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Originally Posted by 44 AMP
However, a good share of the public has been more or less trained to react like the old joke about art/pornography, "I don't know/can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it!"
Some people are so conditioned, we will never reach them.
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At least not with well reasoned analysis.
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Originally Posted by overhead
I do not believe focusing on putting the Administration or others that are ardent gun control supporters on the defensive is very constructive to reaching the goal.
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On the contrary, putting one's adversary on the defensive, leaving him dispirited, and breaking his will to continue the fight is very constructive if one's goal is to win the issue.
The trick here is to know one's audience. If one's audience is a court, he is more likely to be well served by a clear, compelling, and factually correct analysis. If one's audience is every American over the age of 18 who can fog mirror, one should maintain his fidelity to the truth, but persuasion will require more.
The lesson I take away from public policy disputes over the last few decades is that most people, normal people, do not collect data and then employ a rigorously rational framework to that collected data. Instead, most people, and many courts intuit which result they like better, then formulate an apologetic for that result.
This means that routinely the process of persuasion involves changing the intuition of your audience. For many of us, the best way to accomplish this is to take someone shooting so that they can learn that while arms deserve respect, they are not horrible and frightening to use.
For the public policy debate generally, this can mean that efficacy may be prioritized over perfect and exhaustive accuracy. LBJ's Daisy ad had virtually no public policy content and did not explicitly make any argument; however, it aroused an unreasoned fear that was far more effective politically than a merely correct argument.