second Amendment not simply as a tactic, but as a matter of principle. The Amendment is poorly written and ambiguous, but it is still part of the Bill of Rights. When there are doubts about what these enumerated liberties mean, I think we are almost always better served by an expansive interpretation than by taking a narrow one.

Not a particularly sophisticated or complex argument, but in the gun debate it was as impenetrable as a quadratic equation to a beagle. The problem and its solution were apparent on talk radio shows.

The drill usually went like this: A caller would begin by stating "I'm against gun control and - " I'd interrupt to ask for clarification.

"So, you think it should be legal for six-year-olds to bring machine guns to kindergarten?"

"Of course not!" they'd cry, full of indignation.

"So, you're not against all gun control?"

"Just the unreasonable ones," was the usual response. And then the real conversation could begin.

The NRA is celebrating the Scalia decision, assuming they've won the debate. They haven't. Because so far, all we've had is a shouting match, orchestrated by the NRA to swell its own coffers, and legitimated by gun-control advocates who leapt, not fell, into the NRA trap by failing to give the Second Amendment the same respect granted to the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Now the Supreme Court has ruled and the shouting match is over. Let the debate begin.

Osha Gray Davidson is the author of five books of non-fiction, including, Under Fire: the NRA and the Battle for Gun Control

www.oshadavidson.com

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