Engage & Participate

Write a position piece that seeks a "both/and" approach - retain the 2nd amendment right for gun ownership, but include public safety measures to control, monitor and enforce safety standards, like as done with driver's license. The operation of a motor vehicle causes ~ 50,000 deaths annually, and it is heavily regulated but is also a "right" for most, but not all people 16 years of age that qualify. The key is a standard of qualification. The 2nd amendment absolutists think that any breathing human has the "right" to own, carry and use a gun anywhere indiscriminately. In what other aspect of living in civil society is that right given?

I agree, Jim Loving. It would need to acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, the polarities involved between important values - e.g., individual rights vs. responsibility to others, liberty vs. freedom from harm, preserving what's good vs. fixing what's wrong, profit motive vs. public good, etc. - and also highlight the common ground that already exists (most Americans favor gun safety measures). Beyond that, it would need to find a way to address the power of the gun lobby and also of misinformation.

Kevin Mahoney, thanks for initiating this question. Here's my passionate take: I may modify the following assessment based on others' responses, but it seems to me that gun violence in the U.S., compared to issues like climate change, AI, mass migration, and liberal democracy (many of which are connected...I know), involves far less complexity. The policy solutions are clear; Democrats have been proposing them for years; and Republicans have been blocking/filibusturing them. This is not one of those issues where policy solutions require integrating partial truths from both parties. On gun safety, unlike many other issues, the Democrats have it covered. To me, this is what makes the lack of congressional action so heartbreaking. Consider all the countries that don't have our gun violence problem. None of them have developmental politics, and they don't need it. On a policy level, modernist solutions will work absolutely fine. That's why so many other countries have solved this problem. It's not that complex. Cultural evolution matters in the U.S. to vote into federal office more people who will agree to these very simple modernist solutions. It's not needed to create better policy solutions themselves. To me, unlike climate change and those issues, from a pure policy perspective, the Democratic Party's position would work absolutely well. It already has integrated into its gun safety policies 2nd amendment rights and other liberty values. It has done the both/and thing. It distinguishes between different types of firearms, offers reasonable gun safety measures, etc. There is little to nothing that the GOP (or the traditional worldview) has to offer in terms of partial truths to integrate into this policy picture that the Democratic Party hasn't already included. Again, cultural evolution matters for this issue, but not the same way it does for more complex issues. Folks, if you have a dissenting view, I'm open to hearing it.

Here’s a pretty fascinating and radical look at the history and how the gun issue has gotten distorted over the years. fb.watch/de20wfis2q/

Worthwhile read on this from James Fallows: fallows.substack.com/p/the-empty-rituals-of-a-gun-massacre?s=r

We've managed to avoid telling our now 10 year old son about any of the school shootings since he's been alive. They didn't talk about it at his old school in Oregon nor did he hear about it from other kids. We thought he might hear about it today from his teacher at his new school, so we told him after dinner. He rarely reacts strongly to any news, but he was in tears. He happens to be in fourth grade and just celebrated his tenth birthday, like one of the girls whose lives was lost and whose sister posted a photo (none of which he knows about).

