To the editor:
Warrant Article 36 petitions Congress to enact “uniform national gun safety laws.” If such laws were enacted, it is likely that they would be significantly less restrictive than those of Massachusetts, and that Congress would invoke the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, thereby replacing Massachusetts gun laws with the weaker U.S. law. What a dream for the NRA; what a nightmare for Massachusetts.
Sincerely,
Michael R. Coppock
214 Aspen Circle
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The gun violence in this country is the result of a complex and complicated set of factors. I continue to believe that social and economic issues underlie a lot of the violence. We simply won’t address those issues. Nobody agrees on the facts of gun violence. Neither side can be trusted to put out undistorted information as to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of existing gun laws. Certainly there are a set of facts and statistics that can be agreed to be all. Here’s where joint fact-finding comes in.
JFF is part of consensus decision process seeking to integrate facts into effective policy. Disputants, that is participants in a well-designed consensus decision process, decide on an ‘honest broker’ to assemble the facts and statistics that they agree to use as the basis of their discussions. “Because JFF promotes shared learning, it helps to create knowledge that is technically credible, publicly legitimate, and especially relevant to policy and management decisions” (Karl, Susskind, Wallace, A dialogue not a diatribe: Environment, v. 49, n.1, p. 20-34).
Those facts and statistics, however, are open to different interpretations. That’s fine and expected. Community values and priorities are other components of the civil dialogue of a well-designed collaborative problem solving process. Indeed, those values and priorities may be more important than facts and statistics. Let’s though be arguing about the same facts and statistics. Regrettably, neither side will agree to an honest broker to assemble those facts and statistics. Until that is done, in my view, we will never have the debates that illuminate the reasons for and possible solutions to mitigate gun violence.