Common-sense gun conversations are being skewed by politics

No, the national debate over gun laws can’t be summed up as a “cultural divide” between folks who hunt and grew up around guns and folks who feel like they can “just call 911 and the police will come,” as U.S. Sen. John Cornyn claimed in Dallas the other day. The real obstacle is elected officials who perpetuate such myths and fall back on us-and-them caricatures to score political points. That’s what Cornyn seemed be doing when he made the comment Friday to reporters at the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Dallas.

“Trying to find consensus is not easy to do,” Cornyn said at the event, where more than 80,000 gun enthusiasts gathered for a four-day convention. “The solution is not to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Let me tell you what the solution is not: black and white.

It’s not pitting country folk against city slickers. It’s not pitting gun owners against non-gun owners. It’s not portraying families who choose not to keep guns in their home as cowards sitting around waiting for police to save them. Perhaps they have assessed the risk of gun ownership versus the likelihood of actually needing the gun and come to a different conclusion.

Cornyn, it seems, doesn’t know his own Texan constituents who grew up around guns, may own them now, but want common-sense gun laws that would limit a mass shooter’s ability to kill.

Alexandra Chasse’s husband is an avid hunter. She knows about guns. That doesn’t keep the West Houston mother from advocating for better gun laws as a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

“It’s so easy to bring up these mythical personifications of the

other side,” she said. “It just doesn’t hold water for me.”

The reality, she says, is that people who own guns and those who don’t coexist every day. It’s common, she said, to have frank conversations with her neighbors about gun ownership and storage before the kids have playdates. People, for the most part, she said, understand and respect each other’s rights.

You’d never know it to hear the politicians speak.

You’d never know that the options are more nuanced than all guns or no guns. You’d never know that small steps, such as uniform gun laws across states, and banning high-capacity magazines, can make a difference.

Take the hero of the Waffle House shooting, James Shaw Jr., whose intervention saved countless lives. President Trump isn’t tweeting about Shaw. He isn’t inviting him to the White House. The NRA isn’t honoring Shaw at its convention.

Why? Because he didn’t use a gun to save the day.

“I was just trying to get myself out,” he was quoted saying in the Tennessean. “I saw the opportunity and pretty much took it.”

And what was that opportunity? The shooter had to stop and reload, giving Shaw precious seconds to wrestle the gun away. If the shooter had a high-capacity magazine, that opportunity might not have existed.

Now, Cornyn does have an “A” rating from the NRA, but he isn’t saying this stuff because the gun lobby is paying him to. The Washington Post reports the NRA has given the veteran Republican senator about $28,000 over the past decade, which, as the Texas Tribune recently pointed out, didn’t even make the NRA among his top 15 biggest contributors in 2014, when Cornyn raised $14 million.

He’s saying it because the culture war sells in politics. Like abortion, and the dreaded Texas social studies textbook selection, any cynic will tell you gun regulation is the gift that keeps on giving in political campaigns and other partisan struggles for power.

Perpetuating fear, the idea that some big, bad liberals are going to come take everybody’s guns — that narrative keeps people interested, keeps them donating to campaigns, and keeps them voting.

And, it keeps them ill-informed.

You see, the real divide isn’t culture. It isn’t between rural hunters and non-gun-owning 911 callers.

The real divide is partisan. That’s the thing that blinds us to commonsense solutions and compromise. That’s the thing, as Cornyn is no doubt aware, that keeps us from finding consensus.

Last year, a survey published by the Pew Research Center showed gun owners themselves have diverse views on gun policy, with differences driven in large part by party identification. Large majorities of gun owners and non-owners favor restricting access to guns for individuals with mental illness and those who are on federal no-fly or watch lists.

But among gun owners, those who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning are twice as likely as those who identify more with the Democratic Party to say they belong to the NRA. Among Republicans, a similar number of gun owners and non-owners said the NRA has the right amount of influence on the nation’s gun laws. Most Democrats, including those who owned guns, said the NRA had too much influence.

Interestingly, some divisions can be explained by gender more than “culture.” About six in 10 Republican and Republican-leaning women who own guns say they would favor banning assault-style weapons, and creating a federal government database to track all gun sales, according to another Pew poll. About a third or fewer male GOP gun owners express support for those proposals.

Yes, this nation is divided on many issues. But much of that division is by design.

In the debate over common-sense gun laws, let’s not forget that another deadly weapon is partisanship.