Feb 23

Gun Control As Projection Bias

Second Amendment brady campaign, Second Amendment to the United States Constitution Comments Off

Wikipedia describes projection bias, or psychological projection, as “the unconscious act of denial of a person’s own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.”

I’m put in mind of this by two things: a letter to the San Jose Mercury News addressing the recent Open Carry brouhaha in the Bay Area, and a Brian Doherty article at Reason which contains some choice quotes from a Brady Campaign lawyer.

Let’s take the letter, first, from one Laura Knapp of San Carlos:

Eric Kistler (Letters, Feb. 16) believes that Caroline Rackowski’s concern about meeting gun-toting patrons at Starbucks is illogical and shows her ignorance regarding firearms. I’m afraid I must side with Rackowski and inform Kistler that most of us will have the same reaction. What would be illogical is to assume that when you see a gun in a public place that it is unloaded and poses no threat from a so-called “law-abiding citizen.” It is Kistler who is ignorant about firearms if he believes that people will not call the police on him every time he walks near their children in a public place with a gun in plain view, because that’s the way law-abiding citizens deal with potential threats to their safety. Peet’s, anyone?

Consider this in light of the frequent allegations from gun controllers that gun owners live in unreasoning fear of crime and thus fixate unhealthily on firearms: here’s Ms. Knapp, who evidently regards an ordinary citizen, minding his own business as he peaceably goes about his day, as a threat against her or her children merely because he has a gun — unloaded, no less! — on his hip.  Her neighbor, who Ms. Knapp likely won’t give a second thought to as he climbs into his car, becomes a menace sufficient to warrant calling the police because of the mere presence of an inanimate chunk of polymer and steel.

And we’re the frightened ones?  We’re the ones who fetishize guns?

Now, the Doherty article points to a Washington Post profile of Tom Palmer, one of the original plaintiffs in the Heller case, and who is now suing the District of Columbia to vindicate his right to carry firearms in public.  Enter the Brady Campaign’s lawyer:

Jonathan E. Lowy, a lawyer with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says he thinks the case, pending in U.S. District Court, is open and shut.

“To force the general public to be exposed to the risk of loaded guns when they are out with their family in public areas is outrageous and has absolutely nothing to do with the right to defend the home,” he says.

The lawyer’s rebuttal to Mr. Lowry is that what he says is factually correct but entirely irrelevant.  Carrying a loaded weapon around in public does, indeed, have nothing to do with the “right to defend the home.”  But the Second Amendment, according to Heller, does not protect a “right to defend the home”.  Rather, it protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, which the District’s categorical ban on firearms ownership infringed upon at least with respect to a handgun kept in the home for personal defense.  The Heller holding didn’t go further than that because the litigants didn’t challenge the entirety of D.C.’s regulatory regime, just the portion that prohibited them from owning guns in their homes.

Also, bear in mind that Washington, D.C. has, arguably, more armed law enforcement officers per capita than any other municipality in the nation.  Between the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, the DCPD, the FBI, the ATF, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and the dozens of other alphabet-soup bureaucracies with armed federal agents operating in the District, the general public is constantly exposed to the “risk” of loaded guns when they’re out with their families in public areas.

Something more than mere hypocrisy is behind this.  Talk to just about any gun control ideologue for any length of time, and you’ll meet someone who believes that he, personally, is not morally or emotionally equipped to comport himself appropriately while armed.  “I would not trust myself with a gun in a pressure situation,” you will almost invariably hear him say.  And because every gun control ideologue is also the most rational, sensible, and well-adjusted person he knows, he has convinced himself that everyone else in the world is also a morally and emotionally retarded jackass with poor impulse control, who thus cannot be trusted with a gun.

However, his experience with armed law enforcement officers has been that they’re not morally and emotionally retarded jackasses with poor impulse control, and that they can be trusted with guns.  In order to square this circle, he’s forced to conclude that there’s some secret component of law enforcement training that mystically alters mere mortals so as to cure them of their jackassery and convert them into righteous and responsible professionals, if not saints.

Which, as commenter Seerak quite accurately points out, is an expression of the wider premise implicit in the arguments of all regulationists and interventionists: that the same human beings who are too stupid to take care of themselves and live a virtuous life suddenly become paragons of rectitude and rationality when endowed with government power.