As part of a speech at the Democratic Rural Convention an agricultural policymaker discussed the differences between perspectives on gun control. Sociologists call these differences symbolic interactionism. It is about looking at the meaning of words and how different people perceive the word differently. Symbols and words gain their meaning through experience. Some words have particularly strong meanings to them such as the word 'gun'. When we think of guns we can associate it with many words such as:

There is no right or wrong when it comes to associating one word with another. It is all a matter of experience. The list on the right would be preferred by people who support gun rights and the left by those who are more pro-gun control. Let's look at what experiences might create such associations:

To the psychoanalyst the list on the left is far more disconcerting then the list on the right, as it is based on a second-hand experience. The distance from the experience leads to a number of delusions on reality. In particular, it distorts the significance of any particular event by enlarging its reality on your, and does not give a full perspective. Until you have felt an animal dying in your own hands or the blood from its own life then you can not understand what it really means.