Exploiting
Tragedy for Political Gain
I have to admit I did not make it all the way through
Wayne LaPierre’s statement Friday. The head of NRA spoke for about 15 minutes
from a prepared text and was twice interrupted by angry demonstrators who
demanded the head of the National Rifle Association “Stop killing our
children!” From LaPierre’s statement, it appears he is both a very good
strategist but, sadly, a man who is either incapable of or simply unwilling to engage in an honest, critical examination of the crisis in America arising from the guns his organization would protect.
What was apparent from the beginning in his statement was
that any discussion of a failed public policy surrounding guns was off the
table. LaPierre began by decrying those who would “exploit tragedy for
political gain,” assuring America that his organization’s primary concern was “the
safety of our nation's children.” So far, so good.
However, the focus on children was short-lived.
The pattern of NRA response historically in the wake of
mass-shootings has been to initially issue a statement of condolences to those
who have lost family members but to quickly follow that with an assertion that
“now is not the time” to discuss the policy implications of that carnage. Of
course, as in the popular song from the 1940s, Mañana, somehow the time for that discussion never seems to come,
thus revealing this as a thinly disguised defense strategy to protect privilege
through utilizing delay.
A second defense strategy the NRA has used historically has
been the use of diversionary tactics often involving scapegoats. And one didn’t
have to wait long Friday to hear that number warming up.
Monsters
Driven by Demons
LaPierre identified his targets in striking terms:
“The
truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters
— people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that
no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every
day.”
Indeed, they do, Mr. LaPierre. One wonders what kind of
demons drive the vision of gun advocates like yourself who appear incapable of
even considering the possibility that it might be their own attitudes and behaviors which create the carnage we all
abhor. One wonders what kind of monster would take a podium in the face of the
mass murders of 20 children and six of their teachers and argue that the unlimited
privilege which gun owners have enjoyed and presume to be their right, rooted
in a public policy which has clearly failed with catastrophic results, does not
urgently require reconsideration.
At the point LaPierre made that statement I found myself
angrily screaming at my television, “YOU are the monster!” And yet it’s precisely at times like
these that I realize that all of us have the potential to kill another human
being out of anger. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn has so aptly observed, “[T]he
line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes,
nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart --
and through all human hearts.” Had Mr. LaPierre been present in my living room I no doubt would have attempted to strangle him myself.
And that was the point I stopped listening.
Anthropologies
of Depravity
In all fairness I did come back to read the rest of his
statement. It is infinitely easier to deal with the words themselves without
having to watch them being delivered by a smug, angry white man observably
fearful of losing his unearned privilege. It seems clear to me that the
policies he advocates are, indeed, monstrous in their deadly results. But I also
believe there is more to this man than that. It’s not terribly credible to
presume that Wayne LaPierre gets up every morning and asks himself, “What
monstrous things can I say and do today?” even as that might be the end result
of what he ends up saying and doing.
His comments about being “possessed by voices and driven
by demons” are very telling. Many gun owners operate out of a negative
philosophical anthropology which presumes human beings to be dangerous,
untrustworthy, perhaps even demonic. It is not a coincidence that many of these
folks are also members of sectarian-spirited evangelical Protestant traditions,
descendants of John Calvin and company. This religious vision has long focused
on the radical individual before an angry, punishing deity and a human nature
rendered utterly depraved by archetypal events in the Garden of Eden. When one begins
from such a negative starting place, it’s not terribly surprising that everyone
can and, from this theological perspective, should
be seen as a potential enemy.
But fear tends to immobilize rational thinking. It also
tends to neutralize the human heart, immobilizing any semblance of empathy for
others. In all honesty, I saw little genuine concern for the children of
Newtown in LaPierre’s words or affect Friday. Instead, what I observed was a
white hot rage over the withering attacks his organization had sustained this
past week and an overpowering fear. That rage was only slightly cooler but
still palpable in the text itself as I read it this morning. The fear absolutely
leaps from the pages.
