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Americans of all political stripes are arming up in 2020. Photo: Keith Srakocic/AP/Shutterstock

For anyone that talks about how Biden will take their guns, remind them that we had 8 years of Obama/Biden where that never happened, reads a popular post in a progressive subreddit. But Donald Trump has definitely suggested he would take guns away from people without due process. The average liberal who supports much stronger gun-control measures may understand this as a criticism of the Obama administration, but this wasnt posted in your average left-leaning internet forum. It comes from r/liberalgunowners, a Reddit community of over 100,000 people who defy the archetype of the gun-hating cosmopolitan Democratic voter.

Gun control tends to be a clear red-and-blue issue in American politics, but the general uptick in gun ownership among people across the political spectrum 2020 will be a record year for firearm sales in the U.S. points to the possibility that the Democratic Party may include more gun owners in the future than it has in the recent past. In rapidly growing online and real-world communities, theres a sizable, vocal bloc of progressives who are voting for Biden but think the Democratic Partys position on gun control is backward.

Plenty of lefties liked guns before Trump became president, but the escalation of right-wing violence on top of a global pandemic has made things feel extra apocalyptic for a lot Americans in blue states. The demographics of gun buyers appear to be shifting, too, reports Politico. Retailers are selling to more women, and more Black men and women, than in previous years. The membership of r/liberalgunowners has also grown enormously this year. In November 2018, it had around 24,000 subscribers; in 2019, it reached 39,951; and now it has over 100,000. A recent poll posted in the subgroup asked, Do you expect calm or violence eruption in the U.S. after election night 2020? If the poll is a good indicator, about 80 percent of the subgroups members foresee postelection conflict.

You cant say youre for civil rights and have a civil right youre absolutely interested in curtailing, says Lara Smith, the spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, an organization founded in 2008 that provides gun-skills courses for as little as $10 a year and has 4,500 members. She says thatDemocratic lawmakers are totally ignorant when it comes to how guns actually work.

In keeping with national trends, Smith says Liberal Gun Club membership has grown a lot in the past year. People are really concerned about this particular ultra-right-wing threat theyre perceiving, she says. I cant tell you the number of friends of mine who have always [thought of me as their] crazy gun friend who have called me and said, I want to buy a shotgun. I want to buy a handgun. Where do I go? She has been hosting beginner shooting lessons in her backyard to meet the increased demand for gun skills that the pandemic and the upcoming election have inspired.

As opposed to understanding firearms as the primary cause of gun deaths in the U.S., the Liberal Gun Club is interested in investigating root-cause mitigation, or, what causes violence beyond the easy access to deadly weapons. If you dont understand how the tool works, then you dont understand what problem youre solving or not solving with it, Smith says, noting the ineffectiveness of AR bans.

Liberals get everything wrong about guns, Adam Selvage, a truck driver who lives in Albuquerque, told me. He started the Facebook page Pro-Gun Democrats in 2012 after going out shooting with his then-girlfriend; they got to talking about how they were the only people they knew who were incredibly liberal and still like shooting. At the beginning, his page had likes in the single digits, but eight years later, it has upwards of 2,500 followers and has sprouted a Facebook group where members can chat privately about firearms.

Many of his fellow Democrats, Selvage says, have a negative view of guns because they know what they see on TV, and the guns on TV are illegal in the United States, for the most part. They get scared because they think guns are just used for killing people.

Every pro-gun lefty I spoke with expressed dismay at the Democratic machines devotion to gun control. It makes sense that the party would come out against guns after all, a 2019 Pew study found that 86 percent of Democrats and left-leaning independents support stricter gun laws. According to Smith, the push for gun control by politicians like Michael Bloomberg, whose organization Everytown for Gun Safety has poured tens of millions of dollars in digital advertising into this election cycle, is both authoritarian and Republican and appeals to upper-class liberal white women.

Heres the whole thing about Parkland, she says. How many Black kids are killed every day? No one cared until it [happened] to a bunch of cute white teenagers. It was when white kids died that people started caring.

For Yafeuh Balogun, the founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, an organization that teaches firearms skills to people of color as part of a commitment to self-defense and militant culture, guns are an integral part of his progressive ideology. His father was a marine and Vietnam veteran who was shot in the face in combat. Nevertheless, a formative part of Baloguns childhood involved his dad teaching him and his siblings how to use guns safely.

Owning firearms, according to Balogun, is a way to have agency over communities that have been failed and brutalized by the police state. Guns are tools to push toward self-determination, he says. In a utopian sense, we would hope for a world that doesnt need weapons. We would hope that we can have a world where people can live in unity and harmony across the color spectrum. Thats not the case. (To quote a popular post in r/liberalgunowners, Armed minorities are harder to oppress.)

