Addressing Why People Want Guns Isn’t Bad, But Focusing On The Wrong Group Is

Why do you own a firearm?

Most of us have it to protect ourselves and our families. We pray we never need it, but if we do, it’s too late to get one. That’s just a simple fact.

And let’s be real, there’s a good reason why we do that. Violent crime is way too common in this country and we’d just as soon not be a statistic. If we are, we’d rather it be a defensive gun use number than a homicide victim number.

Guns Down America, though, thinks differently.

This is one of the groups that pushed hard for banks to cut off all ties with the firearm industry. This was an agenda driven by a desire to make it impossible to engage in lawful commerce of a legal product only being sold lawfully to citizens without a felony or domestic violence conviction. That wasn’t enough for them.

Now, though, they’re trying to change the focus a bit. Where they’re heading doesn’t sound particularly terrible, but who they’re trying to target shows they still don’t get it.

Let’s start with the focus:

How does your strategy differ from the traditional approaches of gun violence prevention groups?

Areas with high levels of racial inequality, income inequality, and low investment in social capital — like parks, clubs, and other third places — are areas where you see the highest incidences of gun violence. 

We see an opportunity to address that problem through the lens of unlocking business capital and corporate philanthropic capital to move money and resources into those areas — to give people opportunities for jobs, change their employment practices, and provide green spaces where people can be together.

I can pitch Guns Down America seven ways to Sunday, depending on who I’m talking to. But at its core, what we are talking about — and what I think the movement needs to be talking about — is how we contribute to community power. We’re not just saying regulate the tool, but opening our focus out and saying, why do people want the tool to begin with? What are the factors in their life that make them say, I need a gun?

OK, so far, I see some of where they’re going with this, and I don’t disagree. A lot of people get involved in crime because they don’t think there’s really an opportunity for them to get anywhere otherwise. I remember watching a documentary where a couple of prison inmates were talking and one was saying he dealt drugs because there wasn’t anything else for him to do.

So sure, I’m down so far.

But they’re still focused on gun control, for one thing, and they also hint at a bigger issue, which they get into more next:

When you say addressing why people want the tool to begin with: What role do you see Guns Down America playing there?

What we can see in our Consumer Insights research is who I call the “zero to one” set. These are people who currently report that they don’t own a firearm but that they’re planning to buy their first gun in the next 12 months, and they’re doing it for personal protection. Those people — if you look at them through a purely political lens — are part of what you could call the MAGA set.

But if you look at them through an economic lens or a socioeconomic lens, what you see is a set of people who are profoundly vulnerable and acutely stressed. They are worried about getting evicted from their home. They’re worried about the impact of addiction. They are falling behind financially or report that they are struggling to keep up. And they say they want to buy a gun.

That’s right. They want to dissuade lawful gun buyers from buying guns.

Now, the way they’re trying to do that seems to be by reducing the economic issues that create the crime that creates the demand, but they’re still clearly focused on lawful gun buyers overall.

But what they don’t get is that those people aren’t the problem and never have been. These are people you could hand a rocket launcher to, show them how to handle it safely, and then never have to worry. They’re not going to blow up anything that doesn’t actually need to be blown up.

On the flip side, a violent criminal will use a rock if that’s all he has available.

Guns Down America might have shifted its focus slightly, and done so in a somewhat more productive direction, but the fact that it still thinks the issue is people like you and me means it’s never going to be as effective as it could if it recognized that the problem has never been the lawful gun owner.