Someone Else’s Perspective Can Be Eye Opening — Provided We Are Neither Stupid nor Abysmally Ignorant — an Example from a Context Shifting European Article about U.S. Gun Control

24 September 2013

Premise — slightly shifting conceptual frames can move culture-based arguments into clearer light

Litigating lawyers are taught that properly framing cases is everything. That’s emphatically true in everything that requires persuasion. Which means that context framing matters in a democracy and explains why politicians have so much difficulty in hitting on the right mix of factual substance and the emotional pap that sells it.

Take America’s fizzled gun control debate. The recent go-round that began with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings ran out of steam earlier than it should have, due to less than ideal argument framing on the pro gun control side, combined with President Obama’s lackadaisically indulged (stalling) study of the issue.

Most gun arguments have been predictably boring and not chosen with an understanding of the audience that one is ostensibly trying to convert. None of the rants, on either side, have creatively attempted to tilt adversarily engrained American thinking. And, as a general rule, if we are allowed to proceed complacently in our beliefs, no matter how idiotic, we will.

So it was with mild delight that I saw English writer, Henry Porter’s, take on the American gun problem. He very slightly shifted the customary perspective to make our gun violence problem seem just as outlandish as it actually is.

I’m not saying that Porter’s perspective will change minds today. But I am saying that from History’s perspective, more than a few will eventually be saying, “How could Americans have been so viciously destructive?”

Here’s the quantitatively most telling part of what Mr. Porter wrote

Numbers matter — at least to those who can think:

To absorb the scale of the mayhem, it's worth trying to guess the death toll of all the wars in American history since the War of Independence began in 1775,

and follow that by estimating the number killed by firearms in the US since the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 . . . .

The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177.

By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact,

particularly when you place it in the context of the safety-conscious, "secondary smoke" obsessions that characterise so much of American life.

Now the clever framing twist

Mr. Porter puts a significant hook on his argument. Its novelty suggests that even a somnolent panel of jurors might rouse themselves enough to actually consider it — which is what all litigators want:

One more figure. There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms.

If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

The power of this casually tossed in observation is that it is almost certainly true. And its culturally accurate insight forces us, at least temporarily, to consider the actual magnitude of American gun violence.

The moral? — When dealing with acculturated adversarial mindsets, talented concept-framing is both rare and valuable

I doubt that Mr. Porter’s argument will persuade anyone among the Gun Lobby.

But it certainly will persuade future historians and sociologists that there was something psychically wrong with the early 21^st Century United States.

Here, it is important that my Gun Lobby friends recognize that I am not attacking them.

Instead, if I one of those future historians or sociologists, I would want to find out why America’s politico-cultural evolution encouraged and (perhaps) demanded “gun nuts” to evolve into the intransigence that they did. As I noted recently, America’s “Big Daddy” government should not inspire confidence in anyone with measureable intellectual capacity.

PeteFree.com

Someone Else’s Perspective Can Be Eye Opening — Provided We Are Neither Stupid nor Abysmally Ignorant — an Example from a Context Shifting European Article about U.S. Gun Control