Along those lines....
The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between a “clip” and a “magazine.”
Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.
It can be infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions among our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.
Pointing out terminological firearms faux pas has its place. As a lifelong shooter and a third-generation gun collector, I grew up watching pundits and politicos regularly betray their ignorance of these hazardous tools and the culture that surrounds them. Advocates of tighter gun laws have bandied the phrase “assault weapon” around as if it were a static category of insidious killers; they defined an assault weapon, in law, by its cosmetic add-ons — pistol grips, collapsible stocks, bayonet lugs — while overstating the role these weapons play in overall gun crime in America. (According to 2010-2014 FBI data, rifles of all types, including assault weapons, caused less than 4 percent of all firearms deaths in the U.S. Handguns caused 70 percent.) Gun-control advocates have even acknowledged at times that assault weapons are hard to define, and thus easy to vilify among the uninitiated.
If only these adversaries were a little more honest, I’ve often thought, and more precise in their language on the subject, we could have a serious debate on the finer points of gun violence policy, instead of a bad-faith propaganda race.
Gunsplaining, though, is always done in bad faith. Like mansplaining, it’s less about adding to the discourse than smothering it — with self-appointed authority, and often the thinnest of connection to any real fact. (If gunsplaining had a motto, it might be Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s macabre old saw: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”)