‘Whew! I Was Able to Convince My Father That He Really Didn’t Need to Buy a Gun’

Owning a gun is an emotional choice and these days, for more and more kinds of Americans, it feels like empowerment. It feels like taking back control in a chaotic world.

It’s a vision of safety as a personal responsibility, not a public good. The political right may have arrived there first, but the left has quickly caught up. It was Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, who went out of her way during the last presidential election to mention that she owned a Glock and that she would not hesitate to shoot someone who broke into her house.

Seeing all this up close has led me to some ideas that as a liberal academic I would once have considered unthinkable. I still believe it should be harder for people to get their hands on a gun, but to my amazement I now agree with the National Rifle Association that the political left focuses too much on regulation.

For decades, the N.R.A. has said, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It’s usually referring to criminals or mass shooters — the “bad guy with a gun” who commits homicide in cold blood. The slogan suggests the problem is not the weapon in this criminal’s hands, but rather the person’s mind set, his intention and the culture of violence and lawlessness that produced it.

Make no mistake, the N.R.A. is not saying so in good faith. It isn’t lobbying for policies that could reduce poverty, even though financial desperation can fray communities and push people toward criminal activity, and it isn’t lobbying for better access to mental health care, which could help prevent suicides. Addressing either of those factors could do a lot to lessen gun violence without intruding even a millimeter on the Second Amendment. The organization seeks only to shift scrutiny away from the guns, the organization and the politicians and businesses it supports.

But the N.R.A. is right to say that to understand gun violence, we need to look beyond the guns. Limiting people’s access to them is, for now at least, a political nonstarter. So instead of pathologizing gun owners or telling them they should not be allowed to have weapons, what if we focused on the broader social conditions and cultural contexts that make people — the bad guys and the good guys, too — feel desperate enough to take their own lives, or scared enough that they feel they need to be ready to kill in order to live?

My father didn’t end up buying a gun, and it’s in part because of the conversation we had. I started by listening to his concerns and taking them seriously. I didn’t talk down to him and I didn’t tell him he was wrong. But we talked about how the news media often exaggerate the prevalence of violent crime, and we discussed simpler strategies for keeping safe. That helped him feel more empowered, more in control.

I also told him that through my research about gun owners, I had met many people who turned to guns to feel safer and more empowered but ended up experiencing the opposite. They started to focus more acutely on danger and to see it in more places than they had before.

The more dangerous the world appears to someone with a weapon, the more weapons they may feel they need to have. From the narrow view of a gun sight, danger can appear like a bottomless pit, and safety always out of reach.

— Harel Shapira in The Point of a Gun