Gender, Sex, and Transgender Debates

Introduction

For a while, I've had the idea of writing short posts presenting right wing and conservative ideas as charitably as possible. There's a tendency on both sides of the culture wars to oversimplify and straw man (person?) the opposition. I fall prey to this just as much as the next person but in an effort to practice what I preach, here is the first is what I will try to make a regular feature of my blog. My first attempt is here. In this post, I'm going to enter the mine-field debate over sex, gender, and transgender identity.

In these pieces, my aim isn't really to argue for a particular view. I'm mainly going to try to give an overview of some of the issues and trade-offs associated with various popular positions. The hope is that I'll accomplish what I aim for in my classroom: To get people to at least feel the intuitive pull of competing positions and understand why someone might adopt them. That said, where I think a position is particularly strong or weak, I'll suggest this.

Sex, Gender, and Transgender Debates
In good philosophical fashion, let's begin by defining our terms. There is disagreement over the terms and we'll look at that later, but we need something to begin with. Here are how sex and gender are often defined.

Sex: A biological category defined by some combination of chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia. Edit: In an earlier draft I wrote that there are five sexes for humans, especially since it's not clear how to classify hermaphrodites. I'd read this several years ago in some now-forgotten articles. I've since learned from commenters that this is a contested claim. The two-sexes view holds that we can always identify the female because "she makes large gametes." For a fun twitter feed on this topic, go here. For an overview of the biological possibilities for sex determination in humans, go here. For scientific support for the two sex view, go here.

Gender: The behavioral norms typically associated with a particular sex. Norms, in this case, are often understood to be both descriptive and prescriptive. That is to say, they can describe how members of a sex do act or how they ought to act. It's important to keep the descriptive and prescriptive elements separate since most people often equivocate between the two. The most common genders are man and woman or, as adjectives, masculine or feminine.

Famously, gender is often referred to as the social meaning of sex. That is to say, when we think "female" or "male," gender represents the social roles and behaviors associated with the respective sexes.

As far as I can tell, the standard conservative position is that sex=gender. This view is usually referred to as gender essentialism. By this I mean that biology and behavioral norms do not come apart. Sort of. On the descriptive account, being female means that you will behave in certain ways and perhaps be disposed to particular gendered preferences. That is, your biology determines your gendered behavior and dispositions.

The normative account of gender usually follows: If you don't exhibit the appropriate biologically determined behaviors then you are deviating from how you should behave. This is what people mean when they say things like, "he's not a real man" or "act like a lady." These are admonitions to act according the norms appropriate to your biological sex.

Critics of gender essentialism point to a potential problem. If gendered behavior is determined by biological sex then how is it possible that some people don't behave according to the biological sex? The reply usually has to do with the effects of decadent liberal culture corrupting the youth. In other words, culture is corrupting "natural" behaviors. A problem with the reply is that it concedes the very point that their opponents often make: gender is socially constructed and the "natural" gendered behaviors don't occur in a cultural vacuum either. They occur in a cultural environment that models and reinforces particular gender norms....

This leads us to the other end of the spectrum where people argue that sex and gender can come apart. (The fact that it's possible to say "be a man" or "act like a lady" seems to tacitly support this in the descriptive sense...) We only believe that gender and sex are inextricably linked because biologically female humans are socialized to internalize the corresponding cultural gender norms just as biologically male humans are socialized to internalize their corresponding gender norms. If males and females were socialized differently, they would act differently than the gender norms typically encouraged and modeled in our society.

So, to repeat, here are the two extreme ends of the continuum: Those who say that sex determines gender and those that say that gender is entirely the product of socialization--not biology. Those who argue that sex determines gender often move from the descriptive claim to the normative; i.e., that one ought to align one's behavior with the gender norms associated with one's biological sex. Failing to do this is, to varying degrees, morally bad.

As you might guess, there's also everything in between: People argue that, in a population, some traits and dispositions are statistically correlated with one sex rather than another. Basically, some of our behaviors and dispositions are biologically determined by our sex while others are indeed the product of socialization. It's important to add that just like for every other species, most traits fall on a continuum: No one has all traits in the same amounts and so, at the population level, we should expect to find all traits in both male and female humans and in different degrees.

Defending the conservative position: Across all species we observe statistical behavioral differences between males and females of that species. We also know that there is a biological foundation to many behavioral dispositions. It would be weird if humans were the only species in all of creation for which sex and biology didn't play any role in statistical distributions of behaviors.

