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What would a "Getting to Yes" approach to gun policy look like?
For those not familiar with it, the book Getting to Yes is about negotiation, not as a means of "beating the other guy", but as a means of reaching a mutually acceptable solution, even between people whose interests initially seem utterly irreconcilable.
One of its guiding rules is that, at least at the beginning, each side should state its fundamental needs and desires, carefully avoiding talking about specific solutions that would meet those needs and desires. If your proposed solution were compatible with mine, we would have already implemented them and wouldn't need to negotiate; the goal is to find a creative solution (presumably not my original proposal or yours) that adequately meets both my needs and yours. In the case of gun control, if I walk in saying "I demand a ban on assault weapons and large ammo clips, a three-day waiting period on all gun purchases, mandatory background checks for all transfers of gun ownership, Federal licensing of both guns and owners, smart safety locks on all newly-manufactured guns, product liability for gun manufacturers, and a liability-insurance requirement in order to carry a gun," and the other guy walks in saying "I demand no Federal restrictions at all on gun ownership, full faith and credit by each state in the concealed-carry permits of other states, and a million armed schoolteachers," all you've learned is that we disagree vehemently, which we already knew.
Another guiding rule is to keep individual personalities out of it. Even at the later "brainstorming" stage in the process when you start talking about proposed solutions, no solution should be described as "your" or "my" solution, and proposing a solution doesn't imply that you would accept it yourself; the point is to get creative juices flowing freely without either side being associated with any particular proposal.
So, from one side (I'm not going to call it the "gun control" side, because that's a proposed solution), the fundamental need is "I want fewer innocent people in the U.S. to be killed and injured by gunshots." It's hard to argue against that. Some NRA people might say "Why is 'gunshots' even an interesting category? Why aren't you concerned about innocent people in the U.S. killed and injured by cars, diabetes, cancer, or terrorism?" but obviously if you want to reduce unnecessary death and injury you have to categorize them somehow, and attack different means of death differently: a solution to lung cancer isn't likely to help with car accidents, and a solution to diabetes is unlikely to help with gunshots. It's also a broad goal, encompassing suicide, accident, individual homicide, mass shootings, etc: if we are unable to find a mutually acceptable solution to one of these sub-categories, perhaps we can still make progress on another, and lives will still be saved. And with the word "innocent", it accepts the fact that some uses of guns really are self-defense.
I'm less familiar with the other side, having not grown up in a gun culture (I shot .22's in the Boy Scouts, but not often and not very well), but I'm guessing one of the fundamental needs is "I want my family to be safe [from wild animals and malevolent humans] without being dependent on government for that safety." And, perhaps even more fundamentally, "I want my own competence and responsibility to be respected." Pretty much everyone can empathize with the latter (e.g. women who want to be able to decide for themselves when to have children, rather than having all-male legislators decide for them), and can at least understand the former. (If you live in a remote rural area where "government" means a police officer an hour's drive away, "depending on government" for your personal safety is pretty laughable.) I welcome more contributions on this side from readers more familiar with gun culture.
So what can one do with this? Clearly, any strategy to reduce gunshot deaths and injuries has to recognize that there are a lot of responsible, competent gun owners out there, and the great majority of them have never killed anything but a target or wildlife; we need to distinguish between gun use and gun mis-use. At the same time, any responsible gun owner has to recognize that accidents can happen to anyone, and that sometimes a responsible owner's gun falls into the hands of a criminal, a child or mentally incapable person, a suicidally depressed person, or an angry person with impulse-control problems. And a formerly-responsible owner can become a member of one of those other categories.
A solution doesn't have to involve a lot of government intervention, although government intervention shouldn't be ruled out a priori. There are free-market approaches to some of this, like liability insurance from for-profit insurance companies: if the insurance company sees that you've got your guns well secured, with smart safety locks, you pay a lower premium than if they're lying around on the coffee table loaded with no safeties at all. But that approach only works if you have a strong incentive to buy insurance in the first place, e.g. either a government rule that you have to have insurance (analogous to what most states require for car drivers), or the realistic expectation that you'll be sued for big damages if your gun is mis-used, by you or anybody else.
