GUNSENSE

THREE ARGUMENTS THE NRA MAKES IN THE WAKE OF A MASS SHOOTING—AND WHY THEY ARE FALSE

After every mass shooting in America, and depending tragically on how many are killed, our nation erupts in a polarizing debate about how the shooting could have been avoided. The NRA sees it as an opportunity to further their agenda of selling more guns to more people in more places.

Gun-violence prevention groups point to a country with a flawed background-check system and a love affair with the "assault rifle," which for ten years (1994-2004) in our country was banned.

The NRA's message is consistent:  more guns in the hands of more people will discourage and potentially stop these attacks. The gun-violence prevention groups consistently disagree.  

Who's correct, and what are the facts?

Here are three arguments the gun lobbies traditionally make after a mass-shooting, with the counter-arguments following them.  President Trump's Twitter stream made versions of these arguments today. You will hear them from our NRA-sponsored lawmakers in Congress, as well as in their counterparts in our state legislatures.

• More guns in more places will discourage these mass shootings.  More research is needed (and the NRA has done everything in their power to frustrate that research), but the numbers we do have show, in fact, that mass shooters ignore the possibility of facing an armed civilian. Once a person has decided to commit such a violent act, these kinds of logical considerations fall to the wayside.
  • The counter-argument: In fact, more guns not only fail to prevent these shootings, they increase the amount of gun violence in the community at large.  More guns, more gun violence. Details here. 
• Gun-free zones will always invite mass shooters.  Another version of the previous argument.  You will hear our legislators use the standard NRA rhetoric:  they will speak of "crazy killers," "sicko shooters"—our President's phrase—and "soft targets."  But in fact, it has been shown that school-shooters, specifically, do not choose their targets based on whether or not they are gun-free zones. Other considerations are far more important to them. 
  • The counter-argument:  In fact, these school shooters often return to schools where they experienced emotional trauma and never consider whether it has been designated a "gun-free zone" or not.  Details here.
• The increase in mass-shootings in America is due to violent video games, a decrease in family structures, a general breakdown in American society, or mental illness.  The idea here is to take the focus away from the guns, to stop us from looking at our flawed background-check system and the proliferation of assault rifles, and to insure that our gun manufacturers keep their bottom lines healthy.
  
  • The counter-argument:  The reason for the increase in our mass-shootings is embarrassingly simple.  Among developed nations, America offers the easiest access to lethal weapons, such as an assault rifle, of any country in the world.  And if the NRA has its way, that access will become easier and easier.  Details here.

The NRA has spent decades perfecting their propaganda regarding gun-violence in America. It is bold, loud, and often false.  Now, if we want to insure the safety of our students and citizens, we must begin to gather the information that will allow us to construct our own responses, based on facts and an insistence on public safety. Many groups are already doing this, and have been doing so for a long time. We are making progress, and with your help, we will continue to do so.

For an introduction to gun-violence prevention, and a list of those organizations that are doing such good work, see my piece, "Getting Started with Gun-Violence Prevention."

 

AFTER PARKLAND: TWO PIECES YOU NEED TO READ

After every mass shooting, a steadily growing number of Americans—concerned, activated, enraged—ask the inevitable and necessary question:  What can I do?

It's a good question, and two years ago, I posted a piece that offered advice to those who wanted to become part of the solution.  You can find it here.  It's still relevant.  And I encourage you to contact one of these organizations; they have carefully laid out ways for you to help that will fit both your schedule and your level of commitment.  We can't all be full-time activists, and the best organizations realize this.

My guess is that each one of you has wondered how our country has arrived at this particular place—more guns than citizens, more mass shootings per capita than any other developed country, more legislators opining about the horrific nature of these slaughters while piously claiming that now is not the time to discuss these senseless tragedies.  The NRA and America have a long and complicated history—much too long for me to address in a blog posting—but there are two mini-histories, if you will, that are deeply relevant to our current problem with guns, and they're not complicated.  

If you take the time to read these two pieces, you will understand the broad outlines of the two trends that have most shaped the problem that we now confront.

