Welcome friends!
Did you hear about the murder of those seventeen young people at a high school in the US State of Florida a few days ago? Sad case. Seems a troubled young teenager showed up at the school with a semi-automatic rifle, in this case something called an AR-15, which he had apparently legally obtained despite numerous brushes with the law and school expulsions and funny statements about wanting to shoot up schools and so on. He gunned down a number of kids then apparently went for a little pick me up at the local McDonald’s hamburger restaurant and was apprehended without incident a short while later. This type of thing is not particularly unusual here in the USA but there’s been a lot of talk this time around mostly because some of the youngsters who escaped being shot were not content to do the usual crying and graciously accepting the thoughts and prayers of ostensible well wishers routine but instead began agitating for tighter regulations on semi-automatic weapons, a move that infuriated many conservatives here in the USA. Some right wing media pundits portrayed the kids as paid actors or unwitting stooges of “the left.” The president of the main gun lobby group here in the USA, that would be the National Rifle Association (NRA) for my foreign readers, was in the papers arguing or perhaps raving might be the more descriptive term that people advocating for common sense gun control such as the kids presumably aren’t really concerned about gun violence at all as one might suppose but only about making people less free. Oh my! Can you imagine the scoundrels? Thinking only about making people less free. Taking advantage of the unfortunate tragedy to weave their devious designs. Indeed, the NRA spokesman warned us about the dangers of the “socialism” he felt was being peddled by the liberal Democratic Party and urged his conservative followers to be “anxious” and “afraid” of any future political gains by the Democratic Party. He suggested that if Democrats “seize power” I suppose by being voted into office for example then “American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.” Oh my goodness! Them thar are fightin’ words! President Trump chimed in to tell us he thinks the NRA is composed of patriots who want to do the right thing. With national hysteria and vaguely threatening claptrap at this level I thought maybe I should take a few moments from my busy schedule to take another look at this whole issue of guns.
But first perhaps a bit of history might not be amiss. It seems the seeds of this particular social malady were sown in the early days of the USA when the so-called founding fathers thought to include in the US Constitution the famous right to bear arms apparently specifically as a bulwark against the development here in America of what they viewed as the tyrannical government of their home country of Britain from which they had just extricated themselves. Whether there was in fact anything particularly tyrannical about Britain at that time or whether the colonists just didn’t like the political results they were seeing is neither here nor there. They didn’t like what they were seeing and decided they would do better on their own. It was a closely run affair and one can readily understand their concerns that all their fighting and philosophizing and speechifying might be undone before it could take root by the devious designs of wannabe kings and queens of humble domestic pedigree. Unfortunately this concern led them to introduce a legally awkward element into the US Constitution establishing that Americans have a constitutional right at least to the sort of weaponry they would have needed to engage the fledgling US government in armed conflict.
What makes it awkward now of course is that weaponry has long been one of the main beneficiaries of human labor and ingenuity due to our unfortunate inability to coordinate with one another sensibly and has moved on quite a bit from the old muskets, flintlock pistols, and swords of the colonial period. As a result the sort of weapons that would really provide a level playing field if one had the inclination to embark on a private war against the US Army would now be things like automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, mortars, mines, missiles, bombs, biological weapons, jet planes, tanks, artillery, tactical nukes, ICBMs, and that sort of thing. I’m talking about military devices specifically designed to kill a whole bunch of people really really quickly and with a minimum of fuss. Not surprisingly no one here is really very interested in ensuring one’s fellow citizens have access to this kind of equipment because at any given moment a great many of one’s fellow citizens are likely to be high, drunk, insane, or just very angry and no one is really so deluded or optimistic as to want to take the risk of giving them control of something like let’s say a missile launcher. But in that case what arms are we really talking about? Which arms are the ones to which we have a constitutional right? Hmm. Yeah. That’s an awkward one isn’t it?
