There is no way to get more people with their panties in a panic than to suggest tighter government regulations on dangerous items. Although everyone agrees to tight control of automobile standards, however, there is extreme debate on the tighter regulation of guns.
On the surface this may seem to be because everyone needs a car by necessity, and so everyone (virtually that it) is on the side of their safe regulation. But with guns, which are specifically mentioned by the founding fathers in the second amendment, there are severe views of gun rights. Cars were never envisioned by the founders, but then, neither were semi automatic weapons, rapid fire magazines and weapons for massing killings.
The reason some people cling to guns is because they are concerned about personal liberty. And, that is not all. They idealistically want freedom and feel defensive. They see themselves as apart, and often more entitled, than others.
The overwhelming reason why there are not regulations at least as prohibitive as vehicle regulations, such as a waiting period, license, back ground check, even physical, is that the NRA is an immensely powerful lobby that will promote guns at every opportunity. The biggest opportunity they have is having gun control equated with big government wanting to take away individual rights.
There is simply not a counter weight entity that wants to defend citizens’ rights to be statistically safer in schools, restaurants, streets and even homes. If science, by factual statistics, had such representation, it would be obvious that as gun violence leaders of the world, the USA is being held at gun point by the money interests of the NRA.
But there are good psychological weapons more at play in this situation. People only respond psychologically to those triggers, defense mechanisms of knowing dualistic ideas of what is right and wrong.
In the modern world, most societies were formed on the idea of “Us versus them.” The Us, is a ideologically united team that sees any others (other nations, other ethnicity, other organisms, and so on,) as resources without entitlement to as much liberty as those the in group should be. A simple example of this is that there is war and nationalism because there is not a united new world order. Some fear that if there were “one world” individual rights would become non-existent. They also believe that country men and kin are deserving of more belonging, then “others.”
A much more complex example of this true human weakness (exclusivity) is climate change. People wish to either deny, or now more often blame, others for diminishing resources, conflicts, weather disasters, and inadequate infrastructure for aid. It is human nature to blame “enemies”, and/or God or even Nature’s wrath. Blame, rather than self empowerment, means the problems persist, and the solutions are forever kicked in a can “down the road.”
Some people see climate change as the fault of sinners, homosexuals, and everything one can think of, EXCEPT “ourselves” Others say Nature is just trying to rid her skin of a pesky human infestation. In both extremes, personal power is relinquished. People project blame.
Gun owners, sensing that the world and civility is unraveling, wish only to protect their entitlements. They do not believe, nor sense, that the whole world, and that which sustains it, should have those entitlements equally. Many believe that man is superior to the rest of nature, or at the very least, exclusively made in the image of a hominid Creator.
Exclusion, non-belonging, a human failure to cooperate with sustainable systems that can only provide plenty when there is no “ enemy otherness” is the true reason for every conflict. This includes those who fear being weakened without personal arms to defend family and property. Were they to extend the meaning to family to the whole world, they soon realize the whole world of creating and maintaining food, water, soil and shelter is 100% inter connected, and therefore requires equal cooperation among systems and beings.
It is only when people realize that all organisms belong to earth and in the true sense of belonging they are empowered to protect that belonging to a much greater community than those artificially secure exclusionary groups to which they now pledge fealty.
The idea that liberty should always be protected is correct. The only thing that is twists the idea of liberty is exclusion. Exclusion to all who feel exploited or disenfranchised should extend to all needed roles and sustaining systems that promote life. It is human nature, which evolved to exclude and discriminate, that is standing in the way of gaining the power to cooperate with the whole world and its Natural laws of regulation. So people struggle to control what they see as diminishing freedom and abundance.
These laws suggest that toxins, wars, pollutants, exploitation gone too far(all organisms exploit to live) and self destruction of the home by degradation and over population are all caused by a failure to accept the rights of everyone over the rights of a few.
