Why Are Stories About Guns Always So One-Sided?

Stories are important to us as a species. We use stories from the Bible to teach ethics, morality, and faith. Christ used stories for the same purpose, as do many other faiths to some degree or another. Fables from the time of the Ancient Greeks are still common for teaching lessons to kids and adults alike. Chivalric romances of the medieval period were an important part of communicating to young knights and those who wished to act knightly how they should comport themselves.

There’s power in stories.

So, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so surprised to see them used quite often in various contexts to try and sway opinions. Stories are powerful, and that’s why movies and television are so popular, and yes, can shape what people think.

The abolitionist movement wasn’t gaining nearly as much ground before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, after all.

In Rochester, New York, the local paper is collecting stories. Not just any stories, either. No, they want stories about people killed by so-called gun violence.

Thirteen people have been killed by gun violence in Rochester so far this year.

The immediate impact is tragically palpable: In some corner of this city, someone must now mourn a neighbor, a community member, a relative or a friend. The rest of us are riddled with fear or sorrow or sometimes judgement ― even as we admit we know little about the person lost.

Gun violence, however you look at it, is extremely personal. And in order to truly understand how this epidemic shapes our community, we must learn from the experiences of others.

Last year, the Democrat and Chronicle set out to capture the lives of those lost to gun violence in 2024 and what they meant to the people who loved them the most. We published a series of stories about a twin with an affinity for music, a hard-working cab driver, a kind handyman and more. Families and friends we spoke with grappled with feelings of guilt and anger even as they smiled through tales of happier memories.

Do you know someone killed by gun violence? Share their story.

Our work to honor these victims continues ― and we need your help to tell their stories.

I saw this today and thought about the story I wrote on Tuesday, where a writer shares stories of people waiting to learn if their loved one survived a mass shooting, and I couldn’t help but wonder at how all these collections of stories by people who are supposedly interested in the truth all seem to lean in one direction.

They’re universally collected to try and persuade people to embrace gun control. They’re universally collections of loss and tragedy.

But that’s only one dimension of what guns can be used for.

Here at Bearing Arms, we try to run armed citizen stories. They don’t do particularly well in many cases, but we still run them because they matter. Others do as well and for the same reason.

We’re unfortunately relegated to writing about it from news reports, which sterilizes things to some degree. That’s why the Salon piece from Tuesday included lots of quotes from people who experienced that waiting, and why the piece above wants stories, not news articles. The paper could collect those all on its own, after all.

No, it wants those stories for a very particular purpose, and it’s because stories have power. They can sway us to embrace things we might not otherwise embrace. Emotions override reason all the time, and stories are meant to make us feel those emotions.

The exclusion of cases where people were terrified for their lives and used a gun to defend themselves isn’t an accident. They don’t want those stories to shape the narrative. They don’t want those emotions swaying people.

This is no accident.

I might just have to see about doing something to counter it, too.