Ungunned

I read a couple of articles today that took issue with the fact that people attending Vice President Pence's talk at the National Rifle Association's convention won't be allowed to bring firearms into the venue with them. There were some rather pointed comments about how, if more law-abiding citizens carrying guns made society safer, why didn't that apply to the Vice President.

For me, the issue with this is that there is a fundamental difference in understanding about the "good guy with a gun" argument. It's designed to work on the sorts of fear of crime that animates a lot of this discussion. An armed citizen on the scene of an attack can intervene much more quickly than a first responder who's not present. But that intervention still needs a trigger. And if the trigger for intervention is the first gunshot, an armed citizen would be unable to stop an assassination attempt.

And this is the issue with positing an armed citizenry as a means of preventing a shooting, rather than lowering the potential body count of that shooting to the first person shot.

Of course, there is also a certain level of motivation in this perception of hypocrisy. Slate's homepage teaser read "Parkland Survivors Noticed That the NRA Banned Guns for Pence's Convention Speech;" and the article says: "The NRA is blaming the Secret Service for the prohibition." I was unsurprised by this; Slate is a commentary site, and an openly partisan on these days, rather than a news site. (The Washington Post seemed to take a less openly partisan stance on the issue.) The rule that there will be no weapons (or potentially easily-improvised weapons) allowed in the presence of the Vice President IS a Secret Service rule, not the National Rifle Association's. After all, the Secret Service is responsible for the security of the President and Vice President, among others. It seems strange that they would suspend their standard operating procedures for protecting their clients in the name of some partisan understanding of intellectual consistency. And, to the best of my knowledge, the Secret Service has not, as an organization, taken up the idea that their jobs could be made redundant by arming more ordinary citizens. Likewise, the NRA has not, to the best of my knowledge, officially promoted the idea that citizens should actively carry weapons into places where they are legally barred from doing to, in anticipation of violence.

This is not to say that gun-rights advocates as a whole have settled on a single, internally (and externally) consistent message. I recently picked up a personal-defense magazine that strongly implied that the overall drop in violent crime that's been happening since the 1990s can be chalked up to greater personal ownership of weapons. But just because the editors of a particular magazine see guns everywhere as a prophylactic doesn't mean that anyone who claims to stand up for the Second Amendment is obligated to belief in armed audience as a viable anti-assassination measure.

But in the end, this issue is driven by one of the same factors that both drives and derails conversation and "debate" about guns in the United States: filter bubbles and ignorance. Slate's article, in particular, does nothing to educate readers on what the Secret Service's rules for venues that VIPs will be visiting are, and implies that the NRA is deflecting its own responsibility. Educating people on the actual rules the Secret Service wants followed, and then laying out what the NRA could have done within that framework would be much more helpful.

That, however, would have made the Parkland students who criticized the NRA appear uninformed. Which, to be honest, they likely are, if they think that the NRA had any direct control over security measures for the Vice President. But I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. Sometimes, the best incentive to learn is being shown to be ignorant.