Four Gun Control Archetypes - Know Any? (updated)

Gun control advocates are not one homogenized group driven by the same things. Can you see gun controllers you know in these "archetypes"?

People have a tendency to generalize about what drives those with whom they disagree. It is far easier to lump all of your rhetorical adversaries into a single homogenized bowl than try to appreciate their individual motives and driving forces. Gun control advocates do it regularly to gun-rights folk convincing themselves that all gun owners are knuckle-dragging, low intellect, white male minions of the NRA. They harbor such caricatures even though the largest growing segment of first time gun owners is black women and one of the most outspoken defenders of gun rights today is a black man. 

But it is easier for gun control advocates to hold their own opinions when they see their gun-owners-rights adversaries as simpletons motivated by ideas or ideals that they look down upon. 

But this bias or intellectual laziness is not confined to the gun control crowd. The gun-rights crowd does this as well seeing gun control advocates as a single block motivated by a single motive. Sure, while the end desire of most gun control advocates is the ultimate disarming of civilian America, they are not necessarily motivated by the same basic drivers.

So, below is a discussion of six sub-classes of gun control advocates for your consideration. Without question, some are motivated by a single drivers but some can be driven by a combination. 


Hoplophobes harbor a deep-seated irrational fear of guns as if firearms had a mind of their own and/or  a firearm can compel otherwise "normal" people to become homicidal. Hoplophobes are often low-information types who are ignorant of many of the gun-rights arguments, the operation of firearms or the motivations of gun-rights advocates. Try to engage a hoplophobe in a discussion and you will sadly find that they are happy in their ignorance, assuming they are even aware of how much they do not know. Historically, I have found that many hoplophobes have never handled a firearm and claim to not know a single owner of firearms. Actually, that latter part is usually incorrect, they just don't know that people they know own guns. 

Anticulturalists are driven by ideology and hate gun culture for what it represents more broadly and wish it to be destroyed. These are the types who agreed with what then-candidate Barack Obama said of people in small town American, that, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” For anticulturalists, the targets are their general ideological adversaries with firearms being a symbol of an ideology they wish to squash. For this group it is easy to dehumanize a diverse sub-set of the population into easy to accept stereotypes. For anticulturalists, an ideology that they look down upon as being inferior and not worthy of consideration is the target and they would hate those who harbor it even if they were disarmed. They feel the same ideological revulsion toward "red neck hick gun owners" as they do for "bible thumping" evangelical/social conservatives. Unsurprisingly, their supposedly superior moral position allows them to display their hatred unabashedly in public. Listen to their language and you will hear phrases like "gun nuts", "NRA minions", "baby killers", "fetishists", "terrorists" and far worse to deride the gun-rights culture. To one extent or another, most of the anti-gun crowd harbor anticulturalist tendencies and use the gun debate to fight this broader culture war. Sadly, his view is positively tribal and if you need proof of that, it confronts you in newspapers every day. BTW, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that many in the gun-rights community are also anticulturalists vis-a-vis what they see as run-away progressive liberalism nanny-statism as embodied by the "civilian disarmament caucus".

Victimization projectionists are a small segment of society that believe we are all going to be victims of something at some point, it is just a matter of what and when. These individuals assume that any violent act that can happen may happen to them at some point in the future. These are the folks who see rampage massacres and assume that the next one will happen near the same place, even in the same community. They assume that because and event has happened in the past makes it more likely to happen in the future. These people are willing to squash the natural and constitutional rights of others after a horrific rampage killing while they ignore that there has never been two rampage shootings in a single community. At the highest level, these people subconsciously believe they are prey and would never consider that there are things they can do to protect themselves. The gun-rights crowd often refers to this cohort as "sheep" or "sheeple". 

Urban violence disassociationist are those suburban dwellers who are activated by random violence in close geographic proximity to themselves and their families but are otherwise ignorant or insensitive to violence in our urban areas, far from their homes. Across the USA, as well as in CT, more than 80% of all gun violence is associated with illegal handguns used by people who are disqualified from legally possessing firearms. Further, most of that violence involves black males between ages 15 and 25 having no direct impact on white middle-to-upper class suburbanites. Such disassociationists seemingly ignore this monthly toll of carnage yet find the random act of suburban violence reason to restrict the ability of their law-abiding neighbors and others to own guns even though they have having nothing to do with the causitive suburban violence. The groups that have popped up in suburban Connecticut in the wake of Newtown certainly fall under this category of suburbia-focused activism, among others. 

Gungrabbers are statists who believe that the state should control either economic or social policy, or both, to some degree. Some of these are people who trust the "collective wisdom" of government officials more than they trust the wisdom of their fellow citizens. Whether they are politicians or servants of politicians, they want all the power and all the control. They do not necessarily hate gun owners but they hate the fact that any group of citizens, whether gun owners, the tea party or Occupy protestors, may exhibit the power to question the authority of the ruling class. As history has shown, an armed law-abiding population keeps over-reaching governments in check. As history has also shown, the corollary is also true where tyrannical or fascist governments have nearly universally disarmed their citizenry before inflicting the worst upon them. Even our American Revolution was due in large part to efforts by the British to disarm the Colonialist citizenry. 

I am sure one could create more categories but that is likely to lead to diminishing returns. Those above, individually or in combination, cover the motivations of every anti-gun person I know.  I would enjoy hearing about archetypes you might want to add to this list. 

[UPDATED for spelling, grammar and additional content.]