Dan Baum is a self-proclaimed liberal who loves guns, and he's written a book called Gun Guys that takes fellow liberals to task: We would have reasonable gun control in America, you see, if we weren't so disgustingly liberal. The book got him a big interview with Joe Nocera that's the lead story in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times. As Baum says to Nocera:
My essential belief is that we need to treat gun owners with more respect while also demanding a higher level of responsibility.Yes, that's the problem: the people who made gun-rights robocalls to Newtown, Connecticut, mere months after after the Sandy Hook massacre, and who make ads attacking the Secret Service detail provided to the minor children of the president of the United States, deserve more respect. Otherwise, reasonable gun laws can't pass.
Yes, I understand: rank-and-file gun owners didn't do those things. Lobbying organizations did them. But rank-and-file gun owners continue sending large amounts of money to those lobbying organizations, and even the gun owners who don't join the NRA or Gun Owners of America or other groups don't denounce them in disgust.
I acknowlege the existence of a strain of liberal rhetoric about gun owners that caricatures them as toothless, barefoot cousin-shaggers with an excessive lust for blood. But respect is a two-way street, and I don't think gun owners have much respect for the culture of non-gun-loving segment of society. Baum thinks 100% of the blame is on our side, as you'll see in the quote below -- and watch how he then parrots gun owners' lack of respect for the rest of us while demanding that we respect gun owners:
... [Responsible gun owners] don't feel represented by the N.R.A. This is why I started on this book -- I don't feel represented by the N.R.A., and I know a lot of gun guys who don't. But we don't have -- perhaps because we don't feel strongly enough about it -- there is no other organization of the sane gun guys, of the nice gun guys, the reasonable, socially minded gun guys. Gun guys, I think, need to take much more seriously that they're custodians of firearms. Their guns affect everybody and they need to be much more responsible with them. And in order to get them there, we need to make allies of them. And frankly, forgive me, you and your rhetoric make enemies of them, and that's making us less safe. Look at what Connecticut is doing. You're not going to get any public safety benefit out of that. I think you're gonna make us less safe. Because you drive the gun guys into that defensive crouch that's so destructive.Baum, you see, supports all kinds of good gun restrictions, or what he considers good ones. Mandatory lockup of guns in the home? Check. Liability for a gun owner who leaves a weapon in the glovebox that's stolen and used in a crime? Sure. Prosecution of parents if a kid shoots someone with an unsecured gun in the home? Maybe. And he insists this heretofore undetected cohort of reasonable gun owners would be right behind him, backing every move.
Well, what the hell is stoppiing them? It's a free country. Why hasn't such a group emerged? Are we liberals preventing this? We'd be incredibly grateful. And if such a group said, as Baum does, that some of the proposals we support -- assault weapon bans, limits on magazines -- are bad ideas, we might listen because this would be a pro-gun group treating us with respect, rather than calling us fascist Antichrists.
But no such group exists. And that's the gun community's fault, not ours.
But it's so easy for this guy to talk about guns the way idiot centrists talk about, say, the federal budget (If you liberals would just compromise, the right-wingers would be nice to you!) -- after which he spouts off like Wayne LaPierre with his own set of cultural stereotypes:
You don't understand guns, and you don't know gun guys, yet you want to make rules for things you don't understand for people you don't know. And that is not how we're going to end up safer. Where gun guys draw the line is having you make consumer decisions for them. Because what you're saying, Joe -- you, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- you want to say to some guy in Kansas, "You can have this rifle. But you can't have that one." And they're saying, "What does Joe Nocera know about guns? What does Joe Nocera know about me?" It is offensive.You know what's really offensive, Dan? This insistence that I have to have a visceral, gut-level knowledge of an experience in order to have an opinion on it.
You know what else I've never experienced? Heroin. Crack. Crystal meth. I've never done any of these drugs. I've never cooked them up. I've never sold them. Does that mean I'm not qualified to have an opinion on whether they should be regulated? Or on whether they're bad for you?
I never fought in a war. Should I have been told to shut the hell up when I expressed an opinion on the invasion of Iraq?
I give Joe Nocera credit -- he pushes back throughout his interview with Baum. ("Why do gun owners get to have this level of 'respect' that no other segment of society has? I could say, 'I'm a responsible driver. Why does the government get to tell me that I have to wear a seat belt?'") But Baum has combined the worst of centrism and the worst of right-wing extremism -- and it got him a book contract, and a big story in the Times. Slick move.
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OH, AND: If you think liberal contempt is what's preventing moderate gun owners from advocating gun restrictions, take a look at what happened to Reed Exhibitions, organizer of many of the major gun shows, when it tried to keep assault weapons out one show out respect for the Sandy Hook victims, and take a look at what happened to Smith & Wesson in 2000 when it tried to work with the Clinton administration on gun control. Retaliation was swift, relentless, and brutally effective -- and it came from the gun community, not from the Upper West Side.
