A way to talk sanely about guns

A new documentary shows what can be possible.

Image from chatGPT 4o

Mass shootings in the US are treated like tornadoes and hurricanes: tragic, worthy of news coverage and “thoughts and prayers,” but as unavoidable as the weather. Gun rights are so polarizing that even the worst massacres just cause each side to dig in deeper.

So what would it look like if they could talk calmly to each other instead?

That’s the premise of The Tennessee 11, a documentary that premieres tomorrow at the Nashville film festival. It tracks a group of Tennesseans from across the political spectrum as they come together to deliberate gun safety legislation. I wanted to know how to discuss the most polarizing topic in America. So I asked them.

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The TL;DR: Using a process not unlike a citizens’ assembly, but shorter and lighter-weight, the participants got all the way from bridging conversations to seven concrete legislative proposals in a long weekend. So far only a partial version of one proposal has made it into Tennessee state law, but the organizers are already applying the approach to other difficult conversations across the country.

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The backdrop

In 2021, Tennessee abolished the need for handgun carry permits. Two years later, a gunman killed three students and three staff at the Covenant school in Nashville. The governor, Bill Lee, proposed a law allowing courts to temporarily take guns away from people judged at high risk of harming themselves or others. Legislators blocked it. 

In the wake of the shooting, the organization Starts With Us—now in the process of rebranding itself as the Builders Movement—started the Citizen Solutions project to convene the gathering of 11 Tennesseans. It has since held a similar discussion on abortion in Wisconsin and will conduct a third this winter—location and topic still under wraps.

The participants in Tennessee ran the gamut. At the pro-gun end you had a firearms instructor and a combat veteran. At the gun-control end, a former police officer who used to oversee the permit process and a schoolteacher who has lost nine of her students to gun violence over the years.

The Tennessee 11 (Credit: Joseph Patrick)

The discussions

The movie follows their deliberations over the course of two and a half days. It’s compelling to watch, not because of the drama and fireworks, but the lack of them. Instead, you see a dialogue that only occasionally gets… well, even “heated” would be too strong a word.

All the participants I spoke to commented on this. “What surprised me was the vast majority [of the participants] came in willing to figure out the common ground,” Jay Zimmerman, the combat veteran, told me. “There were people who were passionate but… there weren’t intense disagreements,” said Mark Proctor, the former police officer. “I couldn’t have told you I’d walk into a room with people from different backgrounds and politics and we’d have so much fun together,” recalled Arriell Gipson Martin, a local government official.

We get to watch the group achieve consensus on thorny issues. For example, should a diagnosis of mental illness bar someone from owning a gun? I’d have said yes; so would Proctor, the ex-cop. But he told me his mind was changed after listening to Zimmerman, who now works on mental health and suicide prevention and has lost at least one war buddy to suicide.

In conversation with me, Zimmerman made a case that such a provision would be overly broad. “Statistically, people with a mental-health diagnosis are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of a violent crime,” he said. The rule would also catch in its dragnet people who’ve been prescribed psychiatric drugs for off-label use, such as to help them quit smoking.

Ultimately, the group decides that a mental-health diagnosis shouldn’t itself be a bar to gun ownership. Instead, it could in some cases trigger a court probe into whether someone is at risk of committing violence, and temporarily remove their guns if so. (This was essentially the law that the governor proposed but was blocked.)

Mark Proctor listens to an argument. (Credit: Joseph Patrick)

The key faultline

The core divide about guns is whether owning one is a right or a privilege. If you interpret the Second Amendment literally, you believe the former. (Zimmerman goes so far as to call the right to a gun “God-given.”) If you don’t—or if you’re not American—it’s obviously the latter. Nobody automatically gets to drive a car, fly a plane, or store hazardous chemicals; you need to pass stringent tests and obtain permits. Why should guns be different?

Not surprisingly, then, the most impassioned scene in the movie revolves around this question. Specifically, it’s over whether gun carry permits should be mandatory. Proctor and another participant, Brandi Kellett, a college professor, say they should be. The Second Amendment advocates push back. One of them, Adam Luke, a family therapist, invokes a favorite National Rifle Association talking point by drawing a parallel between gun rights and Black civil rights. If you believe in the latter, he says, you should support the former.

Watching, I thought: If I were Black, I’d be incensed. You really want to compare the right to legal equality in your own homeland, the right not to be mistreated for the color of your skin, to the right to carry a lethal weapon just for kicks?

