Category: Current Affairs

Here are two facts about the United States.

1. The United States is awash in firearms.
2. Effective gun control regulation appears to be nearly impossible, the result of strong grassroots political support for maximalist firearm ownership.

To those two facts, I will add an opinion.

• No matter how horribly tragic events mass shooting events such as the Parkland, Las Vegas, and Sandy Hook massacres are, in terms of sheer deadliness, “everyday” gun violence—murders, suicides, and accidental shootings—is worse.

It is possible that increasing the presence of firearms in schools would mitigate the scourge of mass shootings in schools, although (1) I doubt it and (2) the costs are that we further expand the militarization of American society. But arming teachers and coaches will not address the scourge of everyday gun violence.

I personally favor very active firearms regulations, roughly similar to those in place in Israel. However, implementing such regulations is politically unfeasible in the United States.

What strategies are left, then, for addressing gun violence? I believe that the solution can be found by looking to one of the most effective public policy action groups of the twentieth century: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

Since its founding in 1980, MADD has played a critical role in changing national opinions about drunk driving. On the surface, drunk driving and gun violence share some important similarities. Drinking and guns are legal. Drinking and guns are fun. Most people can drink responsibly; most people can use guns responsibly. It would prove politically impossible to ban alcohol as a way to stop drunk driving (we have tried, of course). So too with banning guns.

MADD’s approach is not to oppose drinking, but to change the way that people interact with alcohol. MADD’s simple message is that drinking and driving is fundamentally irresponsible and no one should do it. The argument is not against drinking, or against driving, but against mixing them together. MADD also provides people with a tool to solve the problem that they might want to drink and they might want to drive: the designated driver. MADD has not ended drunk driving, but it has certainly helped to change U.S. culture around drunk driving.

MADD’s success lies with the clarity of its message and the solution that it provides. How might one apply that to U.S. gun culture?

One possibility would be to advance the argument that firearms are fundamentally dangerous. This is true—that’s why they exist, and gun manufacturers assure you that firearms are indeed deadly tools for inflicting harm on other living beings. If firearms are fundamentally dangerous, it follows that no responsible gun owner would want them available to anyone else who might use them accidentally or maliciously. Responsible gun owners do not allow guns to fall into the hands of others. There is no respectable pro-gun position that would admit irresponsible gun storage as a core principle. Yes, many people drink and drive without killing anyone, and so too do many people leave guns on their nightstands without killing anyone. But even if this is legal, it is not what a responsible gun owner does.

That’s the message. What’s the technology? The community armory. One way to guarantee that guns are maximally secure from accidental or malicious misuse is to store them outside of the home, in a location convenient to the gun owner but secured against theft or accidental discovery. There is even a small business opportunity here: Sally’s Gun Storage or Joe’s Community Firearms Locker. Such for-profit gun storage facilities exist already. The task is simply to change the conversation around how we interact with guns. Guns are legal, and they are fun, but they do not belong in the home or on the person unless you plan to use them. When you’re done, you put them back where they can be secure. That’s what responsible gun ownership means.

There is one additional wrinkle. MADD’s task is made much easier by the fact that laws exist that criminalize drunk driving, even if there is no accident or victim. Many people do not realize that most states also criminalize handling firearms while intoxicated, even if one has a concealed carry permit and even if there is no accident or victim. Increasing the penalties for possession of a firearm while intoxicated, rigorously enforcing those laws, and publicizing these efforts as responding to the health and safety crisis that it is—together, this might help to change the conversation about what responsible gun ownership means.

I am under no illusions that a change in U.S. gun culture would be easy. I am also, however, skeptical that there is a legal solution to the scourge of gun violence that is politically implementable.

Identitarianism is a political movement that, in its broadest understanding, is “premised on an acknowledgement that political questions begin with identity.” Identitarianism thus described may encompass any ethnic, racial, religious, national, or other grouping—but in common parlance it refers to a specific European and now American movement concerned with the interests of white Europeans and Americans of European descent. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a nice overview of the identitarian movement in the United States, although it is now clearly dated.

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson explained that large groups face an inherent problem of acting collectively because individual members have an incentive to free-ride on the actions and contributions of others. Combatting this free-rider problem requires either providing selective benefits to those who do contribute, morselizing the group into smaller units (say, clubs or college campuses) in which free-rider problem is easier to manage, or by relying on some sort of political entrepreneur who does not mind paying disproportionately the costs of organizing and mobilization.

Identitarianism as a political movement faces something of a dilemma, then. In every society in which it flourishes, it is a movement that aims to represent the majority of citizens (“whites”). It should be the hardest to this majority to organize as a group to advances its interests qua a group.

How useful is the collective action and theory of groups perspective for making sense of identitarianism in American and European politics? On one hand, the idea of operating at smaller scales, morselizing the problem of collective action, seems to describe how the identitarian movement works well. So too the idea of the political entrepreneur: the National Policy Institute in the U.S. (which “endeavors to do the impossible: give voice to the interests of white peoples”) is exactly this. But there are two departures from the classic theory of groups that might usefully be noticed.

The first departure is that much of what the identitarian movement is about is not organizing whites as a group, but rather convincing whites that they are a group. This task is substantial. It requires “boundary work” or “boundary making” (qua Barth [PDF]): deciding who is in and who is out (Jews, Roma, Turks, sometimes southern and/or Eastern Europeans, and so on and so forth), and how to deal with ambiguity (as the Nuremberg Laws did). But it also requires propagation of this concept more broadly among the community to which it is applied. This differs from the classic collective action framework in which groups more or less objectively exist: wage laborers, or members of religious congregations. The collective action problem, when the group exists, is to convince individuals that their interests are best achieved through collective effort, not that the they in fact have mutual or collective interests. The identitarian movement works to create that group first, and at the same time, in doing so, to imbue that group with a particular set of interests. In 2016, Glenn Loury observed pointedly that

I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating

Identitarianism can thrive within this political space, even if saying “the interests of white peoples” openly, as an invitation for individuals to conceive of themselves as a group that has collective interests, remains something of a provocation.

The second departure has to do with the free-rider problem. The identitarian movement does not confront the standard collective action problem because success does not depend on broad contributions of all potential group members. It is true that the identitarian movement would be stronger politically if it had universal active support. But the movement can prove effective even under conditions of broad apathy. So unlike the congregation that will not build its new church unless all members contribute, or the labor union that cannot effectively press its demands unless all members participate in the strike, the identitarian movement does not need to convince everyone to join the movement in order to change policy. Only for people to accept that the boundaries and groups exist, or even less, not to oppose them. In this way, identitarianism can change national political conversations even without winning converts to its cause.