Gun-loving libs are not, to paraphrase Barack Obama, clinging to their guns as a way to express their frustration with being left behind by globalization or whatever. For Randy Miyan, the executive director of Liberal Gun Owners, gun ownership feels like an essential part of the human experience. He gets frustrated with the Democratic Partys aversion to guns because, he says, its ahistorical. Liberals and leftists treat the 1960s as year zero, he told me. We have had a specialized relationship with specialized projectile weapons for 73,000 years. Theyre archaeologically normative.

Liberal Gun Owners, an organization without an official membership model, grew out of a Facebook group and remains mostly dedicated to moderating discussions between its 4,000 subscribers on the social-media platform. Miyan became involved with Liberal Gun Owners shortly after Adam Sorum, one of the few Democrats in his rural Minnesota community, founded the Facebook page in 2007. (The mission of Liberal Gun Owners, which is registered as a 501(c)4, is to provide a community for gun-loving lefties as well as to look for solutions for gun violence beyond gun control.) The earliest iteration of the group, Miyan explains, was a shitshow of 4chan, 8chan bullshit. Whenever you do something online and dont put a gate around it, every regressive asswipe and jerko on the internet is going to find you. When Miyan finally earned the role of moderator, the new sheriff was in town, he says. He created a set of rules and protocols to turn the group into a healthy space for gun-toting lefties.

Miyan grew up in a working-class family of Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and now lives in North Carolina, but his affinity for guns is part of his spiritual questing. From age 21 to 31, Miyan studied to become a Buddhist monk, and though he ultimately chose to follow a more conventional path of getting married and having children, his time studying under Tibetan monks taught him the importance of compassion, love, and nonviolence. Theres a notion out there that guns couldnt possibly be an extension of compassion, that their very existence is regressive, he explains. You can be involved in self-defense and firearms and have that be an extension of love for your kin.

For Miyan, self-defense is self-care. In a similar vein, a recent post to r/liberalgunowners that received 3,700 thousand upvotes shows a sticker on a container of huge bullets that reads, The tree cant be harmed if the Lorax is armed.

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Self-Defense Is Self-Care: How the Growing Ranks of Left-Wing Gun Owners See the Election - New York Magazine

In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation.

The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions.

On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.

While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, not certaintiesmeaning there is plenty of individual variability. The political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive Priuses and everything in between. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a Republicans brain lights up over X while a Democrats responds to Y.

So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasionsgauging who has the biggest amygdalato more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity.

Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activitydemonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses, says political neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a window into their brains. That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to read minds, but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes.

Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. Yet neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomesjust not in a deterministic way, Nam says.

To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran.

Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpectedwhat they termed congruent or incongruent. They also considered participants own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task.

Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which are involved in helping people form and think about their attitudes, Haas says. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. But she acknowledges that they may instead exercise a particular form of bias called motivated reasoning to downplay the incongruity.

Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. Even if society isnt perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society, Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices. Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so system justification.

Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment, Nam says.

After the original study, Nams team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests, Nam says. That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, Weve got to change the system.

Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth, argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity.

Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a 2013 study, liberals were more likely to misremember George W. Bush remaining on vacation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and conservatives were more likely to falsely recall seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran. Partisan identity also shapes our perceptions. When they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police depending on their interpretation of the protests goal. If the objective was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest (opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy.

If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. The tension between accuracy and identity probably involves a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex, which computes the value of goals and beliefs and is strongly connected to memory, executive function and attention. If identity helps determine the value of different beliefs, it can also distort them, Van Bavel says. Appreciating that political affiliation fulfills an evolutionary need to belong suggests we should create alternative means of belongingdepoliticizing the novel coronavirus by calling on us to come together as Americans, for instance. And incentivizing the need to be accurate could increase the importance accorded that goal: paying money for accurate responses or holding people accountable for incorrect ones have been shown to be effective.

It will be nearly impossible to lessen the partisan influences before the November 3 election because the volume of political information will only increase, reminding us of our political identities daily. But here is some good news: a large 2020 study at Harvard University found that participants consistently overestimated the level of out-group negativity toward their in-group. In other words, the other side may not dislike us quite so much as we think. Inaccurate information heightened the negative bias, and (more good news) correcting inaccurate information significantly reduced it.

The biology and neuroscience of politics might be useful in terms of what is effective at getting through to people, Van Bavel says. Maybe the way to interact with someone who disagrees with me politically is not to try to persuade them on the deep issue, because I might never get there. Its more to try to understand where theyre coming from and shatter their stereotypes.

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Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences - Scientific American

Byelections are usually wonderful, consequence-free opportunities to stick it to the government of the day. And given the Liberal governments 33-seat lead over the second-place Conservatives in the House of Commons, voters in two Ontario ridings had the opportunity to do that last night. And they did.