A BETTER MODEL ...Those who want the great experiment to succeed must offer a vision that is both realistic about today’s challenges and sanguine about the possibility of a tomorrow worth fighting for. The way to do all this is to follow three core principles. Diverse democracies should aspire to a form of political solidarity that is based on greater empathy between its citizens. They should celebrate when the cultures of their members influence one another. And, most important, they should try to build a future in which race and religion matter less—not because more people will deny the role they now play in the real world but because fewer people will suffer disadvantage on the basis of their ascriptive identity. 1. More Empathy and Deeper Solidarity: It is naive to think that humans naturally understand one another’s experiences. If you have never gone hungry, you will find it hard to imagine what it is like to live without reliable access to food. And if you are part of a dominant majority group, you may be oblivious to what it is like to fear that others will treat you with derision or hostility because of the color of your skin. Advocates of the challenger ideology are right to say that there are serious barriers to mutual understanding in a diverse democracy—and that many of their compatriots are naive about the difficulties this raises. But though a member of one group may never be able to perceive the world in exactly the same way as a member of another group, it is a mistake to give up on the promise of effective communication. A man need not have experienced sexual harassment to recognize its injustice. Nor does someone who is white need to have “lived experience” with racism to recognize how vile it is. This is why, far from giving up on the idea of mutual understanding, diverse democracies should double down on inspiring empathy. The citizens of diverse democracies should be highly attuned to the ever-present possibility that they might be ignorant about one another’s experiences, or mistrustful of one another’s motives. But they should insist that they can, if they do the hard work of actually listening to one another, come to feel a deep compassion. That also implies a different vision of political solidarity than the one that has, of late, been embraced by many activists. Men are capable of fighting for a society that treats women fairly because they believe that anything else would violate their own moral standards. Similarly, many whites want to make their democracies better for members of ethnic minorities because of their own aspirations for the kind of country in which they seek to live. Citizens are unlikely to stand up for the interests of an out-group because they have been told to defer to its views. But they are capable of acts of real courage and altruism when they believe that their own ideas about what is just are being violated. And that is precisely why diverse democracies must insist on an ambitious model of political solidarity. 2. The Virtue of Mutual Influence: It is a long tradition for writers and politicians to denounce the ways in which their nations change because of immigration or other forms of contact with the outside world. In the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner inveighed against the deleterious effect that French culture was supposedly having on his home country. In the early twentieth century, many Americans grew concerned that the influx of Catholic immigrants from countries like Italy would change the country for the worse. And today, politicians like India’s Narendra Modi are lambasting outside influences, from Halloween to Valentine’s Day, as dangerous attacks on the cultural integrity of their nations. If the great experiment is to succeed, diverse democracies have to reject this form of cultural purism. Cultures are fluid constructs that reflect the ever-changing choices and predilections of their members, not static entities that, like a butterfly display at New York’s Museum of Natural History, must be preserved with chloral hydrate. Newcomers can’t be expected to integrate into existing cultural practices without having a chance to make their own contributions. Diverse democracies will not, and should not, turn into homogeneous societies in which every citizen has come to embrace the same set of tastes and preferences... 3. An Emphasis on What We Share: Even in a diverse democracy with a meaningfully shared culture, many citizens will strongly identify with their own subnational groups. For the most part, they are likely to continue practicing the cultural rites of their ancestors or to worship the gods of their parents. A liberal society that recognizes what sociologists call the “meaning-making” role that cultural and religious communities play in the lives of most people should celebrate, not oppose, that pluralism. Similarly, categories of ascriptive identity like race are likely to retain real significance for the foreseeable future. In countries that have a long history of domination, a racial lens will remain important for examining to what extent present conditions perpetuate these injustices. And even once the conditions that brought them into existence no longer persist, groups that have long been discriminated against on the basis of their race are likely to retain forms of political solidarity and cultural cohesion. And yet diverse democracies should never waver from a vision of the future in which ascriptive identities play a smaller, not a larger, role than they do now. They should aim to construct societies in which people of different groups have sufficient contact to understand one another’s concerns and care about one another’s fate. And they should try to remedy historical injustices to such an extent that a racial lens becomes less important—not because people ignore its continued relevance, but because it really does structure reality to a lesser degree. Mounk, Yascha. The Great Experiment (pp. 187-192). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Very interesting. It sure reads that way to me. Does Mounk have a name for the "better model?"

Darren Shetler, this is wonderful, thank you. To Mounk's "Better Model" we can add the value of developmental scaffoldings for each developmental stages from childhood through adult development. The Bildung concept that Lene Rachel Andersen writes about is instructive and inspiring in this regard. It provides a HOW

I really wonder about the outlets that score lower than InfoWars.

Are there any meaningful shifts that you notice?

I get an AP feed which I like a lot.

Interesting chart. Wonder how and who decides what goes where.

Up near the top middle you'll find KVVU FOX5 which is a local news station in Las Vegas, NV - of which I was a director in the early 2000's. lol Pretty cool.

So misleading. As if everything in the center/middle is "safe" without bias. The bias of the middle is almost as dangerous as that of the so-called "right." Truthfully, nothing they place on the "right" is really rightwing. It's manufactured, designed to make the viewer feel afraid. That's not "conservative." That's manufactured outrage.