How To Talk About How To Talk About Guns

Craig Rood, After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock

Two-thirds of American homicides, and nearly half of American suicides, are performed with firearms. Mass shootings have become so commonplace that they seldom make headlines outside their regions, unless the body count reaches double digits. Yet such violence hasn’t resulted in meaningful change. According to University of Iowa rhetorician Craig Rood, we remain bogged down in insuperable differences. And those differences are language, not policy.

How we talk about guns, and gun violence, matters more than literal facts. In any policy decision, the language we use, and the rhetorical devices we employ, steer the discussion, hopefully toward points of agreement which we can use to construct a path forward. But currently, Rood demonstrates gun control advocates, and their gun rights opponents, keep talking past one another. We don’t disagree on facts, Rood shows; we aren’t having the same conversation.

Public responses to gun violence, and how to handle private ownership of high-powered firearms, have revealed how fundamentally irrational our deliberations are. We learned in school that argument and debate are, or should be, reasonable actions grounded in evidence and logic. This is true, Professor Rood says, to a point. But sometimes formal argumentation reveals in-group biases and sectarian divisions. And that’s where policy debates stumble.

Both sides have certain, limited agreements. Both agree that the Second Amendment exists, for instance. But beyond the Amendment’s absolute twenty-seven words, it has accrued generations of added meanings, which Rood calls our public memory. How we remember the Second Amendment, and the juridical precedent which clings to it, have become important points of argument. Participants in public debate favor some parts of public memory, and ignore others.

Gun ownership advocates—Rood quotes heavily from NRA executive Wayne LaPierre—utilize rhetoric of defense. We’re under constant assault, LaPierre and others believe, from criminals, undocumented immigrants, dictators, and others. Against this onslaught, gun rights advocates present private firearms as a bastion of individualistic defense against public chaos. Guns, in their advocates' position, have important moral weight which, like marriage and property, requires legal and ethical defense.

Professor Craig Rood

Gun control advocates, by contrast, see firearms as morally subordinate to the damage which gun operators have created. They highlight the death and destruction which guns facilitate as morally primary. And while gun control advocates aren’t as monolithic as their opponents like to believe, they share certain moral precepts which color how they talk about guns and gun rights. These precepts are so deeply ingrained, their advocates possibly don’t realize they aren’t universal.

Besides this, both sides talk past one another; in rhetorical terminology, they have no shared stasis. Gun rights advocates believe private firearms are morally absolute and immune to nuance, and present their opponents as equally absolute, a phalanx of jackboots determined to seize everyone’s deer rifles. Gun control advocates, meanwhile, have little but nuance, weighing new evidence against old, shifting their positions accordingly, and therefore think facts drive debate.

Most important, both positions have evolved more than observers realize. The moral absolute of gun ownership has basically only existed since World War II, and even became the stated NRA position only in the 1970s. Gun control arguments, meanwhile, altered sharply following Sandy Hook; where previously advocates wanted to prevent future tragedy, Rood writes, President Obama moved the argument onto “the warrant of the dead,” honoring lives already lost.

Approaching the end, Rood offers some suggestions for raising the debate from the incompatible tracks both sides have previously taken. These aren’t magic cures for intransigence, Rood admits; they’re tools for broadening the debate and helping good faith arguers find common ground. As such, one of his suggestions is cutting off anyone arguing in bad faith… which isn’t always clearly defined. His suggestions won’t solve anything, but they could help.

Rood admits he has clear opinions in this debate; neutrality is both impossible and undesirable. But he makes a solemn effort to describe both sides in terms they themselves would use, and explain their positions, including the unstated premises. As a rhetorician, Rood believes facts matter, but only when stated in language the audience will willingly hear. Therefore he doesn’t deluge readers with facts, he explains how the respective sides employ language.

This book attempts to reach academic and general audiences simultaneously. Therefore Rood uses some technical terminology, but explains it in plain English. This isn’t a flashy manifesto to motivate activists or elect candidates; it’s a sober consideration of how language controls actions. Don’t expect exciting bombast. Rood cares about how Americans think, and perhaps we should, too.