To make a long story short some court somewhere apparently decided on what was assuredly a rather ad-hoc basis that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 should be included in the sort of weaponry we should be allowed to obtain or perhaps I should say have a constitutional right to obtain. This has proven a bit controversial because like some of the other sorts of weapons I just mentioned one can actually kill quite a large number of school kids or gay people or I suppose anyone really with a semi-automatic rifle. Some people understandably have begun to suspect semi-automatic rifles was possibly not the best place to draw the line. It doesn’t help that I suspect most people don’t know the rationale for the current line if indeed there is one. Are we still committed to ensuring people have the weapons that would allow them to effectively battle US law enforcement or the US military? Or are we on to something else now? Well, let’s talk that through a bit. Not in legal or constitutional terms of course but in terms of common sense, a commodity perpetually in short supply here in the USA particularly now the Republican Party is in charge.
Well, first I would suggest if we’re not claiming US citizens have the right to any old weaponry and instead are attempting to distinguish what’s in and what’s out we might do well to think of a rationale for that distinction. I suggest the most obvious rationale might take account of the variety of arms that are available, their uses, and their characteristics particularly with respect to facilitating mass murder. I would argue we should probably give up the notion we’re talking about whatever weaponry we need to effectively fight the US Army because that’s just not very realistic. To really fight the US Army we’d need access to advanced military weaponry and I suggested earlier I doubt many people would be interested in making that sort of weaponry available to the average Joe because of the risks involved. Fortunately I’m not at all sure that would be the only source of weaponry were we ever to actually find ourselves in the position of fighting our own government. The way these things usually play out in other failed sates around the world is that other countries are happy to supply the disaffected factions with the requisite weaponry for one reason or another. We should know. We’re in the habit of supplying all manner of people with military hardware for all manner of purposes. In the case of another civil war or large scale popular uprising here in the USA I see quite a few friends who may be willing to fund and arm patriots fighting for democracy on principle and also quite a few enemies who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing Americans killing off one another no matter the pretext so it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the necessary weaponry would not become available some old way. In other words, I doubt we actually need to store tanks in our garages in the off chance we need them one day. This is to say nothing of the fact that events in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the last century suggest that without popular support it’s rather difficult for any government to do its own thing for too long no matter the imbalance in firepower between that nation’s army and police and its citizenry.
Another consideration is that unlike the early days of the nation we now have a rather robust, stable, mature system of democratic government with many checks and balances. It’s frankly rather difficult to imagine anyone being able to effectively seize power and do away with democracy at least without the acquiescence of the vast majority of our people and frankly if that’s what most people come to believe it doesn’t really matter whether we have a democracy or not. What’s the point if we’re going to turn around and elect someone like Herr Hitler to escort us all to hell? Here in the USA conservatives have been attacking government in the abstract, including our democratic government, for many decades now and naturally President Trump and Republicans in Congress have been expressing these now traditional conservative themes by attacking many of our democratic institutions including the free press, the separation of church and state, our scientific and regulatory agencies, the intelligence community, our educational system, our justice system, and various others not to mention demonizing their liberal political opponents but as far as I can see they’re not going to be able to take the country very much farther down that road to nowhere without the majority of the American electorate coming to their senses and sending them packing.
So I find I can’t really take very seriously at all the rationale provided by the NRA and seconded by President Trump and the Republican Party that we need semi-automatic rifles to fend off socialists or really anyone but according to conservatives mostly socialists from seizing control of our government and enslaving us. Indeed the entire scenario is so far fetched and implausible I have to wonder if anyone really buys it at all. One has to remember that American conservatives are prone to a rhetorical and political style of expression in which they say all manner of funny things that happen to suit their purposes but don’t really correspond to anything they believe or expect others to believe. I suppose it’s possible given the long tradition in Hollywood of there being no problem that can’t be solved at the end of a gun that some intellectually challenged people may envision themselves taking on the US army with their AR-15s but really I can’t imagine there could be too many people like that.
I suppose rather more people may envision themselves taking on criminals with semi-automatic rifles but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which one would need a semi-automatic rifle to take on criminals. Violent criminals usually either walk up and pull out a gun or possibly kick in the door of one’s house while brandishing a gun. One doesn’t typically encounter hordes of hoodlums charging at one from over the barricades or what have you.