Sort of. But not really.

Toronto Centre has been one of the safest Liberal seats in the country for decades. Its been solidly red for 27 straight years and for all but 15 of the last 58 years. So the fact that former broadcaster Marci Ien held it for the Liberals last night was no giant surprise.

However, Iens vote dropped 15 percentage points compared to what former finance minister Bill Morneau was able to win in the general election exactly a year ago. If the Liberals are capturing only 42 per cent of the votes in one of their safest seats, that ought to raise serious concerns for the party nationwide.

The reason the Grit vote was down so much can be attributed in part to the remarkably strong performance by the Green partys new leader, Annamie Paul. Paul ran in Toronto Centre during last years election and placed a weak fourth, with just 7 per cent of the vote. Of course, she wasnt the leader then and was a virtual unknown.

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But more voters have come to know her since her leadership victory, and she boosted her vote by 25 percentage points last night.

"This result stands as a clear statement of our intention to run competitively everywhere in the next general election,even in Liberal strongholds, Paul told me in an email this morning. It's a shot across the bow."

Pauls candidacy gave rise to one of the more unusual developments Ive ever seen in a byelection campaign. Three stalwarts from the three major parties the Liberals Greg Sorbara, the Conservatives Hugh Segal, and the NDPs Zanana Akande in a Toronto Star op-ed piece urged their supporters not to vote for their parties this time, but rather to vote for Paul, so impressed were they by her candidacy and the chance to make history by having the countrys first-ever Black leader take a seat in Parliament. It may have helped propel the Green party leaders vote to 33 per cent this time.

Were disappointedabout falling short, but its just her first crack at it, said a campaign source in an email. Pretty good after only 3.5 weeks I think! If we had only one more week famous last words I know.

While Pauls campaign took heart at their candidates much improved performance, there was also some disappointment that she didnt win. After all, this was a consequence-free chance to beat the Liberals, as the outcome wouldnt markedly change the standings in the House. Paul clearly loves Toronto Centre and would love to have won there, tapping into thousands of potential supporters among the student bodies at local post-secondary institutions (U of T, Ryerson, OCAD U, and George Brown College, for example).

She was also able to campaign in the media capital of the country, an opportunity that former leader Elizabeth May could never avail herself of, because she represented a riding in British Columbia. One of the leaders toughest calls going forward will involve deciding whether to contest Toronto Centre again or to seek another riding where the Greens may have a better shot at winning.

Meanwhile, in the northwest part of Ontarios capital city, York Centre was a roller-coaster ride all night long, with the lead flipping back and forth between the Liberal and Conservative candidates. At one point, with more than 80 per cent of the polls reporting, the difference between the two candidates was literally one vote.

York Centre has been Liberal for all but four of the past 58 years. And it stayed Liberal last night, but not without a heckuva lot of nail-biting. Liberal candidate Yaara Saks narrowly defeated Conservative candidate Julius Tiangson by fewer than 4 percentage points. In last years general election, the Liberals won the riding by 13 points. Particularly heart-breaking for the Conservatives was the fact that the leader of the Peoples Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, ran in this riding. Bernier showed poorly, coming fourth. But he took 3.6 per cent of the votes, presumably almost all of which would have gone to the Conservative candidate had Bernier not run. So you could say Bernier played spoiler and continues to enjoy his revenge against the party whose leadership he lost by only two points on the 13th ballot three years ago. He potentially deprived new Conservative leader Erin OToole of some spectacular bragging rights, which would have put real wind in the Tories sails. Instead, were reminded of the truest maxim there is in politics: A win is a win is a win. And the Liberals won.

Why did the Conservatives do so much better, albeit ultimately in a losing effort?

I would very much like to know whats driving CPC success here, tweeted Stephen Harpers former director of policy, Rachel Curran, last night. Alarm about the fiscal situation? Jewish voters upset about the National Security Council seat strategy? Tiangsons own network and campaign? All of the above?

Clearly and overall, the Liberal vote was down significantly in a part of the country that the party depends on to form government. If Liberals had been patting themselves on the back for the great job theyve done fighting the coronavirus pandemic, they might want to rethink their self-congratulatory tone.

Yes, both minority governments in New Brunswick and British Columbia just parlayed their COVID-19 stewardship into majority governments. And the conservative Saskatchewan Party renewed its majority government last night a fourth consecutive win. And the Ontario Tories are significantly higher in the polls today than they were a year ago.

But last nights byelections once again prove that no one can take anything for granted in Canadian politics. Even if youre a Liberal in two of your safest seats in the country.

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The Liberals just won two byelections but they should be nervous - TVO

The Manitoba Liberal Party has picked the pandemics largest spike in the province to die on a baffling mole hill.

