Gun Culture, Free Riding, and Nothing Short of Conversion

Abstract

Gun-control advocates need to name what they are up against in the defensive gun culture of the United States. Once so many guns are in circulation, there may be no solution short of mass conversion. For the many good reasons to regulate and reduce the aggregate presence of guns in US culture are almost all collective ones, and that presents a classic “collective action problem.” Any one person or family can easily imagine a moment of extreme crisis that gives them reasons to become a “free rider,” insofar as reasons for self-preservation diverge from collective reasoning about what best serves the common good. Philosophers and economists alike have shown that the free rider problem is nearly insoluble. If reasons for free riding can only be renounced not argued down, we must admit—as an objective statement not simply a religious appeal—that we need nothing short of conversion. Christian “progressives” often have scruples against proselytism, but gun-control advocates should put them aside. In the face of defensive gun culture, we are arguably dealing with idolatry, and thus are on religious terrain already. By turning to a “just peace” ethic and the normative practices of “just peacemaking” we find that by taking the first step to respond to conflict with creative, unexpected transforming initiatives, along the lines of Glen Stassen’s exegesis of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, we can break vicious cycles and thus neutralize the free-rider problem.