Nevertheless it’s clear that many rank and file conservatives are very interested in owning semi-automatic rifles. Why? What do they want them for? Well setting aside the paranoid and unworkable fantasies I’ve just discussed I suspect most of the people who want these weapons want them for three primary purposes: 1) to commit crimes (not just the conventional sort but racial conflict, domestic terrorism, and that sort of thing; one must remember that some people’s notion of a “police state” is basically any state where they are not allowed to do whatever they want to do for example robbing banks or dealing drugs or what have you; for many people we’re already living in a “police state” as oppressive to them as Nazi Germany of Stalinist Russia might be to normal law abiding people), 2) to play army or cowboy in their backyards, 3) to “collect” them and stick them on the wall where they can ogle and fondle them from time to time. In the grand scheme of things I have difficulty attaching too much importance to these objectives and I certainly would not think they justify the increased risk of mass shootings at schools or anywhere else for that matter.
If we’re not drawing the line rather arbitrarily at semi-automatic rifles then where should we draw the line? This is just the sort of thing that drives simple minded conservatives crazy. One can hear the wheels turning: if I can’t have a semi-automatic rifle soon I won’t be able to own a teaspoon! Well I don’t know. Just drawing the line anyplace other than at a weapon designed to facilitate mass murder would probably be a big leap forward.
How about handguns? Well, like semi-automatic rifles the only real reason for handguns is to kill people. In this case no reasonable person would suppose we’re talking about an ability to take on the police or US Army so we can set that argument aside. No, handguns are all about a sort of arms race between criminals and people protecting themselves from criminals or trying to protect themselves from criminals or imaging they’re protecting themselves from criminals. Like all arms races there is something indeterminate about any given equilibrium. If no one had a handgun then one would likely be able to defend oneself adequately with whatever the criminals were using instead. Like what? I have no idea. Spears, swords, knives, rocks, tree branches? Of course wielding those types of hand to hand weapons requires a modicum of strength and physical dexterity while using a handgun requires little more than an ability to point one’s arm and move one’s finger. I can’t really see grandma taking on a ne’er do well in a knife fight but I can imagine her shooting the stranger in her front parlor with a handgun, which one may hope is a ne’er do well and not the neighbor kid come to return one of her cats or what have you. So maybe handguns are reasonable? Of course ease of killing people is a two way street and I suppose it’s quite likely a lot more criminals are interested in committing violent crimes if they know all they’ll need to do is point their arms and move their fingers so maybe we’d be better off overall if no one but police had handguns. Similar considerations apply to the issue of the portability of handguns. It’s great that people can carry them around easily but of course that applies to both criminals and law abiding citizens. Although there are most likely cases where law abiding people have stumbled across ongoing crimes and managed to intercede including some shooting sprees I suspect this isn’t as common as one might think because a good deal of handgun violence most likely involves someone getting the drop on someone else, shooting that person, and promptly running away. Rather difficult for a third person to contrive to be in a position to do a lot about that. So I suspect for every person saved by law abiding people carrying handguns a much larger number of people are likely murdered by criminals carrying handguns. One I think must wonder if the ubiquity of handguns is on balance a good thing or a bad thing. Anyway, I think we can at least agree that handguns seem a lot more reasonable than semi-automatic rifles. They’re a lot less useful for deranged mass murderers wanting to go on shooting sprees because they don’t fire as fast, the magazines don’t hold as many rounds, and one has to be considerably closer to one’s target to hit anything.
Other ideas? Well, I would suggest hunting rifles and shotguns may be in a different category altogether because unlike semi-automatic rifles and handguns they have a purpose beyond killing people: killing animals. Supposing one has a right to bear these sorts of arms makes rather more sense to me than some of the other weapons we’ve been discussing. They have a legitimate and real (as opposed to fantasy) purpose, they’re not very well suited to shooting sprees and mass murder, and as a bonus they’re a lot more awkward to use in the commission of a crime than say a handgun, a fact which would seem to tilt the arms race back in favor of homeowners and other people with adequate space to store them. In the old gangster movies the bad guys would often pull a sawed off shotgun from out of their trench coats or in the case of westerns I guess the varmints would pull them from out of their dusters but honestly how many people really wear trench coats or dusters these days? And of course you have to be pretty much next to your victim for pulling a shotgun out of whatever article of clothing one happens to be wearing to make sense. Seems a lot more awkward to use in a criminal context than a handgun for example.
