What Can Brian Tracy Teach Us About Evidence-Based Firearm Policy?

Any road to sound government policy must be paved with evidence. For rational decisions to be made, the road to policy must be built on the bedrock of fact. Otherwise, policy built on the quicksand of fantasy can never achieve its desired outcome.

Before we can develop effective national firearms policy, we must define our goal (specify with precision what constitutes success) before we construct the detailed roadmap required to achieve that success.

Common ground is critical. Thankfully, firearm enthusiasts and gun control advocates agree on at least one thing – stopping mass shootings.

The path to that goal is where we differ and, with help from business icon and goal-setting guru Brian Tracy, we can find more areas of agreement on the road to achieving our common goal.

Setting goals is a simple, evidence-based process, according to Tracy.

1. Determine what you want to accomplish. Define your goal with precision.
2. Determine the best possible way to achieve that goal. Question relentlessly to ensure you don ’ t overlook any possible paths to success while remaining open to the possibility your best option may be wrong.
3. Examine your assumptions about people, their motives and the marketplace.
4. Ask yourself what will happen if your assumptions about people, their motives and the marketplace are wrong.
5. What must you do differently if your key assumptions are incorrect? What will you do if the primary road to your goal fails? How else can you achieve the same result?

According to Brian Tracy, we question every step of the plan before executing it to ensure it is still valid. More importantly, we must assess the results from each step taken to determine whether or not those results are what we desired and expected.

At every step, if the outcome is not the one expected and desired, we must re-assess and rebuild our roadmap. Failure to do these assessments means failure to achieve our desired goals.

The current status quo fails everyone.

Gun control advocates who demand gun bans in the wake of each new shooting event accomplish nothing, except to rile up the millions of law-abiding firearm owners who did not shoot anyone and who are sick of being attacked for the crimes of others.

Firearm owners rightly feel attacked since they didn’t harm anyone but are held accountable for the criminal actions of others.

We all want the same result. We’re all focused on the same goal –– ending the violence –– but until these polar opposites can set aside their pre-determined conclusions to find common ground, to discuss rational, evidence-based solutions, nothing will change.

And it must change.