Facts can matter to people:

We often see anti-gun people being immune to facts and running completely on emotions and beliefs that have no connection to reality. Here we see something different. Why?

I think When Prophecy Fails (see also my website about the book) gives us the answers. The following conditions are from the book. These are the conditions which must exist to create the condition for a “true believer” to “double down” and try to recruit more believers to their faulty belief system when confronted with disproof of their faulty belief system. All five of these conditions must exist in order for this to happen. Hence, if you can break just one of these conditions they will stop their journey down their delusional path:

1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
4. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
   The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation.  We must therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
5. The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

And this gives us the answer on how to change minds. We see it in the video above. They were not within their social support group. They are extremely social animals. We tend to be individualists. Anti-gun people tend to be herd animals. These people require social support. If you can isolate them, even for a very short time, and present facts then they are likely to break from their delusion.

Another thing that was important is these people read the facts out loud. They didn’t just hear someone tell them the facts. Visual is much better than audible. Having them saying the words is even better. That strikes much deeper than them skimming the words and saying they read it. It reaches the visual and auditory areas of their brains as well as the conscious thinking part of their brain (required for the translation from text to spoken words).

This was brilliant.

When your anti-gun friend or relative is separated from other anti-gun people hand them a piece of paper and ask them to read it out loud, “So we can talk about this together.”

The facts used in this video:

• According to the CDC there were roughly 38,000 gun deaths in the 2016. 2/3 of them were suicides.
• There are over 300,000,000 guns in the United States.
• There are over 5x more murders by knives than rifles.
• The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world. But ranks 28th in gun murders.
• That is a rate of about 2.97 deaths per 100,000 people.
• Handguns are responsible for more than 80% of total mass shootings.
• Between 1993 and 2003 gun ownership increased by 56% while gun violence decreased by nearly half.
• Since 1950 nearly all mass public shootings have occurred in gun free zones.
• From 2013 to 2015 the six states that banned open carry, experienced higher rates of police deaths.
• 86.4% of 20,000 police chiefs and sheriffs support concealed carry and are overwhelming against further gun control.
• Those that have concealed carry permits, on average, commit less crime than police.
• There is a clear correlation between higher firearm ownership and reducing police killings.
• Switzerland with a population of about eight million and armed with an estimated two million guns in circulation and limited gun regulation Switzerland’s overall gun homicide rate is practically zero.
• Gun ownership rate does not correlate with the homicide rate.

Principles are vital for the long term. But principles require the thinking part of the brain to be engaged. You cannot have a principled discussion with a mob chanting for your death. This is how you get their mind reset to a point where principles have a chance of reaching them.