At NRAAM this past April, I had the opportunity to sit in on an interview with the Second Amendment’s most controversial activist, Rob Pincus. He’s made headlines a few times in recent years, drawing ire from pro-2A voices for supporting background check expansion and from the anti-2A side for organizing and running a shooting match for 3D-printed and otherwise homemade firearms. Pincus’ most recent claim to fame is his participation as one of the panelists in the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy project.
As I reported in my previous blog post, the intransigence we gun owners as a voting bloc have been forced to exhibit is largely a reaction to prevalent anti-gun extremism. In other words: if we give in, we lose our gun rights and get bad laws; if we “compromise,” we lose part of our gun rights and get bad laws; ergo, the only viable option is to reject all gun control proposals. That might mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, i.e. rejecting policies that may improve public safety without appreciably infringing on the rights of sane, trained, law-abiding citizens—just because those policies look like backdoors for more gun control.
Bringing this all together, Bridging the Divide’s policy packet is worthy of mention because it appears to be a rare example of a set of compromise laws that thread that needle: enhancing public safety without adversely impacting gun owners. The panel that compiled these proposals consisted of educated, informed people from both the gun-control and pro-2A camps, hence the contribution by Pincus and other pro-2A figures.
I won’t be going through and doing a point-by-point analysis; suffice it to say, I find the whole packet surprisingly tame and think most of them would be fairly popular, even among gun owners. I strongly encourage you, yes, you there, reading this on your phone during your lunch break, to go and at least read their policy outline so you can form your own opinions. It’s okay, I’ll wait.
Finished? Good.
Bottom line up front: Bridging the Divide offers a refreshing view. Whereas typical proposals from anti-gun groups and politicians tend to focus on demonizing gun owners and scaring the uninformed (“assault weapons!”), Bridging the Divide’s thesis is that “firearm policies should be aimed at reducing the opportunities for those at high risk for violence to access firearms, while interfering minimally with the ability of responsible gun owners to purchase, possess, and use firearms.” That’s straight out of page 1 of their policy packet. Great start. For proposed legislation to align with this thesis statement is good because it targets the people most likely to harm themselves and others, not the rest of us or the types of firearms we choose to own. Such laws would also be practical because not going after legal gun owners means more of us will be willing to go along with them.
That’s the why. The what is that this is a package of “state level [sic] policies that will be effective in reducing population levels of firearm-related harms while respecting the rights of firearm owners.” A few things stick out to me here. The emphasis on state-level action is interesting. This packet’s contents are apparently intended as a comprehensive framework that’s both effective (good) at improving public safety and easy to pass (practical) in states with no or minimal gun control of their own (i.e. in addition to federal laws).
It’s heartening to read that balancing “reducing…harms while respecting…rights” is an explicit priority. Anti-gunners often try to make their case with emotional appeals: trying to scare uninformed non-gun-owners, denigrating the right to keep and bear arms, demonizing gun owners, and so on. Given its mixed composition, the Bridging the Divide panel didn’t do that in their policy packet. I only have one small issue with the specific verbiage here. Yes, this is a tiny nit to pick, but I’m a professional copy editor, so my being overly sensitive to word choice puts money in my bank account. “Reducing harms while respecting rights” implicitly creates a false dichotomy. Unduly infringing on people’s rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, is a harm. “Reducing harms and promoting rights” might have been better.
The focus on state-level legislation also gets to a concern I have about this whole project: it seems to target “free states” exclusively. In a conversation with Rob Pincus at NRAAM, he pointed out that the policy package has none of the worst and most common state-level gun laws of the modern era. There’s no may-issue permitting; in fact, the policy package’s only mention of concealed carry whatsoever elucidates “that even facially neutral laws were and can be implemented in a racially discriminatory fashion.” There are no hardware bans, either, and the terms “assault weapon” and “roster” are never even used. Still, omission is hardly the same as explicit disavowal. I can easily imagine lawmakers in Sacramento, Albany, Richmond, or a dozen other state houses passing the Bridging the Gap package verbatim on top of all its existing draconian laws rather than in place of them.
Granted, that’s more of an implementation problem than a flaw with the Bridging the Divide project or its work. This framework totally replacing the state-level gun laws everywhere in the country would cause millions of gun owners to rejoice. If it were proposed in a state legislature as an all-or-nothing bill—we could choose to either stick with all our existing state gun laws or replace them all with the Bridging the Divide policies—I think a large majority of gun owners would be willing to live with even the less-desirable provisions in exchange for a repeal of every stupid gun control law we have and a moratorium on new ones. That would be the first real compromise we’ve seen on the gun rights issue, at least within my lifetime.
The unfortunate reality, though, is that there isn’t any legal mechanism to guarantee such a compromise. I could see, for example, California or now Virginia passing every one of the proposed bills that criminalizes doing or not doing something but not getting rid of things like hardware bans that Bridging the Divide determined are excessively restrictive and don’t work. I could also see, say, Arizona or West Virginia enshrining the whole thing into law verbatim, then a decade later, a new cadre of state legislators blowing up the whole damn thing and going all-in on banning whatever they could and tacking excessive fees and restrictions onto everything else. As I detailed last time, too many anti-gunners (heck, one is too many) are just that—anti-gun, not pro-public-safety. For the radicals, none of this is about saving lives and protecting rights, it’s about going after guns and gun owners, and those radicals have enough political influence to be a persistent problem for everyone else on all sides of the issue.
The fact that every state is now perpetually one bad election cycle away from becoming California looms as a cumulonimbus cloud on a summer afternoon, casting a shadow that chills any optimism one might rightfully have about Bridging the Divide on Firearm policy. I hope it works, I really do. I’d be fine with every word in there being the law of the land if it meant no American ever again had to worry about hardware bans and bullshit hoops to jump through to be allowed to use their carry permits. But the anti-gunners out on the fringe, no matter how few in number, no matter how politically irrelevant, no matter how bad their pet bills or odious their messaging, will never stop. So we can’t afford to either.
To Rob and his cohorts on the panel, I wish you the best of luck.
