Guns are the definition of uncool

Michael Maiello thinks he knows how to undermine gun culture:

It’s surprisingly easy to imagine a society where gun ownership is looked down upon, if not scorned outright. This already happened with smoking, at least partly as a result of a public education campaign aimed at young people, and it happened when polite society finally came down against people flying the Confederate flag after the Charleston church shootings this year. Sometimes, when legislative action is difficult or downright impossible, a cultural approach works to curtail dangerous behaviors.

In short, we can make gun ownership uncool.

This was once unthinkable when it came to cigarettes. In post-World War II America, you might have kept an ashtray in your house even if you were a non-smoker, just to accommodate guests. It's hard to imagine anyone doing that today, or even to imagine a smoker with the audacity to ask if they can light up inside. ...

It's been hard for me to imagine that young people might think that equal rights for gay people would ever be the definition of a just society -- but that's how it is for Erudite Partner's undergrads. Sometimes extreme cultural change can precede legal change, and even obviate the need for legal change to some extent. We've all seen it.

Maiello has some practical suggestions re guns:

• Let other parents know you don't want your kids staying over if they have unlocked guns.

• Shun adults who take kids to gun ranges, as apparently the mothers of both the Sandy Hook and Oregon shooter did.

• Remind them of the child who was taken to play with an Uzi and shot her instructor.

• Point out that mature gun owners know when not to wave heat in the middle of a confusing melee -- including one young man at the recent Oregon massacre and another who witnessed the Gabby Giffords shooting. Owning a gun requires that kind of self-restraint.

• Push for trigger locks that prevent unauthorized people from firing and for required liability insurance. Guns are dangerous business, not toys for fantasists. The only people who benefit from resisting safety features are owners of stock in gun manufacturers.

These sorts of measures can reduce the cool factor, if not for current gun owners, for the next generation of potential buyers.***Listening to D. Watkins, author of The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America, interviewed on Fresh Air, I was reminded that, in addition to alienated rural white men, there is another set of people among us for whom the gun is a very present reality. For young men, usually of color, in neighborhoods where the drug trade thrives, guns just part of a precarious life. Here's Watkins describing how he came up:

... I had a friend - a really, really close friend - he's passed away now - but he was being bullied. He was being, you know, he was being picked on. He got beat down like three times by these same - by the same group of guys.

And these guys, they were notorious in East Baltimore. They used to roll around in packs of, like, 35 or 40. And they used to come through neighborhoods and, you know, I got beat up by them before. They used to beat us down. But, you know, my one particular friend, they beat him up, like, a couple of times - three or four times.

And the last time, he was just - you know, he couldn't take it anymore. He was frustrated. And we're, like, 12 and 13 years old around this time so one day - you know, we used to hang on this corner called Robinson Street - the corner of Robinson and Orleans Street - and we was outside, there was some girls outside, there was some people outside. And, you know, it was a regular summer night. We were having a good time. These guys bend the corner, you know, and they - so many of them. And they walking down the block, and, you know, they spot him, and they see him, and they walk up on him. And, you know, there was about 10 of us so, you know, we swelled up and just stood up. And it was like, you know, like, you know - you know, it's more of them than us but whatever, let's do this.

And, out of nowhere, you know, I - none of us expected this. We didn't even know he pulled a gun out. And he just started busting shots at the crowd. I, you know, well, he was behind me when he did it, so I felt, like, bullets pass right past my head. And, you know, I hit the deck. And he ended up shooting his cousin in the hand by mistake.

And those guys - those same guys - they didn't pick on him anymore. But that was our most, like, one of the worst situations for him because after he did that, you know, it was no looking back. He carried that gun like, you know, like that was his best friend. And it ended up being the way he died.

The gentrifying San Francisco Mission District is not immune to this sort of gun problem. We had a young man around our little church last year who was trying to leave the gang life, who was trying to make it by working a job ... and his former mates shot his girl friend dead next to him. It happens.

This kind of gun violence is not what organized gun owners and manufacturers are defending. But we have relatively good gun laws around here. Yet the thugs get the guns because there are all those other jurisdictions where rabid gun absolutists fight to make availability easy. Guns leak to where people want them.

Caging Black and brown people into neighborhoods where kids have to learn to avoid the guns -- that strikes me as the height of uncool.