So let’s summarize and wrap up or discussion of where to draw the line. Hunting rifles and shotguns seem to me likely to be in the generally acceptable range. Handguns are in a sort of gray area. Pros and cons. Might need some additional research on those. Semi-automatic and automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and other more advanced military style weaponry appear to me to just not be worth the risk to innocent people. Just talking out loud right now. Not saying I have all the answers. Personally I think we’d be moving forward leaps and bounds by just managing to sit down and discuss the issue like reasonable adults rather than small children who’ve missed their nap times. But we all know what’s likely to actually happen after this most recent tragedy is what seems to always happen after these sorts of tragedies here in the USA. Nothing. Or not exactly nothing. We’ll send out our thoughts and prayers. Who knows, I might even get off the couch and light a candle but that’s pushing it. And of course assuredly many people will rush out to buy more semi-automatic rifles to guard themselves against all the gun violence thus insuring the next mass shooting of school kids won’t be far away.
Before I sign off this week I thought I’d mention one other funny component of the discussion of guns here in the USA, which is a notion shared by many conservatives, Republicans, and other nutty right wing sorts not to mention common criminals, that they have what they call a “god given” right to semi-automatic rifles or really I suppose whatever weaponry they desire. Where does that come from you ask? You don’t remember that bit in the bible? Jesus waxing eloquent on the AR-15? Well, again one has to remember that the original purpose of the old colonists coming up with this particular bit of the US Constitution was apparently to allow people to fight effectively against the US government should things not turn out as planned. But of course the US Constitution is a political and legal document implemented by institutions of the US government, so there is obviously something not entirely logically consistent going on here. The so-called founding fathers may have been clever in some ways but they did tend toward rhetorical extremes from time to time. Unfortunate in retrospect they didn’t have a few founding mothers around to help keep their feet on the ground. Anyway, many conservatives particularly of the virulently anti-government including I may say anti-democratic government sort such as anarchists and so-called libertarians and other wacky groups of that ilk have apparently decided they’re talking about rights that don’t derive from the Second Amendment of the US Constitution at all but are instead issued directly from mystical beings in the next world. In my opinion these dangerous anti-social lunatics really belong in prison along with other criminals who believe they are above the law but of course the tendency now with President Trump and the GOP in charge is to coddle and carve out special exceptions for such people. Conservatives have argued successfully in the courts for example that although the US Supreme Court has found that the US Constitution does not allow state governments to discriminate against homosexuals in the area of marriage state officials are perfectly within their rights to choose not to process those types of marriages as long as their disregard of the law and their official duties is based on bigotry with a religious pedigree. I’m not sure any old religion will do of course because I would be surprised if conservatives are willing to extend similar special exemptions to Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists let alone to any of the other more esoteric sorts of religions one hears about these days such as Wicca or followers of Voodoo or what have you. No, I suspect it’s only Christians and possibly only certain sects within that general area who can choose to not follow the law if they feel so inclined at least in this area of gay people getting married. On a positive note I believe the courts did find that the states in question would need to import someone from somewhere else at taxpayer expense who would be able to follow the law and fulfill their official functions to fill in for any state officials who decide to take an extended coffee break of this sort so at least gay people in those states can still ostensibly get their marriage papers processed by someone other than the person who would normally process them. My point is one can very well imagine the GOP trying to exempt certain Christians from gun laws if they claim to have received special permission from the heavens to own particular weapons. All I can say is I hope none of these otherworldly entities had anything to say about nuclear bombs because honestly I think that would be taking this sort of lunacy a little too far don’t you?
Want to help school kids get through their youth without being shot by a psycho killer with a semi-automatic rifle or some similar murder tool? Want to maintain the integrity of our democratic political system? Want to bring some common sense and rationality to national gun policy? Want to confront Christian exceptionalism and bullying and maintain our American tradition of freedom of religion? Well you know what to do my brothers and sisters. Join liberals in fighting the conservative menace to the American way of life! Vote Democrat in the next election!
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