Gun Lovers Against Each Other Analysis

In the article " Friend-or-foe Mindset pits Gun Lovers against Each Other" Leonard Pitts Jr. talks about how the dangers of guns and the fat cats of big business prevent the safety and security that firearms should provide. In Pitts' article, he elaborates on the power of one man's rights and beliefs can take him down to nothing if he is against the majority. The man that Pitts talks about is a highly renowned gun activist who wrote for a prominent firearm magazine and was so renowned with guns that people used to go to him for advice on which gun is the best on the market. So how does a man who leads the fight for firearms rights ends up as the most despised people for gun enthusiasts nationwide? He spoke up against the same people who encouraged …show more content…
Within the article, there are many instances of how one’s opinion when presented with a large collection of people the possibility of opposing views is a constant. As Pitts stated, ”The way his fellow gun lovers responded to this, you’d have thought he’d argued for U.N. confiscation of every gun, arrow, and slingshot in America”. This statement shows exactly how many of Metcalf's supporters felt about his opinion and how they retaliated. They took a simple statement of opinion and turned it into a hostile declaration demanding people to give their firearms up to the government. Instead of just reading the opinion as stated many went out for blood lashing out against Metcalf, requesting that he be terminated from his job as the publishers he wrote for lost a multitude of subscriptions. As more magazines lost their subscriptions so did Metcalf lose his job, show, and support from his once-supportive …show more content…
This comes to light when Metcalf opposed his community's belief he was a victim of crowd mentality, which is the action of a small collection of people projecting that something is unacceptable that in turn persuades an entire collection of people to believe in the projected view. In the article, this is expanded upon with the following “ If you are only with them 99 percent, you are not with them at all. George Orwell had a word for it: groupthink”. Both groupthink and crowd mentality work in the same manner of a small amount opposing an ideal and trying to persuade a large population to go along with their idea, because if a lot of people differ from one's ideals, there is a subconscious feeling that the ideal is the wrong one and should be changed to the one that others agree with. Therefore changing not only a single person's mind on the subject but possibly an entire nation to even the world. With this conflict of persuasion of a group's thoughts on a subject to one’s own there can be multiple implications to how the actions of the self-community can alter to the group community which can lead to a change that the self-community wouldn’t have made if not presented with a feeling of wrong by having a differing