Recently the use of “gun safety” as an alternative for “gun control” greatly has increased. This is a mistake, for these four reasons:
- It is not clear whether you are referring to safe storage/safe handling, or to gun control, in the aspect of what you are trying to say. You are trying to tell people gun control is great, but initially, they will think about the safe storage/safe handling, since that is the general concept to which the word “safety” best fits. You are not communicating what you mean to say.
- Because it is not clear whether you are referring to safe storage/safe handling, or gun control, there is a lethal side effect. Safe storage/safe handling is the shared position of the overwhelming majority. If you try to push a gun control agenda through the use of that term, then whenever we urge people to “gun safety”, if they recognize your rhetoric as you mean for them to recognize it – gun control – then instead of invoking a shared position, you will be invoking a controversial position, and hence at least a significant minority will be hostile to it. Being hostile, they will not take the measures for safe storage/safe handling at the same rate that they otherwise would have done, and so the consequences of unsafe storage/unsafe handling – that is, injuries and deaths – will follow, when they didn’t have to.
- It increases the indirection, hence the complexity, of your appeal. In general, gun regulations tend to multiply, so there already are issues of effective complexity and compliance. This is particularly true if you consider a rough policy aggregation around “no dangerous people get guns”, “no guns in dangerous situations”, but otherwise popular gun ownership. The laws people propose to implement this wind up being beyond an individual’s actionable understanding when driving between cities or performing general errands; there are too many of them in too many jurisdictions. If you intend rationally to persuade people of the goodness of policy, you are time-bound, and adding this indirection just adds more time consumption on an already effectively complicated situation.
- Finally, there is the matter of the loss of goodwill and fraudulent presentation that gets raised by this co-opting of the general terminology “safety”. Neither gun rights or gun control perfectly addresses safety: gun rights will limit rioting and provides some capability against evil rulers, while gun control limits “family fire” and the severity of various impulsive crimes. Hence neither policy tendency obviously is better aligned to an increase in safety (safety is a general term, we should not try to make it specific). By appropriating “safety” for one side, that is an lie of itself, and by hiding the gun control agenda in it, it is a form of fraud, to conflate safe storage/safe handling with gun control. When you lie to people, and use terminology that misleads/misrepresents your position, it makes it impossible for them to enter into a contract with you (which assumes your reliability to uphold your end of it). Accepting a trade of guns, in exchange for a promise of public safety via proper law enforcement, is such a contract. Therefore you are making it impossible for people to accept your policy proposals.