Here comes the tricky part: Humans are unique in that culture plays a huge role in determining behavior. This is why we observe different behaviors across cultures and time. So, while it's entirely reasonable to hold that many behaviors are grounded in biology, many behaviors are also a product of socialization in a particular culture. How do we distinguish behaviors that are biologically grounded from those that are socially grounded when behaviors occur in an environment where both determinants exist?

For some, the solution is to abolish all gender norms and to "let the pieces fall where they may." That is, if we tear down gender norms, people--as unique individuals--will follow a path that conforms to their intrinsic dispositions. In this way, people who might have been pushed into roles that clash with their inner disposition are free to pursue a life congruent with their unique combination of drives and dispositions. Also, those who fit well in traditional gender roles still have that available to them with the important difference that they are genuinely choosing it.

For others, gender norms offer a safe road map for harmonious family and community living. Destroying these norms provides people with no road map and eviscerates the institutions upon which family and society have historically been built.

The gender abolitionist assumes that humans can handle all that freedom and new harmonious forms of social organization can emerge (Read: The Inquisitor from Dostoyevski's The Brother Karamazov for a great take on this). The gender conservative believes that society can't flourish without certain gender roles. They also assume previous forms of social organization grounded in gender norms were indeed harmonious or at least more harmonious than any other possible form of social organization.

There's a lot more to say here but I'm trying to make this just an overview and get to the issue of transgender identity.

Transgender Identity
Ok, if I end up in a re-education camp for this, please contact my mom. She's a professor in the Department of Education at UBC so she may be able to pull some strings.

We can think of transgender identity as involving two distinct but related issues: One ontological and one ethical.

The Ontological Issue
Ontology is a fancy way of talking about the philosophy of "being." In this area of philosophy we try to figure out what makes a thing what it is rather than something else. The ontological question regarding transgender identity asks "what is essential to gender?" In fancy philosophy talk we might ask, what are the necessary and sufficient properties that a human must have such that they are one gender rather than another?

Here are the two simplified ends of the continuum. On one end, some people say that gender is fundamentally determined by how one conceives of oneself. This position is often straw personed(?) as someone merely self-declaring to be one gender rather than another. If I feel like a cat then I am a cat. Most proponents of self-declaring view hold that the self-declaring is a consequence of, amongst other things, a deep psychological self-conception as well as dispositions and behaviors that align with the gender not typically associated with their biological sex.

On the other end of the continuum gender essentialists argue that because gender is biologically tied to sex, one cannot change their gender without changing one's chromosomes. Gender has nothing to do with self-identity and everything to do with biological sex.

There are A LOT of positions in between.

Interestingly, the trans movement has created a division between some feminists. The historically dominant feminist view holds that gender is the product of socialization (often called gender critical feminism). If we accept this then self-identity in the absence of socialization cannot on its own confer gender status. This puts traditional feminism at odds with newer strains of trans-inclusive feminism. A male who is socialized as a man, on this view, cannot be a woman even if they undergo gender reassignment surgery because they have not been socialized as a woman.

Notice that this view (you can't change genders) holds the same conclusion as conservatives but for different reasons. For essentialists you can't change genders because you can't change your chromosomes. For gender critical feminists you can't change genders because you can't change how you were socialized in the past.

Notice also that, on the gender critical view, a trans person could over time potentially become their chosen gender if others treat them that way; i.e, they undergo gendered socialization. One's position here depends on how much socialization is required and at what stages in one's life it occurs.

Most gender critical feminists also disagree with the idea implicit in transgenderism that there are these two neat boxes called "gender" that we can put ourselves or others in. "Gender is a construct, we're trying to deconstruct it, and now you're trying to preserve it just like the conservatives!"

Here's another interesting twist in the debate. Some trans-inclusive views can sort of align with gender essentialists. Our psychology is grounded in our brain biology. We know that in a population, traits are distributed along a bell-curve--regardless of biological sex. This means that some humans with male chromosomes will have a "female" psychology. Gender identity becomes tricky here. What's more important to what we most fundamentally are? Our chromosomes or our psychology? Both are grounded in biology.

