Officers'Wife
Member
In my experience, once people react on an emotional level it is very very hard to get them to reason and logic. And generally facts to the contrary often reinforce the emotional response. Consider this example, you have a terminally ill patient on life support begging you to let them die. But the wife/husband/sibling/child simply repeats "I can't stand to lose him/her." You can argue quality of life until the cows come home but it will only make the relative realize they have a life or death decision and their fear of death intensifies.
With firearms, especially a mother, we imagine it was our child at Beslan, Sandy Hook or Columbine. It was our child that looked down the barrel of that weapon and felt the pain of their precious body being insulted by bullets. It's instinctual, you are not going to defuse that by pointing out that the odds against your child being in that situation are astronomical because in your mind and in your heart you have 'seen' it happen. Being told it wasn't the gun after being called a 'stupid cow' is going to set it in stone.
What needs to be done is to appeal on that emotional level, my God, when that shooter came in our kid's teachers had no way to protect them because our laws ... filled in the blank... What if he (the maniac) had had gasoline bombs too, our teachers would have been helpless to stop them. etc.
Emotion appeals to emotion. The trick is to be able to turn the emotions around.
With firearms, especially a mother, we imagine it was our child at Beslan, Sandy Hook or Columbine. It was our child that looked down the barrel of that weapon and felt the pain of their precious body being insulted by bullets. It's instinctual, you are not going to defuse that by pointing out that the odds against your child being in that situation are astronomical because in your mind and in your heart you have 'seen' it happen. Being told it wasn't the gun after being called a 'stupid cow' is going to set it in stone.
What needs to be done is to appeal on that emotional level, my God, when that shooter came in our kid's teachers had no way to protect them because our laws ... filled in the blank... What if he (the maniac) had had gasoline bombs too, our teachers would have been helpless to stop them. etc.
Emotion appeals to emotion. The trick is to be able to turn the emotions around.