Why we’re gaslit on guns and don’t know It

“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday during a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.

Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation: to license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.

Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75 percent of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits.

The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term, after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton, Ohio.

He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader, Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.

This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth.

Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank.

Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.

Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown (2012) and Columbine (1999). But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.

Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.

Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.

Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay — even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.

This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.

• Frank Smyth is the author of the book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).