Moms and Guns
"Moms want gun control." I've been hearing and reading it for several days now, without even looking for it. "It's what they want for Mother's Day." Tin foil hat side of me thinks this phrase wave is not organic, but let's hush that side for a moment.
I'm a mom, and I want an end to violence and murder. I also want my fellow moms to stop accepting the talking points and data summaries that they are fed about the "number one cause of death of kids" and the "low-hanging fruit" of gun control that would end it. Because these summaries are not truthfully nuanced to help you reason your way through anything. They are chosen for the way they make your gut lurch.
To call guns the number one cause of death for youth requires a very large umbrella. It includes robberies gone wrong, gang violence, and suicide. Of gun-related deaths of youth, 0.5% are mass public shootings. Call me what you will, but this to me is an incredibly important distinction! It demonstrates how ineffective most gun laws on the table would be at reducing each of these subtypes of deaths. And yet, if you just clump them all together and call it gun death, you can garner a lot of public support for those same proposed laws.
Selecting a mainstream media outlet at random, you are almost guaranteed to read the exact same line about there being "200 mass shootings this year." Every citation is of the same one non-profit, and the definition used to generate that talking point is deliberately over-inclusive. It is constructed to make you feel like Parkland happened 200 times this year, when 95% of those instances could have been drug deals that went south.
I also consider it important to recognize that the percent of mass public killings in the US that are mass public shootings is 12%. Which means, 88% of the time, the murderers are choosing other methods that are just as effective. They just don't fit as well together as a repeatable narrative with an actionable theme (background checks for driver's licenses anyone? ).
I hate what is happening just as much as any of the moms who want gun control. But I also refuse to have my heartstrings manipulated while the same political forces that break us all apart convince us more and more that we "need them" to make things right. We have an isolation, enmity, despair, and emptiness problem. Government is much more likely to thrive off of that than to relieve it.
And for the record, most states (including Texas) already require background checks.
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