On the one hand, you are you because of the psychology particular to you. For example, if you are a shy person it doesn't make sense for someone to call you an outgoing person. You both feel and behave like a shy person. Here, biology points in two directions: The (biologically grounded) brain structures underlying a person's psychology might be what our society associates with femininity while their XY chromosomes point in the other direction. If we weigh psychology and underlying brain structures more heavily, then gender is determined this way. The other position weighs chromosomes more heavily in determining gender identity.

Both replies assume that one or the other is more fundamental to gender identity. Notice that both positions also sort of agree that there is something essential about gender: masculinity and femininity are identifiable clusters of properties grounded in biology. The disagreement is over which is fundamental.

The deep psychological view of gender presents its critics with the following challenge. How do we explain the fact that despite socialization and despite chromosomal sex some people deeply and sincerely identify as the gender not typically associated with their sex? If gender is primarily the product of socialization, then how do we explain gender dysphoria in those who were never socialized for that gender? If gender is primarily chromosomal, how do we explain the existence of a psychology (grounded in brain structures) that can resist a life-time of conditioning in the other gender direction? On the essentialist view, chromosomes, by definition, code for brain structures that underlie the psychology of typical gender identity for that sex. But there exist people for whom this doesn't appear to be true.

The central task for trans-inclusive feminists, with respect to the ontological question, is to show a disanalogy between race and gender. Almost no one thinks that self-identity can determine one's race. So, trans-inclusive feminists need to argue that gender and race differ in some important respect where gender can be determined by self-identity but race can't.

These arguments exist but disagreement over their soundness still abounds--even in the neo-Marxist post-modernist universities (i.e., all of them, according to Jordan Peterson). Regardless of one's position on the issue, I think it's unfair to vilify conservatives and people on the right over the ontological issue when there isn't even consensus on the liberal left.

The Ethical Issue
That said, the left generally agrees on the ethical question: Should I refer to someone according to their preferred gender pronoun? Regardless of whether someone actually believes a trans person is really the gender they believe themselves to be, most people on the left hold that basic norms of dignity and mutual respect imply we call people by their preferred pronoun.

A loose analogue might be someone who self-identifies as a Christian but acts contrary to Jesus's teachings and has never read the Bible. If they want me to identify them a Christian, norms of basic dignity and mutual respect suggest that I do so if that's their preference. I gain nothing by insisting that they are not TRUE Christians. Of course, being a Christian isn't a biological category but it's the norms of dignity and mutual respect that ought govern behavior towards one another regardless of what my ontology tells me. That said, if I want to write a respectful philosophical paper on the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian, I should be able to do this without Harris-Mint.

Finally, the norms of dignity and mutual respect hold people should not be discriminated against based on their self-identity--even if we disagree with how they self-identify. This is the benefit and responsibility of living in a free society. We cannot escape interacting with people with whom we disagree but we can choose to treat them the way we would want to be treated. As an itinerant Jew from Israel once said:

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you:
do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

and

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself

Amen.

One final point regards individual liberty. Americans luuuuuuuuvz them some freedom talk. Consider what a genuine commitment to freedom entails. Respecting individual freedom to do only the things one likes and agrees with is no commitment to freedom. It's thinly disguised prejudice. A genuine commitment to individual liberty and its real test implies imparting dignity and mutual respect to those who make choices and live in ways we strongly disagree with.

USA! USA! USA!

FREEDOM!!!!

Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!

Final Remarks
There is no way to cover this entire debate in a single blog post. This topic is massive. The intent here is simply to give people an overview of some of the major positions and what they entail. If you have something you'd like to add, feel free to write me something in the comments.

Value and Gun Rights

The American Dream

Introduction
I've mentioned before that philosophers distinguish between lumpers and splitters. Splitters take a category of things, actions, concepts and show that there are important distinctions to be made within that category such that we should really see it as two (or more) distinct categories. For example, someone might argue that 'motor vehicle' should be treated as two categories because cars and motorcycles are importantly different in the skills required to drive them. 

Lumpers do the opposite. They take what appear to be a collection of distinct things, concepts, or actions and argue that in some important respect they are all the same such that we can treat them as all belonging to the same category. For example, someone might argue that apples and oranges should both be considered 'fruit' from the point of view of import taxes.

Shortly following the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas Reason magazine, a Libertarian publication, published an article predictably calling for restraint (i.e., do nothing) with respect to gun control legislation. All the standard arguments were there for why gun control legislation is bad. What stood out to me, however, was the euphemistic lumping of guns as mere tools. Here are a few prominent examples :

The unwillingness to leap to a legal solution to mass gun murders requires recognizing that guns are tools, with genuine uses for personal safety, personal fulfillment, and convenience, just as are cars, as well as noticing that a tiny number of people who own or have access to these specific tools ever use them to harm another human.

