The democrats abandoning gun control will not help them win the votes of rural whites

Great Debates
1

Its an argument a lot of people seem to be making. “If democrats abandon gun control, then rural whites will be more open to the party”.

I disagree.

For one thing, gun control is fairly popular.

But more importantly, guns are a symptom of something else. They are a symptom of white people who fear multiculturalism.

Whites who find multiculturalism threatening cling to guns because their America is dying. The America they feel they know (a white christian patriarchy of native born people) is changing and America is rapidly becoming browner, more secular, more muslim, more feminist, more immigrant, etc. They are attached to guns because guns help them feel safe in a world where they feel their national identity and sense of privilege is going away. Plus guns help them feel safe in a world full of scary out-groups (latino immigrant street criminals. Black urban street criminals. Foreign muslim terrorists. Liberal government. etc).

The democratic party is the party that embraces multiculturalism. The republican party is the party that rejects multiculturalism. Even if the democrats abandon gun control, everyone still knows the democrats are the pro-multiculturalism party. So why would abandoning gun control make these people like the democrats when the main reason they cling to guns is because they find pro-democratic policies threatening?

Basically saying 'I support changing America into something that makes you feel threatened, but I also support your right to own a gun to keep yourself safe from the threats our party is visiting on you" is not a winning argument. But thats the argument people are making for why the democrats should abandon gun control.

FWIW I’m not saying all whites who own guns are racist. But its a major factor in hostility to gun control among whites. I’m a liberal gun owner and I know lots of liberals who oppose gun control because they feel they need guns to keep themselves safe from the rise of neo-fascism. And there are people who need guns to deal with hunting animals or dealing with threatening feral animals. Or people who need them because they live in areas the police don’t patrol well or they can’t trust the police. So I’m not saying owning a gun = racist. But its a major factor. But having said that, these people wouldn’t be affected by most forms of gun control anyway.

For me personally I don’t even know where I stand on gun control. I feel unless we confiscate the 300+ million guns already out there, gun control won’t make much of a difference. And that’ll never happen. The virginia tech shooter had a pistol and regular magazines.

However the 1934 gun control act made getting fully automatic weapons, among other things, hard to get. So if we passed strict gun control on a national level it may make a difference, but not for several decades (when the current guns are trashed and you can’t buy new ones).

2

Really? How about those who carry guns for their safety? You know, pistols to shoot snakes and rifles to shoot wolves, bears, and cougar? How about those who have guns to defend their livestock? How about those who have guns for pest control - rats, rabbits, coyotes, prairie dogs, etc? How about those people who have guns in the home because the police cannot attend an incident in any reasonable time? How about those who have guns for hunting?

Anyway in your interpretation of your second link you seem to be making the basic mistake of logic. That a racist is more likely to own guns does not mean that someone who owns guns is more likely to be a racist.

3

It doesn’t appear he was talking about those people. But, in your opinion, do you think that the sort of rural whites who own guns for these reasons are (a) voting conservative, and (b) likely to suddenly go blue if democrats started shrugging about guns?

4

Lol talk about basic mistakes of logic. All A are B does not mean all B are A. Regardless of whether he’s correct or not, your objection is baseless per any middle school symbolic logic lesson.

5

Surely it’s worth doing, even if we don’t see immediate benefits.

No arguments about critter control or sport-hunting make sense as a defense of keeping automatic weapons freely available. Those weapons are for killing people.

And on the topic of Democratic messaging: the emphasis should be on measures that consistently receive wide support—background checks, etc. Few Democrats (or few that are running) are in favor of confiscation and similar harsh crack-downs on ownership of firearms. Democrats shouldn’t let Republicans lie about that.

6

Yeah, like it’s possible to make Republican(politican/news outlet)s tell the truth about anything.

7

While it’s probably true that Democrats won’t win any rural white votes by adopting a pro-gun stance, they can certainly fire up the rural white vote to show up to vote R by emphasizing an anti-gun stance.

(Of course, if Democrats became pro-gun, they’d anger their own base, who might refuse to come out and vote D. It’s all a numbers game.)

8

The only thing that will bring rural under-educated white males to vote Democratic is good jobs with good benefits for blue collar workers. If they saw that it was the Dems that brought those things to their area, anyway. I bet if that happened, they’d overlook a lot.

9

True enough. I was thinking more of ‘correcting the lies’ as opposed to exercising the degree of control over fellow-humans required to prevent lying.

It’s similar to the ‘DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS’ lie that many elected Republicans are so fond of repeating—you can’t keep them from saying it, but you can point out that it’s a lie when they do.