But this is where the surprise happens: Luke gets backing from Martin, who is Black. “I literally walk in a life where my rights and the rights of my ancestors were taken for granted so long,” she says, that she wouldn’t want to restrict any other constitutional right even if she disagreed with it.

I asked Martin why she had made that concession. Couldn’t she have argued that comparing gun rights to civil rights cheapens civil rights? “And then where does that get you?” she responded. “It can’t be about nitpicking—you think this right is more sacred than that right. It’s got to be that I want everyone to feel protected.” Taking that stance, she said, “humanized the conversation and brought people off of their defenses.”

The aftermath

In short, gun rights won out. And in a country where they’re literally in the Constitution, that probably wasn’t surprising.

But the group did reach consensus on seven proposals to improve gun safety without curtailing gun rights. Those, plus one on which there wasn’t consensus—namely, restoring mandatory permits—were put to the public in an online poll. 30,000 people voted; five of the proposals received majority support.

The group then took those five to legislators. Just part of one of them became law: a requirement for schools to give students age-appropriate instruction on gun safety. And it was one step forward, one step back. That same month another bill passed allowing more school staff to carry guns. “I don’t think that was smart,” Martin said.

The process

So what does it take to make a conversation like this happen? And why did it ultimately have only a minor influence on lawmakers?

1. The groundwork. They began, said Ashley Phillips, the Builders Movement head of programs, with a months-long search for participants. Program manager Lori Raimondo earned the sobriquet “Legendary Lori” after talking to community members and scouring local media to identify more than 300 people with a connection to the issue of gun violence. An interview process whittled them down, singling out those with the necessary humility, open-mindedness and critical thinking skills to be able to listen to opposing views without flying off the handle. 

2. The location. The gathering took place in Franklin, a small town chosen to be near the liberal city of Nashville but rural enough to make the more conservative, upcountry participants feel comfortable. 

The “Wall of Words.” (Credit: Joseph Patrick)

3. The structure. The retreat’s first day focused entirely on building trust, via such things as people telling their personal stories and creating shared ground rules for the discussion. Those ground rules included a “wall of words” of agreed-on terminology—for instance, not using emotionally loaded phrases like “assault weapons” but instead identifying guns by their capabilities (e.g. semi-automatic vs single-shot).

On days 2 and 3 they listened to non-partisan expert testimony, did breakout groups on sub-topics like guns in schools, and started crafting policy proposals. All this was under the guidance of professional facilitators from the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution.

4. The follow-up. This was the weak point, in my view. In a classic citizens’ assembly, the organizers typically get buy-in from legislators or local officials before holding one, so they know the citizens’ recommendations will at least get a fair hearing. The Tennessee 11 didn’t approach lawmakers until after their discussions were done. That may be why only one recommendation got implemented and another countervailing law was passed.

But Phillips says they are open to engaging lawmakers earlier. And now, with two deliberations under their belt and a third on the way, they are hoping “to scale it up.”

My conclusion

This citizen assembly-lite approach sounds like a useful addition to the deliberative democracy scene in a country where full-scale citizen assemblies have been almost non-existent. It can make the method more accessible to jurisdictions that can’t afford to run a months-long process. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next gatherings from Citizen Solutions achieve.

Links

Let a hundred thousand flowers bloom. Guy and Heidi Burgess of the Beyond Intractability newsletter expound on “the notion that the ‘solution’ to failing democracy comes in the form of hundreds of thousands of different people and organizations, each working on their own little ‘thing.’” This jives, of course, with my central thesis for Futurepolis. (Toda Institute)

Why misinformation seduces us. Our brains “are wired to process information, especially when it confirms what we already think or feel.” Understanding this is the first step to inoculating yourself. (Outrage Overload)

How to fix DAOs. These blockchain-based governance organizations often fall short of their promise of equitable, decentralized decision-making. But some key organizational principles like transparency, openness, and free expression could help. (arxiv.org)

More on DAOs: It’s not the technology, stupid. Along similar lines, this report from “the standards body of the DAO ecosystem” is a case study on the rise and fall of DAOs in Singapore. It argues that “The core value of DAOs for local communities… lies not in the underlying technologies but in the ideology of self-governance and new modes of community organizing.” (Daostar via Metagov)

How to break the two-party deadlock. In a looooong piece, Lee Drutman makes the case for reviving the 18th-century system of fusion voting, where multiple parties can endorse the same candidate. Several other scholars weigh in, some disagreeing. If you can’t be bothered, Micah Sifry has a shorter gloss on it. (Boston Review)