For the vast majority of their owners, guns are no more worthy of banning than any other element of their peacefully enjoyed liberty, one tool among many to shape their chosen life and leisure. Banning something that tens of millions of people innocently value and imposing onerous costs on American citizens, generally downward in socioeconomic terms, is a recipe for disaster.

Notice the effect on our emotional response to 'guns' when we lump them in with 'tools' (and refer to them as such). Much of the emotional charge runs out of the word. I have no doubt that this is what the writers at Reason magazine intended. I assume their thought is something like this: [Read in your learned teacher voice lecturing to students] "If we are to understand the issue of gun violence we must take a cold reasoned approach to the issue. There is no room for irrational emotion." This is Reason magazine, after all.

Setting aside that most philosophers (since Aristotle) reject the view that all emotions are purely irrational, I want to sporatically adopt this lumping convention for this blogpost: Listen, you hysterical liberals, guns are just tools. There are no relevant distinctions between a philips head screw driver and a gun. They belong in the same category. Settle down.

Preferences

Before moving forward, I need to quickly introduce a technical term. 'Preference,' as it is used in every day speech, is sometimes used differently from its more narrow meaning in economics and political theory. Preference, as it is used technically, is always an expression of relative choice or value; it's an expression of ranking something relative to some other choice. So, I can never just say I prefer a. I must say that I prefer a to something else. 

Example: 
P = some person;
a = apples
b = bananas

P {a>b} means that some person prefers apples to bananas.

The main idea here is that whatever we choose, we make that choice in the context of available alternatives. How we rank our preferences is an expression of what we value relative to other things.

Now that we've got the fancy talk out of the way, let's move forward and discuss gun legislation.

Preamble: Gun Violence Statistics and Scope of Argument

I don't want to turn this post into a cut-and-paste of gun facts. I'll just pick a few so I have something to work with.

In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries (23.2 injuries per 100,000 U.S. citizens),[2][3] and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms" (10.6 deaths per 100,000 U.S. citizens).[4] These deaths consisted of 11,208 homicides,[5] 21,175 suicides,[4] 505 deaths due to accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms use with "undetermined intent".[4]
In 2010, 67% of all homicides in the U.S. were committed using a firearm.[7] In 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US, with 6,371 of those attributed to handguns.[8] In 2012, 64% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides.[9] In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S.[10] In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm.[11] (Wikipedia) 

I will add without argument, because you're all capable of googling, that the per capita numbers of all kinds of gun deaths, gun crime, and gun injury are much higher in the US when compared to other Western democracies even when crime rates are controlled for.

Finally, let me point out that when I vaguely gesture at 'gun control legislation' below, I'm referring to some empirically supported combination waiting periods, background checks, licensing, and training--whatever it turns out to be--to reduce some subset of recognized gun violence. By 'gun-control legislation' I do not mean confiscating guns or prohibiting their sale (generally). For some reason any mention of gun control legislation is automatically interpreted, by pro-gun advocates, as confiscation or prohibition. This is not what I (or most gun control advocates) mean.

Reread above as many times as you need to.


Let's Get Philosophical
With the empirical and technical out of the way, let's get into the philosophy. The pro-gun lobby argues that we should do nothing in the face of gun violence because they want to own and purchase guns in a way that is unrestricted. Let's express that in the cool unemotional language of economics. Given a choice between 

a = easy access to tools.

b = even attempting to reduce loss of human life.

The anti-legislation person's (P) preference ranking looks like this: 

P: {a>b}

Easy access to tools is more important than any attempt to reduce the loss of human life.

Let me reframe that. The average annual death toll from guns is 30 000. Now suppose some piece of legislation could reduce the average gun-related death toll by a paltry 10%. That's 3000 human lives saved every year. Now, imagine we put 3000 people into a theatre and we say to someone who loves tools: 

You have a choice: we can make everyone wait [insert some trivial number of days] to receive a tool or we can let these 3000 human beings die unnecessarily, and repeat the same thing every year.