The first piece here was published just after the Las Vegas shooting, and it's titled, "The NRA Wasn't Always Against Gun Restrictions."  You want to pay special attention to what happened to this organization in 1971, which is detailed in the section, "The Hardliners Took Over the NRA after an NRA Member Was Killed by Federal Agents." 

The name to remember is Harlon Carter, a Texas lawyer who turned the NRA into a conservative, pro-gun, anti-immigration lobby.

And by the way, if you're a fan of the Drive-By Truckers, you'll want to have a look at this video of the band's single, "Ramon Casiano," that details the murder of Casiano by Carter.  Carter is never mentioned by name, but it's a powerful send-up of the founder of the NRA's violent campaign, as well as the racism that powers it.

The second piece, "A Confirmed Decline in Hunter Participation Should Be a Call to Action for Sportsmen," tracks in effect the decline in sales of traditional hunting firearms.  Faced with this declining revenue, arms manufacturers had to appeal to another demographic simply because Americans have been steadily losing interest in hunting and the firearms that traditionally accompany that sport.

The argument the gun-lobby made was fairly simple:  you don't buy shotguns nowadays to shoot quail; you need military-style weapons to repel the hordes of heavily armed invaders that are currently planning to trample the borders of our country, our homes, our schools. 

An essentially militaristic advertising campaign and the fear-baiting that provided its fuel—it struck home with many Americans, and the gun industry began to recover its losses.

So—a growing lack of interest in hunting, which led to a drop in traditional firearms revenue, corrected by an NRA that has become increasingly militaristic in its appeal to self-defense and closely aligned with the gun manufacturers whose bottom line they have made their number one priority. 

And of course buying the politicians who will support their violent agenda—that too is a priority, and we have learned sadly that many of our legislators will simply work for the highest bidder.  That is old news, but it is always tragic news.

In short, we're confronting an unholy alliance between the NRA and the new demographic they have spent over forty years creating to bolster a revenue problem. The gun-lobbies have a head-start, and they are very good at what they do, but reasonable solutions appeal to reasonable people, and I still believe that we are ultimately a reasonable nation.  

We will prevail in this struggle because more and more Americans are becoming involved every day, and they are not giving up.  Patience and commitment at a sustainable level are the keys to success. 

Here in Arkansas, for example, Moms Demand has grown from a fledgling group of women in Little Rock to a broader-based organization that now has representation in many parts of our state, and they have accomplished this in only a couple of years.

And remember, the mid-term elections are coming.  And voting is activism in its purest form. 

MANY THANKS FOR YOUR HELP ON AR HB 1249!

As most of you have heard, HB1249, Representative Collins’ bill to put guns on our campuses without allowing our Boards to opt out, passed through the House Judiciary Committee this morning.

This was expected.

The crowd in opposition to the bill was overflowing. UAPD Police Chief Gahagans led off the testimony against the bill, and he was extraordinary: measured, authoritative, a true and rare expert in every sense of the word. President Welch, from ASU testified, as well as President Bobbitt. Everyone provided forceful and credible opposition. The community’s position on this unpopular bill is clear, and I want personally to thank everyone who joined our efforts. (I was unable to go because of teaching obligations, and so have now mastered the skill of lecturing and checking messages simultaneously!)

The bill will now go to the House floor, and then next week on to the Senate. It hasn’t yet been assigned a Senate committee.

In my opinion, it is very important that we see our efforts in a larger context. As I have often said—and so speak only for myself—my primary goal has always been to leave a public and articulate record of my disapproval of this destructive and dangerous bill, and together, we have done this and are continuing to do it.

This record will be vital as we approach the mid-terms in 2018, the next legislative session in 2019, and of course the national election in 2020. We are all constructing important narratives that will shape opinion as we move forward, and the fact that we are able to do this together is significant.

We will, of course, do everything that we can to make our opinions known as the bill passes into the Senate next week, and eventually the Governor’s office, if it finally lands there. Our Governor has expressed his support of the opt-out clause, but nothing is certain, especially since his veto, if it were exercised, only requires a simple majority to override.

But finally, I want to thank this organized and dedicated community. Opposition to the gun bill now is the strongest that it has ever been in this state, and I would hope that together we can parlay this energy into the kind of change, in other areas, that our state deserves.

