To get gun safety, we need to talk to gun owners: Column

When news broke about yet another mass shooting — this time, ten dead at a community college in rural Oregon — I felt revulsion and anger. Another ten families who will never see their children graduate from college or marry, ten families for whom stories that began with diapers and training wheels and new notebooks each September end senselessly with shocking loss, TV cameras and grief counselors. I found myself, as we did after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Aurora, asking why we can’t stop this.

I also found myself recalling a conversation from last summer. At the rural New York library that I frequent during summer months, my librarian was chatting with a patron as she checked out a volume on guns. Casually, the patron asked how many guns she owned. My librarian replied with a smile, saying she had eight, one for each room in her house.

I was stunned, to put it mildly. Never would I have imagined that this lovely woman with whom I linger to chat about books would be a gun enthusiast. But after my initial astonishment, her words made me think: Could there be more common ground than I’ve assumed between “us” and “them”?

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The more I reflect, the more important it seems to go back to the library and hear my librarian’s story. What do those eight guns mean to her and how does she reconcile that meaning with our national gun violence epidemic? As someone who specializes in sharing information, she must be aware that rarely a week goes by without some new tragedy — the latest of these just last week. So frequent have mass shootings become that, as President Obama put it, people have “become numb to this.”

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof recently made the shocking observation that “more Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.” He called for a public health approach to gun regulation, just as we take steps to assure the safety of ladders or laundry soap pods. Obama made the same point last week, asking why we can regulate bridges for safety, but not guns. As a professor of public health, I’m all for that, but I can’t help but seeing problems with that strategy. For millions of Americans, owning guns is a deeply meaningful assertion of their identity. No one feels that way about step ladders or detergent or bridges.

Why does that matter? Because where deeply held beliefs are concerned, all of us think we have good reason to hold the ones that we do. Working on a vast range of topics — from bareback sex to vaccines — social scientists have found that people have good reasons (you might call them culturally-specific rationalities) for doing things that are clearly dangerous to them and others. Not surprisingly, this is true for gun owners as well, according to Abigail Kohn, a University of California at San Francisco-trained anthropologist who wrote a book about gun culture in America.

As the pioneering community organizer Saul Alinsky taught, we all have a story. In reaction to the shooting in Oregon, a visibly-moved President Obama challenged the nation “to think about how they can get our government to change these laws.” As a former community organizer himself, the president knows that spaces open for the politically impossible to happen when we listen to each other — even if it first appears our positions cannot be reconciled. Where guns are concerned, it’s possible we aren’t even so far apart: according to one recent Pew Study, “Americans who live in a household where they or someone else is an NRA member overwhelmingly favored the idea of making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to such [background] checks.”

I’m not naïve. I know that there are powerful corporate forces opposing legislative change. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, more than 130,000 Americans work for companies that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, generating nearly $6 billion in wages — and you can bet that your senator’s staff has seen the table that breaks those numbers down by state. Still, the enormous public health improvements in tobacco and automobile safety suggest that even where jobs and money are at stake, change is possible.

Which takes us back to my librarian. I’m not generally afraid of difficult conversations — I talk to my own kids about sex, and have even been drafted to ‘have a talk’ with my friends’ kids. Nor am I shy with strangers — I’ve engaged in community-level politics ranging from voter registration to marriage equality. And yet I hesitate to go back and ask her about those guns because I value our friendly interactions and fear that asking about her eight guns might bring them to an end.

But I’ve seen the courtesy and genuine warmth with which she treats each and every patron — black and white, no matter how they are dressed, or what they are checking out, or if they are old and young. It’s hard to imagine that someone with hate in her heart would take a job in a small town community library, the last non-commercial remnant of a public square, a place where all are welcome. Perhaps she’d welcome the chance to talk as much as I would.

Even closer to home, I’ve never asked another mother if her family has an unlocked gun in their home. At the very least, why not follow guidelines from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which urges parent to pledge to have this talk before sending a child on a playdate? (The American Academy of Pediatrics has even helped Brady develop a toolkit to help parents "have the conversation" with fellow parents.)

Of course, I’m not going to stop sending money to organizations seeking to change our nation’s gun laws or calling my elected officials to tell them where I stand — after all, part of their job is to listen to me politely. But those of us who demand change must also do something else: seek out and embrace opportunities to talk with individual gun owners. It’s no longer enough for President Obama, or any politician, to suggest to gun owners that the NRA is misrepresenting their interests. We need to reach out directly, and learn what those interests are. Thousands of those conversations across the country will help build the political support needed to accomplish what our lawmakers have so consistently failed to do. It’s time to talk with my librarian about more than recommended reading.

Jennifer S. Hirsch is an anthropologist, a professor of public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and an Op-Ed Project Public Voices Fellow.

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