The choice the anti any legislation tool-lover makes expresses their preference ranking. More specifically, they are expressing the ranking of their values. The anti any legislation position says, in the language of economics: There is more value in everyone getting tools promptly and without hinderance than there is in 3000 people/year dying preventable deaths.

This, simply put, is the 'preference ranking' of the anti-any legislation position.

But It Won't Work

Now, I know what you're thinking. But gun control legislation won't work!!! 

Really? How do you know? Most (but not all) of the evidence points in the other direction for some but not all kinds of gun violence. The exceptions to this trend in the literature are outliers which the pro-tool lobby cites ad nauseam, ignoring the general trend. Why not introduce targeted legislation to address the kinds of violence that seem to respond to legislation in other countries? 

Let's see what this denial of even attempting targeted legislation expresses in terms of value rankings. In doing so, let's grant that no one really knows for sure (in the Cartesian sense) whether a particular kind of tool regulation (that somehow works in just about every other Western democracy) will work in the US. Refusing to even try some targeted legislation expresses the following value ranking:

a = easy access to tools  

b = even bothering to try to prevent the loss of 3 000 lives/year

P: {a>b}

In everyday English, this preference ranking expresses the following: 

It's more important for me have easy access to tools than it is for me to even try saving 3 000 human lives per year from preventable death. That is, me owning a tool and being able to buy tools with minimal restrictions has more value than even trying to prevent the (preventable) loss of 3 000 human lives. 

What the gun-control advocate fails to see is that life's meaning, purpose, and value comes from owning tools. Tools, not human relationships, not cultivation of ones virtue nor talents, not contribution to one's community, not preventable human death, are what matter for the good life. A purposeful and meaningful life depend on, above all else, easy, unrestricted, and unfettered tool ownership.  

In support of this view, Aristotle, in The Nichomachean Ethics famously argues that certain external goods are required in order to live the good life. He writes

But nevertheless happiness plainly requires external goods too, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without some furniture of fortune  GUNZ. There are many things that can only be done through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and political influence AND GUNZ: and there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children, GUNZ, and personal beauty; for a man is not very likely to be happy if he is very ugly in person, or of low birth, or alone in the world, or childless, and perhaps still less if he has worthless children or friends, or has lost good ones that he had, OR CAN'T BUY A GUN IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT A BACKGROUND CHECK.

QED

But America Is Different (We're Special)

It is a common trope of the gun control advocate to bring up how, among comparable Western democracies, tighter gun control legislation correlates positively with lower gun death. What these tool-haters fail to appreciate is that our magical American culture is different! Americans have nothing in common psychologically or sociologically or culturally with other human beings. None of the widely studied tendencies of human behavior apply here. Ipso facto, of all the possible gun control legislations that whose number are limited only by the human imagination, we can with absolute confidence and certainty say that none of them will work here. There is no conceivable way that legislation that works on just about every other human culture on the planet--especially those most resembling our own-- could work here. Simply ridiculous to even try.

First of all, this line of thinking is right on both counts. The culture here is different. People here would rather own tools, unfettered and unrestricted, than attempt to reduce the total 30 000 human lives lost per year to tool violence. That, however, is a cultural problem, not something to puff your chest up about. 

Now, here's the really cool part. "Scientists have determined/studies show" that humans have the capacity to reflect on their practices as revise them in light of those reflections. We are not stuck in the culture we find ourselves in! This is shocking, I know. You might need to pause to catch your breath. 

And so, while it is true that current American tool-loving culture makes it difficult to save potentially tens of thousands of lives/year, with some reflection on its values, it could! All it takes is having the thought that the more or less unrestricted access to tools isn't as valuable as tens of thousands of human lives/year.

As it stands, the but-American-culture-is-different-therefore-we-shouldn't-even-try value ranking looks like this: 

a = Maintaining tool-loving at the epicenter of American culture 

b = attempt something to reduce the 30 000 lives/year that are lost. 

P: {a>b}

In plain English, there is more value is continuing to place some kinds of tools at the center of cultural identity than there is value in the lives of the very people who inhabit this community.

To be American means easy access to tools. This matters much more than 10s of thousands of preventable American deaths. Easy access to tools make us who we are. Without our tools and easy access to them we float adrift in a sea of despair with no other possibility of meaning and purpose in sight. Our culture, nay! our very way of life and identity would disintegrate before our eyes without easy access to tools. If 30 000 of us must be sacrificed/year for this end, so be it! We have deliberated and decided what truly matters.

