There are few things that can really be considered tough to talk about. I don't necessarily mean tough in the sense that the content material is too difficult or too sensitive, but instead tough as in the potential the topic creates for tangents of different political leanings to take up and effectively take off with, rendering the initial topic mute to the world. Gun rights in the United States are one such topic. To the right, talking about whether or not people have the right to own guns is immediately taken as the first domino in a series of quickly falling rights, leading to a cataclysmic showdown with the federal government in the second Civil War. To the left talking about whether or not people have the right to own guns quickly becomes a starting point for first bashing the NRA and subsequently any "evil" right-wing interest group with ties in Washington.
Against my better judgement, I'd like to try to foresee those tangents and ask that anyone reading this abandon prejudices for the sake of having a real conversation about gun rights and gun control. This conversation doesn't need to include the NRA, nor does it need to include talks of secession. It needs to be able to stop, look at the gun attacks we've had this year and say that lives were lost due to some sort of error down the line of people purchasing, owning, and keeping guns. So let's start from the top.
Is there an absolute human right to own a gun? I'm tempted to say yes, but not on grounds of divine intervention (I don't think God cares one way or another whether or not you own a .308, the same way he doesn't care if you own a Ford Taurus), nor on grounds of state endowment of a right to own a gun (states have historically struggled with the idea of "rights by majority" and "rights by necessity") so we can't really use either as an argument for or against. There is simply too much subjectivity on both sides to successfully garner an objective answer. Perhaps the right to own a gun falls under a category of owning any other thing that may be dangerous. But there is something to be said about a difference between owning a handgun and owning a firecracker, so maybe ownership of dangerous things does not quite take into account the scope of owning firearms. What I can say is this; ownership of any thing could in theory be fine if that thing is not putting anyone in danger of any negative externality.
Perhaps then ownership of any thing really comes down to a utilitarian approach; a "do least harm" sort of idea where even a nuclear weapon would be theoretically legal to own should it pose no objective threats to anyone else. So is that the case with firearms? I can imagine that to some extents, this rule does not really apply. There are some types of firearms that overstate their purpose of providing hunting or defense interests, in the sense that it would be, not trying to be cruel here, virtually overkill. For instance, a military grade fully automatic M16 is overkill whether you take it hunting or keep it at home to ware off petty burglars. This overkill extends itself to being dangerous to the public should it fall into the wrong hands. So in a certain sense, ownership of some weapons, while endorsing rights of ownership do not provide an adequate utilitarian response for the danger they inherently provide as firearms always do (to the extent of their power obviously).
On the opposite side of the coin, most firearm ownership is very much insufficient when it comes to satisfying what in the U.S at least is the second portion of the second amendment. If the allowance of a militia is to be interpreted as private citizens having a fighting chance against a tyrannical government, then that particular portion of the second amendment may as well be null and void. There is simply no way that armed citizenry can width-stand the force of the entire American army. There isn't even a sense of having an honorable end to it all because of the use of airstrikes or drones don't make it a fair fight. Better yet, there is historical evidence of people having tried to enforce that second amendment against the federal government and having failed even when the technology gap was much smaller; see Civil War.
Either way then whether to maintain rights of ownership or rights of defense, having highly capable and consequently very dangerous weapons available to the general public seem to bring present danger with little tangible positives to be found.
So then what of less capable, perhaps less dangerous firearms like for instance pistols? Yes, the capacity for these weapons to inflict unwarranted damage has a much lower rate than rifles or automatic weapons so they are definitely safer on an individual basis. But the Bureau of Justice has shown that between 1976 and 2004 homicides by handguns are incredibly higher than any other sort of weaponry used in such cases. So while handguns theoretically offer less danger in terms of bullets per second or bullets fired, we cannot ignore the fact that the statistics make handguns the most deadly of any sort of weapon in the United States.
Is this because there is an amendment allowing citizens to keep weapons? Not quite. Execute a quick Wikipedia search like I did and you will find that other countries with some sort of acceptance of the right to bear arms have lower per capita gun related deaths than the U.S. Is this because the United States has a deep gun culture? Not really. In that same list from before, many countries have rich gun-making histories yet significantly lower gun related deaths than the U.S. What could it possibly be then?
The answer I believe lies somewhere outside statistics. It sounds strange, knowing that the more objective proof you have of a phenomenon the more reason you should have to believe in it but if that were the case then this problem would have been resolved by now. I am also fairly confident that it doesn't start at the societal level either; there is no "Godlessness" that is forcing evil onto the U.S nor have video games ever brought about slaughter of innocents in real life (only ignorance to individual problems have caused that).
