We've tried reason, we've employed statistical truth, and we've even called out the leading opponents of any new reforms or enforcement for having previously backed the proposals they now are against.
Neil Steinberg throws up his hands and sees the failure of dialog as a symptom of a pathology:
"...we are not dealing with rational people. Guns are part of the right-wing lunatic fringe of fear, the Obama-loathing, government-hating, minority-despising, science-scoffing quarter of Americans existing in a shadowy permanent grief state over the 1950s, over a white-bread America where they were king that never was and never will be. Guns are the talismans that ward off change in the world, that protect them from all their stalking fears, the wand of hope that someday society will indeed break down — isn’t it fracturing already, with gay marriage? — and they will assume their rightful place as unquestioned kings once more, with their AK-47s set proudly on their kingly hips and their freeze-dried meals nourishing them through the long night of the tardy Mayan zombie apocalypse.
What statistics are going to crack that nut? What numbers are going to change those minds? When they say gun control never works, and you point to the rest of the civilized world, where guns are restricted and gun deaths a trickle, they blink. What rest of the world? Oh, you mean Europe? Where European-style socialism rules? There is no fact that will cut this knot."Perhaps the "gun-nuts," as some us are prone to calling these fanatics, are exactly that.
They are nuts.
