Blame the Victim and Privatize the Grief

If You're Wrong, Go with the Big Lie

June 3, 2018. I got my t-shirt at 22nd and Spruce.

There's a well-worn playbook that's been used by the tobacco and asbestos industries and now seems to be an integral part of virtually any reactionary movement that deals with ideas. The basic principle is quite simple: Deny the premise. If scientists are saying that tobacco causes cancer, find some scientists who are willing to disagree. If argument doesn't work, go buy some scientific research that backs your side. If the war goes on long enough, found think tanks and give your best propagandists fancy, academic-sounding titles. (For background on this topic, see Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin, 2010, chapters 2 and 3. See also Jill Lepore, "The Lie Factory," The New Yorker, September 24, 2012.)

There's another template that came to my mind recently, after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Back in the 1920s, a new-fangled contraption called the automobile was busy slaughtering children in the streets of our nation's cities. And many people were unhappy about that, and they protested - there were marches, all kinds of things. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

The auto industry and its allies were taken aback by this uproar, and so they organized on a number of fronts. In particular they got state legislatures to change the traffic laws to make it illegal for pedestrians to cross in the middle of the street. This was a novel idea, and so "motordom," as it was called, didn't just sell it to the lawmakers. It also mounted a huge public relations campaign, even inventing the term "jaywalking."

With the law on their side, the auto lobby could then blame the victim. Little Johnny shouldn't have chased that ball out into the street. Or, what was he doing wearing dark clothes at dusk? On it goes, and it still goes on today. When a Duck boat driver killed a pedestrian down by the Reading Terminal Market, here in Philly, there was much tsk-tsking about how the pedestrian lacked sufficient situational awareness.

I wish I could say that the media have not been complicit in all this, but they are. Let's face it: Car ads are a huge category for print, television, and online media. Last year, for instance, a local television station did its best to blame a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk in suburban Abington. (For a story on this, click here.)

In the end that driver was charged. In the Philadelphia Duck case, it was the insurance companies that finally shut the company down.

Okay, so blaming the victim is the setup punch. And here's the money punch. Motordom can say, with a straight face, that death on our roads is a private matter, not a concern of public policy. Mothers just need to do a better job keeping their children inside, playing violent video games and getting fat. The government doesn't need to do anything. Shouldn't do anything.

And by the way, speed limits are an un-American infringement of citizens' God-given rights. So our political class needs to balance freedom and death.

And the same thing happens with guns. Here the NRA has the advantage of the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court has obligingly interpreted in a profoundly screwy way. So they've got the law.

But I don't think they're doing very well on blaming the victim, and we need to make sure that that continues to be the case. Because if they ever do get traction on that, then I think they'll have a good shot at privatizing the grief and removing the issue from the public agenda.

Fortunately, I think the NRA is playing a weak hand. Wayne LaPierre's famous statement that "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun" is problematic on a number of levels. First, we now have many instances where a good guy with a gun was present and failed to prevent mayhem. Second, there are alternatives, like seeing that the bad guy doesn't have a gun. In a school setting, LaPierre's dictum also conjures the image of giving guns to kindergartners. Even the idea of arming teachers takes many people to a place they don't want to go.

At its core, the NRA's vision is profoundly dystopian, and their argument for irresponsible freedom only appeals to certain people.

That leaves them with raw power. But power in America almost always comes cloaked with virtue. Naked, it's a tough sell.

I think that leaves a very large gap for the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas to rush through, and I think the rest of us should follow. Call us the Utopians, or maybe the Shining City on a Hill Mob.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Guns Without Responsibility

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

So what does the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral have to do with gun control laws? Quite a lot, it turns out. The Earps and their friend Doc Holliday were actually enforcing a local ordinance against the Clantons et al. -- an ordinance that prohibited the carrying of weapons in good old Tombstone, Arizona.

It turns out that quite a few Old West towns prohibited carrying guns.  I found out about this from Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA who has written a book called Gunfight:  The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W.W. Norton, 2011).

Winkler is middle of the road, as gun things go.  He's okay with the individual right to a gun -- the core of Justice Scalia's Supreme Court opinion -- but he begs to point out that gun control has been around as long as the right to have a gun.

He also points out that the fear of gun confiscation is not entirely a paranoid fantasy:  It has happened in this country.  From the early days of the Republic and on through Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan to Ronald Reagan and the Black Panthers, gun control laws were used to disarm blacks.

Which puts RR in the odd position of being a conservative saint who favored gun control while he was governor of California, saying, "There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."  

The National Rifle Association also used to support gun control.  In the 1930's the organization's president, Karl T. Frederick, told Congress, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns.  I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

Justice Scalia's opinion turns on the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, and Winkler points out that America in the late eighteenth century had all kinds of gun controls:  "At the time of the founding, laws required the armed citizenry to report with their guns to militia musters, where weapons would be inspected and the citizens trained.  Authorities often required that militia guns be registered.  There were laws requiring gunpowder to be stored safely, even though the rules made it more difficult for people to load their guns quickly to defend themselves against attack."

The history of guns in this country is complicated, and we need to look at the whole picture.  Justice Scalia didn't, and his opinion suffers from that.  He wrote that, unlike handguns, machine guns could be restricted because they are "dangerous and unusual weapons" that are not "in common use."  And he ignored the fact that the federal government effectively banned machine guns in the 1930's, so naturally there are not many of them in civilian hands.