The president met with the leader of the radical gun rights organization (NRA) and accepted their propaganda opposing universal background checks for gun purchases. The NRA's groundless conspiracy theory is that background checks for guns will lead to confiscation of all guns. No evidence supports that false claim. Recent polling indicates that about 85-90% of Americans favor universal background checks.
So, once again, lobbyists with money talks and public opinion walks. That is the norm in American politics, where “even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” Demands backed by campaign contributions and bribes from economic elites and organized interests dictate policy by compliant politicians, not public opinion. Here the organized interest is the NRA, the economic elites are gun manufacturers and the compliant politician is the president.
The attack on truth: Even worse than accepting an American president accepting a crackpot conspiracy theory, is the president's immediate attack on truth. Presumably, that idea came from the NRA. The basis for trying to shut down information flow to the public is simple and popular: An ignorant public is easier to deceive than an informed public. Politicians know this. So does most everyone else with an agenda, including political parties, marketers, religious groups and gun manufacturers.
A Washington Post article, After Trump blames mental illness for mass shootings, health agencies ordered to hold all posts on issue, indicates that a “Health and Human Services [HHS] directive on Aug. 5 warned communication staffers not to post anything on social media related to mental health, violence and mass shootings without prior approval. ..... Many researchers and mental health experts said Trump’s comments contradicted well-established research. ..... While mental illness is sometimes a factor in such shootings, it is rarely a predictor, according to a growing body of research. Most studies of mass shooters have found that no more than a quarter of them have diagnosed mental illness. Researchers have noted that more commonly shared attributes include a strong sense of resentment, desire for notoriety, obsession with other shooters, a history of domestic violence, narcissism and access to firearms.”
The HHS denied that there was any attempt to squelch information flow. Instead, the agency said it was holding off on commenting to allow the president to speak first before government experts could speak freely. That makes no sense. Cognitive science is clear that when false information followed by corrections, the false information is often more persuasive than the later correction.[1] That is evidence of the president’s and the NRA’s intent to deceive the public by resort to dark free speech[2], which is deeply immoral.
This not the first time that the NRA and republican politicians have attacked research that could lead to inconvenient truth. For example, this 1993 NEJM paper, Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home, led congressional GOP politicians to pass a ban on federal funding for research on the causes of gun violence a couple of years later. The NRA lobbied for and got that funding ban, which is still in place today. The data described in that 1996 research paper led the researchers to conclude that mere gun ownership is a risk factor in domestic shooting deaths. As discussed here before, that was something gun manufacturers did not want the public to know anything about. That kind of information had to be shut down and suppressed as much as possible.
Given the circumstances, it seems reasonable to refer to the next mass shooting as something along the lines of “Trump-NRA event #1”, “Trump-NRA event #2”, etc., to make clear that both the president and the NRA favor keeping as many guns in circulation as possible, including keeping guns in the hands of killers who are not mentally ill. That reasoning is perfectly logical because universal background checks could be used to detect both mentally ill people and the majority of mass shooters who are not mentally ill.
Footnotes:
1. “Generally speaking, misconceptions regarding climate change, evolution, and healthcare reform could be harder to correct, as people’s religious beliefs and political identities are deeply implicated ..... Further, the data showed that ‘beliefs in constructed misinformation (fictional events or studies) were easier to debunk, whereas beliefs in real-world misinformation tended to be more resilient to change.’” The same applies to other kinds of information that implicate personal beliefs and identity, including false beliefs about gun safety and ownership risk.
2. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or otherwise protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide corruption (~ lies and deceit of omission), and inconvenient truths and facts, and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)
No comments:
Post a Comment