At the end of the day, I believe it all comes down to a mixture of different issues, explaining exactly why this issue is so contentious. It is not divisive because there are rights of people at stake or because there isn't a good enough scapegoat. It is divisive because so many relatively small issues feed onto themselves in a continuous feedback loop ever promoting the issue; the trouble is nobody knows where to start fixing it. I will describe it as follows.
You, a normal human being, have an inherent sense of duty to protect yourself. As a citizen, as a business owner, or as a crook, you know that the best form of defense that is accessible, cheap, and effective is a gun. You can go to your local Walmart right now and check that fact yourself. Now in theory there is nothing wrong with that; nobody should tell you your life isn't worth protecting. The feedback loop starts when everyone begins walking around with a gun given the fact that guns are readily accessible. People are not thick, they pick up on the fact that everyone else has the same opportunity to have a gun as a form of protection. So, like the very first caveman who realized his caveman neighbor could also pick up a rock, the "modern caveman" quickly begins looking for a much bigger gun. What happens next is right up Adam Smith's alley; someone decides that seeing as how everyone is in the market for better guns, there's money to be made in all this. So gun companies begin to cash in on this very big demand. Again, nothing wrong with exposing a high demand market.
But when that market starts to produce items that in some way shape or form fall through the cracks and into the hands of those not looking to protect themselves but instead looking to cause havoc among us, that creates a big problem. Ironically, the only logical response anyone can have to knowledge of this fact is to go out and buy more guns in order to protect him or herself from these criminals. So, the loop becomes bigger, and more guns end up getting on both the regular market and the darker markets. Fear leads to more guns leads to more fear and back again it goes. Compounding that loop are the intangibles of society that tend to provide the most hurt of all when applied to loose weapons; the mentally unstable, the gun shop owner looking to make a quick buck instead of screening correctly, the lobbyist looking to keep gun companies out of the loop entirely, all throw wrenches in an already malfunctioning system.
Is there a solution to all this? Perhaps you can start by looking at whether or not the gun control laws that are in effect already are being looked after in a good way. Then you can start to see where the holes really are. Is there a place that has gun control laws on the books but isn't doing much to solve the issue? Well then perhaps it's time for a reassessment of that particular community. Is there a place where gun control has worked? If so, what can that particular community tell us about what works well? Also, considering that no law abiding citizen who owns a gun would use that gun to murder someone (hence the "law abiding" characteristic) what objection would they have to registering their firearm with their local police station, or perhaps their state? We've already ruled out hiding the possibility of a massive pro-gun insurgency and we've eliminated criminality from law abiding gun carriers, so what is the issue with forcing gun owners to tell others that they do indeed have a gun which they would never use for nefarious purposes?
Gun registration would also help keep unregistered firearms from ending up in the wrong hands (assuming hefty prison time would be served for such an offense by both the owner and the dealer of the gun). But for this to work there needs to be a more open dialogue between the individual and the state with regards to the liberties of the individual and how the state is trying to help them maintain said liberties. There is a characterization of anti-establishment, anti-government, pro-conspiracy theory Americans out there among us which to some extent is as true as the foil of that very characterization, but that all stems from poor efforts on both sides to reach a consensus on what the government is there for. Essentially, there needs to be an abandonment of this overblown individualism in exchange for legal assurance of both physical defense and defense of rights.
With that sort of transaction, gun politics can begin to become a thing of the past. There will still be generations who would never agree to these sorts of things on archaic principles alone, but if they truly believe in a robust sense of individualism then they will allow the loss of some privacy for the gain of many spared lives who otherwise would never have had a chance of experiencing individualism at all. It is a societal trade, but it is a trade that should be done for the sake of innocents everywhere. Historically speaking self protection and the right to correct injustices have slowly been handed over to the state as dangers have been proved to be neutralized by the state itself. The attitude of some living in the United States needs to follow on this trend, because it is their justified fear that drives the issues we still have today.
Against my better judgement, I'd like to try to foresee those tangents and ask that anyone reading this abandon prejudices for the sake of having a real conversation about gun rights and gun control. This conversation doesn't need to include the NRA, nor does it need to include talks of secession. It needs to be able to stop, look at the gun attacks we've had this year and say that lives were lost due to some sort of error down the line of people purchasing, owning, and keeping guns. So let's start from the top.
