Citation

Braman D, Kahan DM. Emory Law J. 2006; 55(4): 569-607.

Affiliation

Yale Law School

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Emory Law School)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

For most Americans, the "Great American Gun Debate" isn't particularly "great." The question of how strictly to regulate firearms has convulsed the national polity for the better part of four decades without producing results satisfactory to either side. Drowning in a sea of mind-numbing statistics, ordinary citizens stand little chance of even understanding their opponents' arguments, much less being persuaded by them. Battered by pro-control forces in one election and by anti-control ones in the next, moderate politicians say as little as they can get away with. The organizers of relatively extreme interest groups, in contrast, say -- indeed, scream -- as much as they possibly can, symbiotically nurturing a divided public's anxiety that one side or the other is poised to score a decisive victory.



Our goal in this Article is to diagnose the pathologies that afflict the American gun debate and to prescribe a possible cure. That debate, we will argue, has been disfigured by two prominent misconceptions, one relating to  what the gun debate is fundamentally about, and the other to how citizens of a liberal democracy should talk to each other when they are divided on issues of fundamental values. Overcoming these misconceptions almost certainly won't dispel Americans' differences of opinion on guns. But it will go a long way towards making our public discussion of this issue into one that honors rather than mocks our pretension to be a well-functioning deliberative democracy.