Gotta go to work. To be continued...
One of its guiding rules is that, at least at the beginning, each side should state its fundamental needs and desires, carefully avoiding talking about specific solutions that would meet those needs and desires. If your proposed solution were compatible with mine, we would have already implemented them and wouldn't need to negotiate; the goal is to find a creative solution (presumably not my original proposal or yours) that adequately meets both my needs and yours. In the case of gun control, if I walk in saying "I demand a ban on assault weapons and large ammo clips, a three-day waiting period on all gun purchases, mandatory background checks for all transfers of gun ownership, Federal licensing of both guns and owners, smart safety locks on all newly-manufactured guns, product liability for gun manufacturers, and a liability-insurance requirement in order to carry a gun," and the other guy walks in saying "I demand no Federal restrictions at all on gun ownership, full faith and credit by each state in the concealed-carry permits of other states, and a million armed schoolteachers," all you've learned is that we disagree vehemently, which we already knew.
Another guiding rule is to keep individual personalities out of it. Even at the later "brainstorming" stage in the process when you start talking about proposed solutions, no solution should be described as "your" or "my" solution, and proposing a solution doesn't imply that you would accept it yourself; the point is to get creative juices flowing freely without either side being associated with any particular proposal.
So, from one side (I'm not going to call it the "gun control" side, because that's a proposed solution), the fundamental need is "I want fewer innocent people in the U.S. to be killed and injured by gunshots." It's hard to argue against that. Some NRA people might say "Why is 'gunshots' even an interesting category? Why aren't you concerned about innocent people in the U.S. killed and injured by cars, diabetes, cancer, or terrorism?" but obviously if you want to reduce unnecessary death and injury you have to categorize them somehow, and attack different means of death differently: a solution to lung cancer isn't likely to help with car accidents, and a solution to diabetes is unlikely to help with gunshots. It's also a broad goal, encompassing suicide, accident, individual homicide, mass shootings, etc: if we are unable to find a mutually acceptable solution to one of these sub-categories, perhaps we can still make progress on another, and lives will still be saved. And with the word "innocent", it accepts the fact that some uses of guns really are self-defense.
I'm less familiar with the other side, having not grown up in a gun culture (I shot .22's in the Boy Scouts, but not often and not very well), but I'm guessing one of the fundamental needs is "I want my family to be safe [from wild animals and malevolent humans] without being dependent on government for that safety." And, perhaps even more fundamentally, "I want my own competence and responsibility to be respected." Pretty much everyone can empathize with the latter (e.g. women who want to be able to decide for themselves when to have children, rather than having all-male legislators decide for them), and can at least understand the former. (If you live in a remote rural area where "government" means a police officer an hour's drive away, "depending on government" for your personal safety is pretty laughable.) I welcome more contributions on this side from readers more familiar with gun culture.
So what can one do with this? Clearly, any strategy to reduce gunshot deaths and injuries has to recognize that there are a lot of responsible, competent gun owners out there, and the great majority of them have never killed anything but a target or wildlife; we need to distinguish between gun use and gun mis-use. At the same time, any responsible gun owner has to recognize that accidents can happen to anyone, and that sometimes a responsible owner's gun falls into the hands of a criminal, a child or mentally incapable person, a suicidally depressed person, or an angry person with impulse-control problems. And a formerly-responsible owner can become a member of one of those other categories.
A solution doesn't have to involve a lot of government intervention, although government intervention shouldn't be ruled out a priori. There are free-market approaches to some of this, like liability insurance from for-profit insurance companies: if the insurance company sees that you've got your guns well secured, with smart safety locks, you pay a lower premium than if they're lying around on the coffee table loaded with no safeties at all. But that approach only works if you have a strong incentive to buy insurance in the first place, e.g. either a government rule that you have to have insurance (analogous to what most states require for car drivers), or the realistic expectation that you'll be sued for big damages if your gun is mis-used, by you or anybody else.
Gotta go to work. To be continued...