Is there an absolute human right to own a gun? I'm tempted to say yes, but not on grounds of divine intervention (I don't think God cares one way or another whether or not you own a .308, the same way he doesn't care if you own a Ford Taurus), nor on grounds of state endowment of a right to own a gun (states have historically struggled with the idea of "rights by majority" and "rights by necessity") so we can't really use either as an argument for or against. There is simply too much subjectivity on both sides to successfully garner an objective answer. Perhaps the right to own a gun falls under a category of owning any other thing that may be dangerous. But there is something to be said about a difference between owning a handgun and owning a firecracker, so maybe ownership of dangerous things does not quite take into account the scope of owning firearms. What I can say is this; ownership of any thing could in theory be fine if that thing is not putting anyone in danger of any negative externality.
Perhaps then ownership of any thing really comes down to a utilitarian approach; a "do least harm" sort of idea where even a nuclear weapon would be theoretically legal to own should it pose no objective threats to anyone else. So is that the case with firearms? I can imagine that to some extents, this rule does not really apply. There are some types of firearms that overstate their purpose of providing hunting or defense interests, in the sense that it would be, not trying to be cruel here, virtually overkill. For instance, a military grade fully automatic M16 is overkill whether you take it hunting or keep it at home to ware off petty burglars. This overkill extends itself to being dangerous to the public should it fall into the wrong hands. So in a certain sense, ownership of some weapons, while endorsing rights of ownership do not provide an adequate utilitarian response for the danger they inherently provide as firearms always do (to the extent of their power obviously).
On the opposite side of the coin, most firearm ownership is very much insufficient when it comes to satisfying what in the U.S at least is the second portion of the second amendment. If the allowance of a militia is to be interpreted as private citizens having a fighting chance against a tyrannical government, then that particular portion of the second amendment may as well be null and void. There is simply no way that armed citizenry can width-stand the force of the entire American army. There isn't even a sense of having an honorable end to it all because of the use of airstrikes or drones don't make it a fair fight. Better yet, there is historical evidence of people having tried to enforce that second amendment against the federal government and having failed even when the technology gap was much smaller; see Civil War.
Either way then whether to maintain rights of ownership or rights of defense, having highly capable and consequently very dangerous weapons available to the general public seem to bring present danger with little tangible positives to be found.
 |
| BJS - Homicides 1974-2004 |
So then what of less capable, perhaps less dangerous firearms like for instance pistols? Yes, the capacity for these weapons to inflict unwarranted damage has a much lower rate than rifles or automatic weapons so they are definitely safer on an individual basis. But the Bureau of Justice has shown that between 1976 and 2004 homicides by handguns are incredibly higher than any other sort of weaponry used in such cases. So while handguns theoretically offer less danger in terms of bullets per second or bullets fired, we cannot ignore the fact that the statistics make handguns the most deadly of any sort of weapon in the United States.
Is this because there is an amendment allowing citizens to keep weapons? Not quite. Execute a quick Wikipedia search like I did and you will find that other countries with some sort of acceptance of the right to bear arms have lower per capita gun related deaths than the U.S. Is this because the United States has a deep gun culture? Not really. In that same list from before, many countries have rich gun-making histories yet significantly lower gun related deaths than the U.S. What could it possibly be then?
The answer I believe lies somewhere outside statistics. It sounds strange, knowing that the more objective proof you have of a phenomenon the more reason you should have to believe in it but if that were the case then this problem would have been resolved by now. I am also fairly confident that it doesn't start at the societal level either; there is no "Godlessness" that is forcing evil onto the U.S nor have video games ever brought about slaughter of innocents in real life (only ignorance to individual problems have caused that).
At the end of the day, I believe it all comes down to a mixture of different issues, explaining exactly why this issue is so contentious. It is not divisive because there are rights of people at stake or because there isn't a good enough scapegoat. It is divisive because so many relatively small issues feed onto themselves in a continuous feedback loop ever promoting the issue; the trouble is nobody knows where to start fixing it. I will describe it as follows.
