Can Gun Victims and Gun Advocates Change Each Other’s Minds?

more than a dozen others on both sides of the gun debate ... agreed to meet face-to-face, tell each other their stories, and try to understand one another’s points of view, in an experiment in radical empathy ... Statistics and argument make no dent in fixed opinions: Each side, incredulous, regards the other as sectarians who’ve somehow got their values mixed up...
part of the process of transformative empathy is fully taking on another’s story — using the pronoun I, embodying, for a few moments, someone else.... Without a doubt, radical, revelatory empathy did occur. But did it matter? The participants would soon return to their “normal” lives ... Empathy did not seem to have fundamentally changed anyone’s mind... Paul Bloom’s complaint ... that empathy privileges the heart over the head... is therefore not all that useful in solving difficult social or political problems..
But identity is a fractious, multilayered thing, and it’s possible to use empathy to redraw the circles around “we.” ... empathy ... forces the bully and the bullied to see how they’re the same: both students, brothers, friends, sons.