So again, thank you very much for your support!

A PLEA FOR CIVILITY: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY GUN-LOVING FRIENDS

Dear Gun-Lovers:

Let me speak personally to you, without statistics, without affiliation, without insult, without condescension.

Without history, in effect, which is impossible, I know, but worth trying.

I want to speak to you person-to-person. You know what I mean: the bill-paying, family-raising, slightly disgruntled, wish-things-could-be-better person who, if we were stranded on a lifeboat together, would find a way, if we had two oars, to row together toward a safer place. I would look at you, and you would look at me, and we would know what we had to do, and we would do it.

That's the person who's writing this letter, and that's the person I want to address.

I know, in fact, that you are such a person most of the time—wanting and willing to help your fellow citizen when the chips are down. But like me, you have opinions that often divide us. Like me, you want your opinions to be right. Even better, you want them to be founded on facts. Why? Because you want your opinions to be founded on something that can't be overturned. And if they can't be overturned, then they must be right, and by extension, you too must be right. 

After all, being right is a good feeling. No doubt about it.

But I want to suggest that being right at the present moment is less useful than being civil during every moment that we have left together. 

Why? Because I continue to believe that we can row this boat together; or I believe that trying to row this boat together makes sense, that it is our last option, even though Congress tells us every day, every hour, every minute, that co-operation is fatal to the health of the Republic. Together, we must stop listening to Congress and listen to each other—with civility. 

Remember: many of our politicians today are exactly those people that Washington, Madison, and Jefferson (you're always quoting them) warned us against. They are destroying the spirit of co-operation, the very spirit we need now to solve our problems. You know that, and I know that.

The problem is that the gun debate uses statistics, and you have your set of statistics, and I have mine, and we toss them back and forth at each other, as we have done, for years. But statistics, when they appear in polemical settings, are often designed to polarize, and now, at the current moment, this polarization is killing us, literally, every day. 

It works like this. I don't change my mind because I have confidence in my statistics, and you don't change yours because you have faith in your numbers. The only thing left to do then is to call each other "stupid," or "ignorant," or "libtard," or "ammosexual," or "racist," or "sexist," or if we're feeling compassionate, we might go with "liberal" or "conservative" because each label softly offends the other one.

And offending is what we're trying to do.

So have we wasted our time? Probably. 

Maybe there are those who haven't made up their minds on the issues that you and I have long ago decided, and maybe they're quietly watching our back-and-forth, and maybe they will finally embrace one position or the other based on our shouting match. 

But I doubt it. Why? Because uncivil rhetoric appeals only to those who have already committed both to the position and the attack-language associated with that position. If we ever do convince someone who hasn't already formed an opinion, the key ingredient in that act of persuasion, along with statistics, will likely be civility.

I believe that. The problem is I don't know if you do. 

But I have hope. I'll say it again, my new mantra: you and I have much in common because, as I said at the beginning of my letter, you're probably a family-raising, bill-paying American, and so we have much to lose at this current impasse if we don't respect each other's opinions when they differ.

To quote the great British folk-singer, Roy Harper: "We're both fighting for the very same breath, and what did you say were your reasons?"

So I think we should both re-boot, and start again with the premise of civility.

We already agree that we have important decisions to make regarding the future of guns in our culture, and we're going to have to do it together. Civility is not simply another word for "manners;" civility is about civilization, and civilization is a group project, and civilization can perish or prosper. We need to commit to that project, particularly that project of prosperity. And we need to do it now. And we need to do it together. 

If you don't think civility is a revolutionary concept, if you think it's something your parents preached, or your teachers insisted on in class, then you're not paying attention. 

Civility, wielded at the right time, is the revolution. And I believe that the right time is right now.

Very few people are doing it, and so we could, together, make history.

But I can't do it alone. And neither can you. 

That's the beauty of it.

Thanks for your time, and your civility,

Gunsense

SHANNON WATTS & MOMS DEMAND IN LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

Shannon Watts (center), Jamie Ford (far right), and a few of the dedicated women of Moms Demand, Little Rock.

