The National Rifle Association (NRA) is good at using democracy to advance its agenda. Over the course of many decades, the United States’ foremost advocate of gun rights has built substantial political power by cultivating a politically unified and engaged base of grassroots supporters. The political intensity of US gun owners – and the NRA’s ability to mobilize them into action – has enabled the organization to consistently defeat proposed gun regulations and is a key reason that it has become a central pillar of the contemporary Republican Party.

This essay began as a blog post on Skeptic.com that I wrote after a series of debates I did with John Lott, who has emerged as one of the strongest opponents of gun-control measures and a regular guest on Fox News. The original blog included my PowerPoint slides and accompanying commentary that I used in my debates; here I primarily focus on my experiences debating Lott, drawing on some of the more poignant data slides I used to counter his thesis that more guns equals less crime. This is followed by a discussion of a more recent debate I did with a radical gun advocate named Michael Huemer, who made the argument for guns as a necessary bulwark against governmental tyranny, which I debunked in the previous essay. I did not fully understand where Lott and Huemer (or gun-rights advocates of any kind) were coming from until I read George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics, which lifted the scales from my eyes and enabled me to understand what both conservatives and liberals really want, and not just in the realm of gun control, but in all dominions of life. The final part of this essay addresses those insights.