What If We Made Gun Culture Uncool Like We Did Cigarettes?

[Amishman]

34. it would backfire

Try to stigmatize gun ownership and they will respond with pride and band more tightly together as a group. By attacking a person for the interests or values they hold, you re-enforce it as part of their identity. Its already happening. I see more firearms related stickers on cars and trucks today than I ever did ten years ago. Gun owners are banding together. This is why NRA membership is rising. This is why pro gun rallies are usually far larger than those by Mothers Demand Action.

It only worked with smoking because many smokers are addicted and wish they could quit. Those smokers agreed with the criticism and went along with it. This is not a good comparison for gun owners as there is not a large subsection of them that wants to 'quit'. They own guns because they want to own guns, not because of an addiction (ok, maybe a tiny fraction might qualify as addicted, but its not significant). Smoking was also something that the average person was inconvenienced with on a daily basis. This kept the issue from getting lost in the daily shuffle of people's lives. On any given day, very few people are directly negatively impacted by the prevalence of guns. This is why the issue fades away so quickly.

An adversarial approach is the reason it is so very difficult to make any headway. We aren't working with gun owners on the smaller items which could get wider support. The drive for improved background checks focuses on banning private sales or even creating a registration system; where instead we could work with them and open the background check system for use with those private sales. Safe storage programs would likely be very popular if it was done from the perspective of making proper storage containers more affordable / available. Instead of solely to block concealed carry, why are we not trying to encourage training programs so that those who do choose to carry are safer about it? I know I would feel safer if PA offered free safety training classes as part of their licensing process. When we talk about compromise on gun control, we usually see it as a perspective of any rights that gun owners retain is what we are 'giving' up in the deal. The gun crowd sees it only as more restrictions with no benefit to them, and are not willing to talk. The few items I listed here (opening up background checks to private sales, subsidized gun storage lock boxes, free training programs) are the types of things we should be offering up as part of any compromise.