On Wednesday, April 27, I had the good fortune to hear Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, in a question-and-answer session at The Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I became active in the gun-violence prevention movement in January 2013 when our state legislators attempted to pass a campus-carry bill, and since Shannon had founded Moms Demand a year earlier, on December 15, 2012, I got to know her through various social-media channels.  But I had never met her.

Having met her, and spoken with her now, I see why Shannon is a powerful advocate for gun-violence prevention. First, she has no hidden agendas—she is not secretly attempting to confiscate firearms from American gun-owners; she isn't attempting to vilify gun-owners (in fact, her organization's members include gun-owners); and she isn't even attempting to repeal the Second Amendment.

She is simply trying to make America a safer place to live, work, and raise children. The organization's platform is difficult to criticize, once it's understood. (And the gun-lobbyists have worked overtime to misrepresent it.)

In fact, her major initiatives find broad support among the American public:  she advocates for universal background checks on all purchases of firearms, and she proposes to do this by closing the loopholes on gun-show and internet gun-sales, where background checks are not required.  (Amy Schumer, in fact, has weighed in on this enormous problem in another of her biting, hilarious videos. You can, and must, view it here.)

For the record, though, 90% of the American public support these proposals, as well as 75% of the NRA's membership. And gun-owners in general overwhelmingly support them as well.

Shannon also advocates for safe-storage of all firearms within the home, a simple and preventive measure that would stop the rash of child-shootings that are now part of our daily headlines—shootings that are routinely ignored by the national media.

The problem, of course, as Shannon said, lies with our politicians who continue to support bills that the public opposes, and they do so because they are paid to do it by the NRA.  It isn't news, it isn't complicated, but it is formidable: money and politics make powerful and, at times, destructive allies.

But 91 people in America die from gunshot wounds every day, and Moms Demand, like most every American, believes that this figure is a national embarrassment.  So, the organization is working to decrease that number, and they have been very successful to date in building a campaign with both short and long-term goals.  And remember, the NRA has been working its agenda for 30 years, and Moms Demand has been around for a little over four years.  Their impact has been little short of miraculous.

Of course, Moms Demand is part of a network of gun-violence prevention groups, such as the Brady Campaign, whose roots extend back to the 70's, but Shannon's organization, as its name implies, focuses on mothers (although everyone is welcome), and as a result has a distinctly grass-roots feel to it that is designed to allow even the busiest Americans to participate in meaningful ways, often through a few minutes at the keyboard using social media or on the phone calling an elected official. 

The success of Moms Demand in uniting mothers at this fundamental level was obvious in Little Rock. I knew many of these women previously through social-media connections, but had never met them.  Jamie Ford, Jaimee Alverson, Kat Koran Hills, Austin Gelder Bailey, Julie Dunekacke Jaeger, Shelley Adams—and others whose names I should, but can't recall—are working quietly in Little Rock, and well beyond, to make our country a safer place. 

The important thing to note about Moms Demand, as an organization devoted to reform through political channels, is that Shannon has insisted that no action taken on behalf of gun-violence-prevention is too small.  One tweet, strategically hash-tagged, will have an impact.  As her organization has grown, she has kept that message in the foreground, and this tactic has served the movement well.

It's also important to articulate one of the unspoken assumptions behind the success of Moms Demand:  the horrific and inexcusable levels of gun-violence in America are so clear and obvious that when one American becomes aware of these levels, the gun-violence prevention movement has gained another supporter. 

So, Moms Demand, first of all, is about raising awareness, and that can be done with just a few clicks a day. Their website is full of helpful suggestions about how anyone can do this, and once you become involved with this group of talented women, you will find solid guidance about getting further involved with the movement at a level that you can sustain. And that is one of the reasons the movement has grown:  sustainable involvement is the focus.

Anyone can make a difference.  It's an obvious, simple, and often overlooked truth. But it's also a profound truth.

Historical aside:  Gandhi repeatedly said the same thing about nonviolence—embrace it only to the extent that you can sustain it.  Sustainability is essential to a successful social action, and Shannon clearly knows this.