Fear, False
Dichotomies and Sophomoric Thinking
Mr. LaPierre has proved himself to be a master strategist
in defending an organization that represents just over 1 out every 100
Americans but successfully advances its interests at the expense of the rest of the population
at large. For that, he must be duly credited if for nothing else than the
efficaciousness of his methods.
But his thinking evidences a pronounced myopia that appears to make
it difficult – perhaps impossible - for him to even consider the possibility
that the interests he advances might ultimately prove destructive to others.
Such a reality would thus reveal himself
as the actual monster driven by demons of fear and his statement Friday an
unconscious - and no doubt unintentional - revelation of his own frightened inner state. Projection
always tends to be at least as revelatory of the projector as his targets.
There is also a decided brittleness in LaPierre’s
thinking which is readily revealed in statements like these:
“The
only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved
and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad
guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. ”
In introductory logic courses we teach our students about
a wide range of logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is the false dichotomy: Either X or Y. Such arguments often reveal either limitations of
conceptual awareness of other possibilities or, more often, the simple refusal
to consider them. They also evidence a tendency toward simplistic thinking. We
all want things to be as simple as possible, as Einstein noted. But as he also insisted,
our considerations should not require a subject to be seen in a simpler manner
than is possible. Beyond simple lies simplistic.
We expect some level of simplistic thinking from college
undergrads, hence the description of such fallacious thinking as sophomoric.
But when we begin to see an ongoing pattern of such thought in adults,
stubbornly resistant to all attempts to consider other possibilities than one’s
foregone conclusion and willing to actively ignore all evidence or arguments to
the contrary, we begin to suspect this might be a deeper problem.
William Perry, a scholar of cognitive function, observed
a pattern of developmental tendencies in human thinking capacities. He noted
that the structure of arguments advanced often revealed the given developmental
point from which they were being made. Perry found that the tendency to engage in black and white,
dualistic thinking is common to all human beings at very early stages of our cognitive development. But as human beings mature and become better educated, our
thinking tends to become more complex, nuanced, attentive to contextual
considerations.
While confronting black and white choices offered in
simple terms remains comforting to all of us, most of recognize fairly early on
that most things in life just aren’t that simple, particularly hotly debated
issues of policy. We also know deep in the back of our minds that even as we
would reduce complex issues to simplistic terms, we tend to sacrifice intellectual
honesty and ethical integrity for the comfort of an artificial certainty. This, in
turn, necessitates the operation of repression to push such awareness from our
conscious minds. The first person we lie to is our self.
Complexity
and Intellectual Courage
To his credit, LaPierre did point toward some of the
complexity in this crisis yesterday when he spoke of the lack of mental health
treatment in America (thank you, Mr. Reagan). He also pinpointed the feeding
frenzy surrounding these issues practiced by a mass media which has learned
that stimulating fear also stimulates viewership and thus exposure to the
consumer advertising of corporate sponsors. And he noted the normalization of
violence which feeds into this problem through entertainment media from video
games to the carnage which nightly presents itself as regular television
programming.
These are all aspects of the problem America must solve.
And LaPierre is correct when he points to them as facets of a deep-seated
problem. But where his arguments fail is the reduction of the options available
to address our national crisis to either providing armed guards in schools or
not. Not only is this a false dichotomy, it also evidences the intellectual
dishonesty of refusing to identify the elephant in the room – the failure of
the very gun policies which LaPierre is defending.
The reality is that we simply cannot deal with this
crisis until we recognize all the factors which have given rise to it. And in
our discussions of them, all the bluster of self-righteous indignation in the world cannot
overcome fundamental problems of intellectual dishonesty and intellectual
cowardice. If Wayne LaPierre wants to have any real intellectual or ethical
credibility, he will have to come clean with his fellow Americans about the
role that unlimited access to guns and the failure of a policy which has put
them into the hands of two out of three Americans plays in this crisis. Until
then, he is relegated to seeing the monsters driven by demons in the other that so clearly appear to haunt his own soul.
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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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