10

Thats possible, but its very abstract. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, but he signed it with the help of republicans in congress.

Obama saved the auto industry, saving millions of jobs held by high school educated whites. It didn’t win him any points with them.

11

IMO, the only thing that’ll win over high school educated white men is rebuilding the union movement.

I recall reading an article years ago about John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election. It mentioned how with rural white men he did terrible, unless those men were in a union. If those men weren’t in a union, he lost them by 30-40 points or so. If they were, Kerry won them by 15-20 points.

So rebuilding the union movement, especially in vocations where high school educated whites work, could be an important part of winning over that demographic.

12

From my limited personal perspective, Obama’s effort did make points with the aforementioned high school educated blue collar whites. My family members that fell into that camp, somewhat begrudgingly voted for Obama. What pushed them into the Trump camp, rightly or wrongly, is that they felt the democratic party increasing only talked about poor intercity and immigrant people. I know I know, those poor white males, are getting screwed! But they feel they are, and the only candidate that put them in the spotlight was Trump. I worry as democrat put up very left leaning candidates, than we may get the same thing again.

13

The 2018 midterms threw one big thing into sharp relief: Dems are winning the suburbs while losing rural America. (The reverse is true for the GOP.)

Seems like an advantageous trade to me.

So do the Dems want to support policies that will reinforce their gains in suburbia, or do they want to keep trying to win back rural America? While not all suburbanites are in favor of gun control and not all rural folks are against it, most suburbanites view the presence of guns as a threat, a danger to their kids.

There are issues where Dems can stand with rural folks in ways that don’t give suburbanites any heartburn. Gun control isn’t one of them. The gun control issue forces Dems to choose between the two constituencies. And cities + suburbs > rural America. Seems like a straightforward choice to me.

14

There are about 400 million guns in America owned by civilians. How many of these guns do you think are used to defend livestock? How many gun owners have even seen a cougar outside a zoo?

Uhh … you might want to work on your probability arithmetic there. I know you’re a bridge player: If hands with 22+ hcp are more likely than average to open Two Clubs, then hands that open Two Clubs are likelier than average to have 22+ hcp.

15

Logic doesn’t work like that. The rule is, ‘If A implies B then NOT B implies NOT A’.

Or, if a racist is more likely to own guns then someone who doesn’t own guns is less likely to be a racist. It doesn’t mean that someone who owns guns is more likely to be a racist.

16

Well, since you couldn’t be bothered to read the entire post, let’s try this again:

It never occurred to me that he meant gun owners or racists. But rather a subset of white people were more likely to own guns than others.

17

Actually, I did read it and the OP said and you quoted:

And I’m questioning his mis-use of logic.

18

Too long, and only skimmed, but I’ll address the thread title. I think…it depends on what you mean, exactly, by ‘gun control’. The devil, as always, is in the detail. To some folks, ‘gun control’ is pretty obviously a play to remove private ownership by hook or by crook. To others, it means practical and common sense controls we put on a lot of other dangerous things in our society to attempt to mitigate the damage having them be legal (or a right) would our could cause.

Either way, I think the Dems risk losing some of their voters. If you go too hard, you will lose people who would otherwise vote Democrat because, frankly, they don’t want ‘gun control’ to equal ‘gun ban’ or anything like that. If you go too soft, then you will almost certainly piss off those who do equate gun control with eventual and systematic gun bans or extremely hard restrictions like in several European countries. Personally, I think there are more on the soft side of gun control than on the hard side, so, to me at least, it’s not a matter of the Democrats abandoning gun control as the Democrats getting smart and informed about it, and reigning in their loony lefties (sort of like how I think they should on the nuclear debate). The US voter base by and large doesn’t want radical…they want small, incremental changes at best. I think there IS quite a lot of support for gun control that equates to something like waiting lists or registration, but only if these aren’t first steps towards eventual confiscation. People want a personal right to keep and bear arms. And they want to be safe (er) as well. Good, solid and effective (and not stupid) gun control I think could be a winning play by the Dems…if they can just reign in those who it all and want it now (heavy guitar cord!)…

19

This is a probability problem, not a logic problem, but you’re still wrong. If 90% of the population are right-handed, and left-handed people are three times as likely to own guns, then there are three times as many right-handed gun owners as left-handed gun owners, despite the left-handed people’s higher preference for them.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.

20

The relevant issue is how many people who would identify as pro-gun single-issue voters would otherwise vote democrats? It’s not all gun owners–it’s gun owners for whom gun control is their #1 issue. That’s a much smaller subset.