So finally thanks to Shannon Watts, thanks to Jamie Ford, who oversees the organization of several states in this region, and thanks to all the women that I met in Little Rock who are working to make Arkansas a safer state, at times against heavy odds. While resisting gun-legislation in a red state is a multi-faceted operation, Moms Demand is in the fight with us in a big way.  They have extremely smart, energetic, and dedicated workers, and I am thankful that they are here.

Now, if we could just get a Fayetteville chapter started!

REMEMBERING SANDY HOOK THREE YEARS LATER

Amidst all of the tributes for Sandy Hook that will take place today, I would point to only one thing: our clear need to develop the space for an ongoing civil discourse about gun-violence and its effect on American life. Period.

There will always be divisions, anger, heated exchanges, but we must also have moments of reciprocated respect and civility. Moments—we can start with those, and only those.

Charles Blow in his New York Times op-ed today is already calling for such a demilitarized zone of discussion, and I'll close with his plea:

I thought of how productive it would be if more people with discordant views on gun regulations could have as civil a discussion as I had with my brother — full of mutual respect, adults disagreeing but not attempting to demonize, honestly searching for solutions.

The gun lobby poisons these conversations. It pumps out and promotes a never-ending stream of worst-case scenarios until it builds a level of fear and paranoia that only profits gun makers and grinds all progress to a halt.

So if you're concerned about gun-violence in this country, you might make room on your list of talking-points for civility and productive discourse:  ask for it when it seems to have disappeared, and cease the conversation when it refuses to return.

That's my resolution for the New Year, which nowadays begins on December 14.

3 HOPEFUL SIGNS THAT AMERICA'S GETTING GUNSENSE

After the Umpqua Community College shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, which occurred on October 1 and left ten dead and seven wounded, America sat up and noticed.  

As we always do.  

We were shocked, and we said so, and we prayed for the victims, and we denounced our legislators.

Since then, Mass Shooting Tracker has registered ten more mass shootings (fewer than one a day), and while these incidents received little coverage, our country seems to be growing increasingly impatient with the NRA's stranglehold on our politicians.  

Last night, as I stumbled on these postings, I entertained the hope that maybe, just maybe, the prevention of gun-violence in this country is inching its way up the importance-scale in the lives of everyday Americans—what the statisticians call the "saliency" factor.  

So it's time to share some good news.  Here are three recent indications that we are making, in fact, real progress toward real solutions in preventing the senseless gun-violence in this country that many are now comparing to a disease. I'd recommend that you follow the links and read the articles because they contain a lot of important information that I couldn't include in this piece. Plus, you'll start to feel hopeful, and we all need that.

1. A recent Gallup poll found that 55% of Americans support tighter laws surrounding the purchase of firearms.  This figure represents a sharp rise of eight points from last year, and registers a year-long movement toward support for stricter controls.  At the very least, this shows that the NRA's campaign to loosen our laws is no longer winning the hearts and minds of the American people.
2. A study of the NRA's membership reveals that its constituency is moving toward extinction, or irrelevancy (only 7% of American gun-owners now belong to the organization).  Largely white, male, rural, and comparatively uneducated, this demographic is being statistically diminished in the American population by the growth of Black, Hispanic, and to a lesser degree, Asian populations.  The bad news for the NRA is that these groups support strict gun-control by substantial majorities. Add to these populations, the majority of other Americans who support stricter controls on firearms, and the NRA's future begins to resemble the Brontosaurus—large, unwieldy, and harmless.
3. California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom recently unveiled a ballot initiative that, most significantly, would require background checks for the purchase of ammunition as well as ban possession of "large capacity" magazines. Most importantly, I would point to the fact that Newsom is explicitly taking on the gun lobbyists in his state, basing a political career on it, and bypassing the politicians who have been purchased by the NRA.  He is trying to float this initiative because he believes the people of his state are ready for these changes. It's a creative work-around that must be giving nightmares to the NRA.  This much is clear:  Newsom now considers the NRA to be both vulnerable and aligned against the interests of the people of California.  Even twelve months ago, this initiative would have seemed improbable, at least, if not impossible, and as we all know, as California goes . . . 

So in the wake of the horrific shootings that crowd our daily calendar, is it overly optimistic to hope that the American people are waking up?