Self-Defense/Protect My Family

Recall the passage from Reason magazine:

For the vast majority of their owners, guns are no more worthy of banning than any other element of their peacefully enjoyed liberty, one tool among many to shape their chosen life and leisure. Banning something that tens of millions of people innocently value and imposing onerous costs on American citizens, generally downward in socioeconomic terms, is a recipe for disaster.

People need to chill. All the anti-legislation people are saying is, "hey man, I just want to be able to own tools." Of course, not everyone just wants to own tools merely to love them and hold them and squeeze them. Some people make the argument that owning guns is an extension of their inalienable natural right to self-defense. 

For the moment I'm going to ignore that (a) from the right to self-defense it doesn't follow necessarily that you have a right to every means of self-defense and (b) gun control legislation is not the same as gun prohibition. I want to continue to focus on preferences and their ordering.

It's not that people merely want the right to own tools it's that they want the right to ensure the physical safety of their person and family. Guns are merely...uh...tools in this pursuit. Amiright? 

Let's grant that people have this right. It's not unreasonable after all. We can then ask the question: Are you and your family safer with a gun-tool in the house than without a gun-tool in the house? If you and your family are safer without a gun-tool, then if your concern truly is safety, you will get rid of your gun-tools. This is something to which there is an empirical answer. It's a verifiable and falsifiable matter. More on that later...

For now, take my word that as it turns out that you and your family are less safe with gun-tools in the house. So, if you insist on keeping gun-tools in your house then your concern really isn't safety or self-defense. You value having gun tools more than you value you and your family's safety. We can express the preference ranking like this:

Hypothetical: You and your family are less safe with a gun-tool in the house. 

a=have gun tool in the house.

b=you and your family's safety. 

P: {a>b}

If they hypothetical turns out to be true then the preference ranking says this: There is more value in having a gun tool in my house than there is value in the safety of myself and my family.

This being a hypothetical, for fun let's see what the literature says regarding safety and gun ownership...

For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182 

Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily forceLinda E. Saltzman, et al., Weapon Involvement and Injury Outcomes in Family and Intimate Assaults, 267 JAMA, 3043-3047 (1992) 

Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm

More than half of youth who committed suicide with a gun obtained the gun from their home, usually a parent’s gun. U.S. children and teens made up 43 percent of all children and teens in top 26 high income countries but were 93 percent of all children and teens killed by guns. 

In 2010, children and teen gun death rates in the U.S. were over four times higher than in Canada, the country with the next highest rate, nearly seven times higher than in Israel, and nearly 65 times higher than in the United Kingdom. 

U.S. children and teens were 32 times more likely to die from a gun homicide and 10 times more likely to die from a gun suicide or a gun accident than all their peers in the other high-income countries combined. A child or teen dies or is injured from guns every 30 minutes. 

http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/data/state-data-repository/protect-children-not-guns-key-facts-2013.pdf 

Huh. It looks like having gun-tools in the house actually makes you and your family less safe than not having gun tools in the house. Obviously, this isn't all the literature there is on the matter but the trend is fairly clear.

Conclusion

I could carry on like this all day but the structure of the argument is the same with each iteration. Every objection to even trying out a piece of gun control legislation that targets a subset of gun violence can be expressed as a preference ranking--an ranking of values.
The anti-even-bother-to-try any legislation position always prefers owning a tool to saving human lives. That is, easy access to a tool is always more valuable than human lives.

No irrational emotions needed. This is the cold-hard language of reason.

Loose Ends

"But legislation can't prevent mass shootings." My reply is simply to copypasta the intro from a post I made a few years ago:

Mass shootings represent only a very small fraction of gun-related homicides (about 1% depending on the study you read). Even if we increase this number by a factor of 10 we're still only looking at 10% of gun-related homicides. From the point of view of policy then it makes sense to argue that preventing mass shootings shouldn't be the primary focus or starting point of gun policy. (Not to say it shouldn't at all be the focus of policy, only that there are perhaps better starting points, and lower hanging fruit).
Consider: Suppose policy aims to reduce mass shootings but not other forms of gun violence (primarily from hand guns). Even if that policy reduces mass shootings by 50%, of total gun homicides it's a hollow victory. If however policy reduces other homicides by just 10%, as an absolute number of lives saved, that policy is much more successful. (Assumption: gun violence policy ought to reduce total homicides and injury from guns).