Fresh off their recent victory in having same-sex marriage legalized, many of the movement’s organizers are now turning to gun control as the next hot social issue, or so reports the New Yorker .
Marriage-equality activists in every state were armed with a talking-points tip sheet from WhyMarriageMatters.org whose logo reads “Love. Commitment. Family.” The one-page memo talks about the protection of religious freedom, the golden rule, family stability, and mutual respect. In the fight for marriage equality, the left borrowed the language of the right, in other words, and used it consistently and explicitly to bring the opposition along. Now similar tacks are being taken on guns…
When Zach Silk thinks about how to articulate the values of the renovated gun movement, he uses the same words that the gun advocates use: “Community. Safety. Responsibility. Protecting my family.” In this redefining, he hopes to make a point. “Protection” isn’t an individual matter (a canard in any case, because having a gun in the house makes you exponentially less safe) in which individual patriarchs safeguard individual offspring. “Protection” is a communitarian thing, in which the safety of one’s own children depends on the safe habits of one’s neighbors.
Gun people underestimate these guys at their own peril. I shudder to think that in the face of savvy, patient, successful operatives like Zach Silk, we’re offering the tone-deaf and thoroughly unlikeable Wayne LaPierre, along with mass mailings filled with fear-mongering fever swamp boilerplate about black helicopters and the NWO.
We need an NRA 2.0 to go with Gun Culture 2.0, and we need it now.