Is it too much to claim that we are realizing that the will of a distinct minority can no longer indulge its interests and line its pockets while the majority of the country suffers the devastating consequences of gun-violence at such a high and unjustifiable level?

I don't think so.

I think our country is righting itself once again, as it always has, and we can be proud of the hard work that many have undertaken to move us toward real and equitable solutions to this national problem.

Thanks to everyone who has helped! We are making progress.

HB1077: HOW TO PASS AN UNWANTED BILL & WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

I have just learned that there is a chance that #HB1077, Representative Charlie Collins' bill to put guns on our state college campuses will be voted by the general Senate out of the Senate Judiciary committee, where it faced substantial resistance.

The Senate has very different rules from the House, and an unpopular bill can be shielded from public scrutiny by using this desperate, and essentially undemocratic, tactic.

If this happens, the bill will then go to the Senate floor where it will pass. 

I have also been told that this might happen as early as tomorrow.

Here is what you need to know:

1. The bill is being moved out of committee to avoid public scrutiny and opinion. The sponsors' experience in the House committee taught them a very important lesson: the Arkansas faculty, staff, students, and administrators do not want this bill.
2. Further revelation of this fact exposes the legislation for what it is: an NRA intrusion into Arkansas higher education.
3. They have chosen to do this during Spring Break, hoping that the affected constituency would not notice.
4. This represents a failure of leadership on many levels, too many to enumerate at this time. So now we must step up.
5. It is important as we move forward that we leave this historical record of our resistance to this bill—Representative Collins has said publicly on numerous occasions that if this bill passes, he will then consider a student-carry bill in the next session (2017). These moves are all taken from the NRA playbook, and we have to compile publicly accessible records of our resistance to the minority, though well funded, opinion. 

Here is what you need to do:

1. If you have a Twitter account, please tweet your resistance. Include primarily #HB1077 as a hashtag, and then as you have room, #arleg, #arplx, #NoCampusCarry; and RT similar tweets that embody your opinion. TWEETS MATTER—THEY ARE READ!
2. Send an email to our senators immediately. Here is their email list; you can copy and paste:

 [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Thanks in advance for your help. We can make a difference simply be leaving a record.

 

HOW DO YOU DEFINE HOME? GUN VIOLENCE ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT

 James Gilligan, one of this country's foremost authorities on violence, writes:

The use of violence as a means of resolving conflict between persons, groups, and nations is a strategy we learn first at home. All of our basic problem-solving, problem-exacerbating, and problem-creating strategies, for living and dying, are learned first at home. (From Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, p. 5).

For many unfortunate women and children, home is a place that defies our common conception of the word—comfort, security, refuge. For these women and children, home is a very dangerous place to live. The numbers are clear:

1. In a study of 23 high-income nations, 87% of the children under the age of 15 killed by guns lived in the United States.
2. More than half of our youth who commit suicide do so with a gun obtained from their home. And more often than not, with a gun that belonged to their parents.
3. In 2010, of females killed by a firearm, more than 2/3 were killed by an intimate partner.
4. Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving bodily force.
5. Abused women are 5 times more likely to be killed by their abuser if their abuser owns a firearm.

Add to these dire statistics the simple fact that of all OECD countries with a per-capita income over $15K, the United States accounts for 30% of the population and 90% of the firearm homicides, and we begin to understand the magnitude of this problem.

America is a very violent nation, and much of this violence is directed toward our women and children. We must do something about it.

And we can, even though problems of this sort rarely admit of simple solutions.

Here are four legislative fixes that will work and that we must continually demand of our elected officials.

1. Ban all convicted abusers, stalkers, and people subject to related restraining orders from possessing guns.
2. Provide all records of prohibited abusers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS.
3. Require a background check for all gun sales. Period.
4. Ensure that all abusers surrender their firearms once they become prohibited.

With these four simple solutions in mind, and with organized initiatives at the local, state, and national level, we can make a difference and begin to rehabilitate our country.

And don't forget to check out Women Against Gun Violence. They've been around for over two decades, and they're a deep source of information about gun-violence as well a model for the social organization needed to accomplish our goals.