Instead of granting leave on Monday to allow debate on Bill 44, which would make amendments to the Employment Standards Code and allow for protection of those seeking paid sick leave, party leader Dougald Lamont has decided to quibble over the province not funding further leave, saying the province is taking credit for the federal governments work while contributing nothing.

Had they been able to proceed on Monday with debate, the bill could have potentially been pushed all the way through and Manitobans could apply for the federal Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit without questioning whether or not they will have a job when they come back from leave.

Now they must wait until the debate on the throne speech is complete to proceed with debates on other bills.

On Tuesday, Lamont was unrelenting in his viewing, casting the bill as just a few adjustments on dismissals. If youre worried about your job, it is not near as simple.

There are an untold number of people who are sitting there having to weigh whether or not to go into work because they have the sniffles. Tell themselves its just a cold and to ignore symptoms or lose a paycheque. If theyre struggling to make ends meet, as more than 50% of Manitobans are, I can guarantee you those symptoms are being shrugged off way more than they should be. If theyre working minimum wage at a big box store, there is always a sense of replaceability.

While the province was unable to produce numbers through contact tracing to show how often COVID was being passed on at work or people were being exposed to it, both Premier Brian Pallister and Provincial Chief Public Health Officer Brent Roussin spoke to how big the issue has become on Monday.

Going to work sick is putting way too many people at risk of catching the virus. We are even seeing this in health care facilities where people are not disclosing symptoms to nurses and doctors. The province disclosed over the weekend how a surgical team has been sidelined for two weeks because of this behaviour while nurses and other staff are being put in unnecessarily at risk due to these decisions.

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ALDRICH: Learn to read the room, Dougald as Liberals make tone-deaf move - Winnipeg Sun

The Canberra Liberals often attacked by Labor as the "most conservative Liberal branch in the country" want you to believe that the appointment of Elizabeth Lee as leader is a change in direction for a party that has learned from a sixth straight election loss.

"This is a fresh new beginning," the party declared shortly after she was picked by her colleagues on Tuesday.

It's true there are some big changes afoot and her selection is a first on many fronts.

Lee and her new deputy Giulia Jones will be the first female pair to lead a party in ACT politics, and Lee is the first person of an Asian background to be at the helm of an ACT party.

Not since Kate Carnell was chief minister two decades ago has a woman led the Canberra Liberals.

In the 19 years since, six other men have led the party Gary Humphries, Brendan Smyth, Bill Stefaniak, Zed Seselja, Jeremy Hanson and now Alistair Coe. None have prevailed against Labor and the Greens.

Carnell, the only leader to ever win an election for the Liberals in the ACT, last year warned the party against pitching conservative policy to a progressive town, believing that a Liberal victory hinged on ideology.

So does the backing of Lee represent a genuine shift to the moderate wing of the party? Or is it a recognition by the conservatives of a need to recalibrate after consigning themselves to another four years in opposition?

Yesterday's leadership ballot was a moderate against a moderate and that in itself is an indication of the party's acknowledgement they need to change, or as one Liberal MLA put it: "drawing a line in the sand".

And a vote for former leader Jeremy Hanson, however popular he may be, would have signalled a retreat of sorts, so instead it was out with the old and in with the new. The numbers favoured Lee overwhelmingly.

Fronting the press for the first time as leader, Lee said that politics had been craving diversity, in both background and gender.

She admitted the party must change direction as it reviewed what went so wrong at the October 17 poll, when they suffered a 3 per cent swing away from the Liberals.

However, she wouldn't say exactly what needed to change and she made it clear that the Canberra Liberals proudly enjoyed a "broad church" of views.

It appears the 41-year-old is keen to give an impression of change and a fresh voice and, as a moderate, she'll be determined to shake the nagging perception that senior conservative figures continue to pull the strings behind the scenes.

As the party attempts to move forward Lee may have to make concessions in order to maintain her moderate agenda while also keeping the right of the party happy.

The course Lee chooses is important because the next Legislative Assembly will be as progressive as it has ever been, with a remarkable six Greens MLAs.

Greens Leader Shane Rattenbury suggests a group of moderate Liberals are seeking to wrest control of the party from key conservative forces who have controlled the party for several years.

"We'd love to have a more constructive, working relationship with the Liberal party," Rattenbury said.

"If they actually start to take up policy positions that we have more in common, we're always keen to work with them."

It's a sentiment shared by re-elected Chief Minister Andrew Barr.

"Under new leadership there may be more occasions where the Government and the Opposition can find common ground on policy matters," he said after Lee's appointment.

As Lee put it: "Canberra spoke very loudly and we must listen."

It's a basic but necessary point if the Liberals are ever to move out of the political wilderness.

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Six other Liberal leaders couldn't do it. Will Elizabeth Lee be the one to end Labor's reign in Canberra? - ABC News