Here we are again, in the wake of a horrific mass murder 45 minutes from my home, discussing whether or not we can discuss the question of guns. Writing in The New York Times on Saturday, Nate Silver pointed out a shift in our language to which any who wish, finally, to engineer this public discourse should pay attention. Gun rights and Second Amendment, as he demonstrates, are on the rise, whereas gun control and gun violence are on the decline.
As George Lakoff has so convincingly demonstrated in his articles and books (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think), language controls political debate: “Any political message about policy can be understood only in terms of moral values,” he writes in The Little Blue Book; moreover, “Traditional liberal discourse strategies are not consistent with the science of how reason really works.”
Nate Silver’s analysis back…