On Friday, December 21st, in his position as CEO and Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre offered the NRA's official response to the December 14th shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. In explaining why the NRA would not be supporting any federal gun safety policies or legislation--not even universal background checks for all gun purchases, which LaPierre in the past had publically endorsed (May 1999, U.S. Senate Testimony)--LaPierre insisted that "the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
In the first print edition for February 2013 of the college newspaper where I teach, several students were asked to discuss gun safety regulations as a means of decreasing if not preventing gun violence. Sure enough, there was LaPierre's argument, verbatim, as one student's answer that gun regulation was not the solution: "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy...blah blah blah." It was a hollow, thoughtless, lazy argument when it came out of LaPierre's mouth last December, and it's still an incredibly poor defense of guns, particularly for guns as the best solution to gun violence. And clearly others are blindly internalizing LaPierre's claim without any interrogation of what his claim really means.
As a rhetoric scholar and a teacher of non-fiction writing, I hear LaPierre's words and waver between laughing out loud and annoyance at such simplistic, unexamined thinking. I mean seriously: what, for goodness sake, is a "good guy"? what, exactly, is a "bad guy"? at what point does a "good guy" become a "bad guy"? Can a "good guy" do "bad" things? Can a "bad guy" do good? And who gets to decide: is there a "good guy/bad guy" committee? Does it go to the people for a vote? Is there a once-for-all good guy/bad guy taxonomy? If not, what happens when my definition of "good guy" differs from your understanding? which of us is the good guy? And btw, "good guy"?? What about women...especially women with guns?
Such a universal, mutually-exclusive moral category for complex, regularly flawed, multi-faceted,--and gendered-- human beings is a fiction. And to base an argument supporting the need for a deadly technology on such a fiction is unproductive at best, downright ignorant at worst. Further, where is the objective, quantitative evidence for the claim that good guys with guns are the most effective, if not the only, antidote for bad guys with guns? C'mon y'all: surely we can do better than this!
Meanwhile, we humans are killing each other in significant numbers on a daily basis with an explosive, deadly technology that is not as morally neutral as gun rights proponents want everyone to believe ("guns don't kill people; people kill people"--nevermind that guns and ammunition are designed for just one purpose: to kill). I said it last week, and I'm sticking with it this week: we need to refuse superficial, unexamined, absolute arguments; we need to ask ourselves the difficult questions and meet those questions with appropriate answers that we work out together, even though arriving at those answers is difficult and occurs over time.
If we don't, we'll continue to be devastated by ugly if not deadly problems, passing them on to succeeding generations. Peace is simple, y'all, but it's certainly not easy. So let's mind our p's and q's and get busy confronting our difficult issues in more productive ways.
Very nicely said and right on the button!
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