Tuesday September 17 2013

Quiet day.  Ev is working on a couple of local stories and her bike trip diary.  I went for a walkabout to The Bean Down, the marina office, and all the way down Beecher to the ferry landing to watch the early commuters coming home.  Occurred to me as I chatted with people in these places and on the street while I was walking from one to the other that I was walking through a familiar script.  And I was. 

The faces, the voices, the conversation—both topics and tenor—were all predictable.    The attitudes were also static.  The majority those I talked to had opinions on just about everything, but they were the same attitudes they had ten and twenty years ago.  Remarkably, if they had changed at all, it was inevitably to a more extreme version of the old position. 

This was especially the case when it came to some long standing areas of public debate—government healthcare, immigrants, and gun rights.  The only exception was on the topic of gay rights, where all buy a few curmudgeons have bought into the idea of equal rights for all.

But the main topic today, of course, was the shooting in DC yesterday.  And the main debate was over gun laws.  With this being a rural community, almost every household has guns, usually several including rifles and shotguns and in some cases handguns, although much fewer of the latter.  What has always been interesting to me is that the line of separation between those who favour free access to guns an those who oppose it does not fall along the Gun Owner/Non Gun Owner divide. 

While virtually all of the people who don’t own guns are against free access, there is a sizeable contingent of gun owners who are on this side as well.  Problem that arises is that the positions of the two sides are absolutely ridged. 

So when there is a mass killing like the one yesterday or the one at Sandy Hook Elementary the debate over gun control flares up, burns brightly for a few days or weeks, then dies away with no one’s mind being changed.  It is a frustrating situation for both sides, but especially for the pro gun control group because they are the ones aware of and terrified by the prospect of a similar mass shooting taking place at some point in the not to distant future. 

While walking today, I struggled with the intransigence of the anti gun control people.  Just couldn’t get my head around how anyone could possibly refuse to see or acknowledge the benefits and reasonable-ness of background checks. 

Then I had another thought:   Maybe it wasn’t the content of the debate that was important, but rather, the debate itself.  Maybe what was important was that the public discourse remain focused on this, and other, insoluble issues.  Maybe those who fund lobby groups want the media and public to be focused on this instead of other things. 

Things like the growing wealth and income inequality.  Maybe if the public debate is locked on arguing about the logic of 100 round magazines, there will be no ability nor aptitude to pay attention to the fact that 95% of the gains in income over the last five years have gone to the top 1% of the population.  Maybe divisions created over guns or healthcare or abortion were useful in their own right as a way to distracting the masses from paying attention to the fact that the middle class has been getting screwed for the past 30 years, since Reagan.  Maybe it’s all some twisted game of Three Card Monty, all smoke and mirrors.

Maybe.