 

REFORMER! KNOW THYSELF! GUN-VIOLENCE PREVENTION & SELF-KNOWLEDGE

“The more you develop [nonviolence] in your own being, the more infectious it becomes . . . —Gandhi |

Gandhi’s idea about nonviolence, or set of ideas, really, speaks directly to the gun-violence prevention movement for several reasons—long-term reasons, but reasons that provide an unshakeable foundation for an enduring action.

Gandhi situated fundamental political action within the only arena that we can continuously access and daily strengthen: our own hearts and minds. This kind of internal disarmament had been part of Christian nonviolence for centuries, but as the twentieth century dawned, social reform had become a more pressing concern, particularly with the advent of World War I. Gandhi's reminder of the older tradition is important, though, because he tells us, in effect, that we can always “be political,” we can always practice our political chops, even in our cars, waiting at a stop-light, as long as we understand how he understood the phrase, "political action."

His understanding is a lot different from the way that phrase might be understood in Western circles.

Gandhi placed special emphasis on the mind’s role in perceiving and understanding the world around him. That role is pivotal, so pivotal, in fact, that the mind is seen to determine, for all practical purposes, whatever aspect of the world it is currently processing: weather, war, hunger, love, attack, boredom. The mind is not a clear lens. It is dusty, and its dust arises from our own self-interests.

Our minds so heavily skew our perceptions that we believe these skewed perceptions to be, in essence, an accurate report of what's happening. Nothing more, nothing less.

We rarely believe what we see; we do regularly, however, see what we believe.

Gandhi’s assumption is that the mind’s default setting renders a picture of the world that simply doesn’t exist. And with that idea in hand, he turns to the world of social and political reform: our actions in that world will never have the desired effect because they are being designed and implemented to reach a goal, a place in the world, that doesn’t exist.

So what are we to do? The answer to that question, conceptually speaking, is easy: we need to reconfigure those default settings so that we perceive the world, and our own place in it, more accurately. Then our actions will become more effective because they are designed to operate in a world whose true qualities, not our projected qualities, we are beginning to understand.

Buddhism, Hinduism, and other wisdom traditions from Asia have produced multiple ways for gaining this understanding. They have composed over several millennia a number of user's manuals for the mind, so to speak, and they have outlined scores of ways to put these user's manuals to good use in our daily lives.

As a general rule, Westerners lump all of these methods under the general heading, "meditation," and as long as we understand how varied are the practices that fall under that heading, it's a good place to begin because it emphasizes the fact that the problems we are trying to solve out there—gun violence, racism, poverty, the penal system—have their root in here, in our own minds. 

So, while we are working away at those problems that surround us, we might as well also address the roots of those problems. And since we can't address someone else's roots, we have no choice but to address our own. When we do that, to return to the original quotation that began this posting, our own internal renoviations become "more infectious," which means that world around us benefits from the work that we are undertaking within us.

That alone is a pretty serious insight because it radically redefines the notion of our place in the political arena, and it has been sending yogis to caves in the Himalayas for thousands of years. It also explains why being around people who do these internal explorations at a very high level, like the Dalai Lama, are so charismatic: we like being "infected" by them.

It also gives the deeper background to the bumper sticker you often see with a picture of Gandhi accompanied by the slogan: "Be the change you want to see in the world." (No matter that Gandhi never said that. What he did say was longer, less sloganistic, and more subtle. Still you get the point.)

But the results are clear: trolls stop getting under our skin, though they continue to troll us, and our focus remains; the mindless serve-and-volley with angry gun-huggers on Twitter seems more and more pointless, and we find ourselves gradually working effectively above the fray; and we begin to sense the undefined but deeply powerful community that ultimately claims all of us because we have seen love as the only common bond that survives the struggles or hardships that come with real social reform. 

Gandhi had a clear awareness of this continual back-and-forth between internal renovation and social action—how the two can sharpen and dull one another—and it came to him early. Remembering Pretoria, South Africa, where he began his career, he wrote that "the religious spirit within me became a living force." 

It's a model that can benefit all of us, as we continually balance our social action, however we define it, with our hard-won self-knowledge, however we decide to acquire it.