You, a normal human being, have an inherent sense of duty to protect yourself. As a citizen, as a business owner, or as a crook, you know that the best form of defense that is accessible, cheap, and effective is a gun. You can go to your local Walmart right now and check that fact yourself. Now in theory there is nothing wrong with that; nobody should tell you your life isn't worth protecting. The feedback loop starts when everyone begins walking around with a gun given the fact that guns are readily accessible. People are not thick, they pick up on the fact that everyone else has the same opportunity to have a gun as a form of protection. So, like the very first caveman who realized his caveman neighbor could also pick up a rock, the "modern caveman" quickly begins looking for a much bigger gun. What happens next is right up Adam Smith's alley; someone decides that seeing as how everyone is in the market for better guns, there's money to be made in all this. So gun companies begin to cash in on this very big demand. Again, nothing wrong with exposing a high demand market.
But when that market starts to produce items that in some way shape or form fall through the cracks and into the hands of those not looking to protect themselves but instead looking to cause havoc among us, that creates a big problem. Ironically, the only logical response anyone can have to knowledge of this fact is to go out and buy more guns in order to protect him or herself from these criminals. So, the loop becomes bigger, and more guns end up getting on both the regular market and the darker markets. Fear leads to more guns leads to more fear and back again it goes. Compounding that loop are the intangibles of society that tend to provide the most hurt of all when applied to loose weapons; the mentally unstable, the gun shop owner looking to make a quick buck instead of screening correctly, the lobbyist looking to keep gun companies out of the loop entirely, all throw wrenches in an already malfunctioning system.
Is there a solution to all this? Perhaps you can start by looking at whether or not the gun control laws that are in effect already are being looked after in a good way. Then you can start to see where the holes really are. Is there a place that has gun control laws on the books but isn't doing much to solve the issue? Well then perhaps it's time for a reassessment of that particular community. Is there a place where gun control has worked? If so, what can that particular community tell us about what works well? Also, considering that no law abiding citizen who owns a gun would use that gun to murder someone (hence the "law abiding" characteristic) what objection would they have to registering their firearm with their local police station, or perhaps their state? We've already ruled out hiding the possibility of a massive pro-gun insurgency and we've eliminated criminality from law abiding gun carriers, so what is the issue with forcing gun owners to tell others that they do indeed have a gun which they would never use for nefarious purposes?
Gun registration would also help keep unregistered firearms from ending up in the wrong hands (assuming hefty prison time would be served for such an offense by both the owner and the dealer of the gun). But for this to work there needs to be a more open dialogue between the individual and the state with regards to the liberties of the individual and how the state is trying to help them maintain said liberties. There is a characterization of anti-establishment, anti-government, pro-conspiracy theory Americans out there among us which to some extent is as true as the foil of that very characterization, but that all stems from poor efforts on both sides to reach a consensus on what the government is there for. Essentially, there needs to be an abandonment of this overblown individualism in exchange for legal assurance of both physical defense and defense of rights.
With that sort of transaction, gun politics can begin to become a thing of the past. There will still be generations who would never agree to these sorts of things on archaic principles alone, but if they truly believe in a robust sense of individualism then they will allow the loss of some privacy for the gain of many spared lives who otherwise would never have had a chance of experiencing individualism at all. It is a societal trade, but it is a trade that should be done for the sake of innocents everywhere. Historically speaking self protection and the right to correct injustices have slowly been handed over to the state as dangers have been proved to be neutralized by the state itself. The attitude of some living in the United States needs to follow on this trend, because it is their justified fear that drives the issues we still have today.
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1 comment:
Sounding rather consequentialist there, Alessandro.
I'm skeptical of the "feedback loop" mechanism you describe. Having been around firearms most of my adult life, and having fired quite my share of ammunition "down range", I don't personally know anybody for whom the "Holy crap, that guy's got a bigger gun so I need a bigger gun" type of thinking is operative. Generally speaking, human beings are pretty fragile, and it doesn't require a .50 caliber to put someone down. In fact, a .22 caliber does quite nicely. Coincidentally, the M-16 you mention uses a 5.56 mm round, which is significantly smaller than most hunting ammunition used today (it's smaller than .22 caliber).
That isn't to say that there aren't people out there who are looking for "stopping power", but stopping power doesn't translate into "bigger ammo". And "stopping power" is useless if you can't put a round on a target. Most professional shooters aren't about the size of the round being fired, but whether the firearm is comfortable to the shooter and whether the shooter can put their round on target, which are both about the mechanics of the shooter, not about the size of their "opponent's" weapon.
If you go back to the homicide report you cite, handguns are used in murders far more often than any other chosen weapon. The reason why is relatively simple: most homicides are between people known to each other and handguns are relatively easy to obtain and easy to handle. Most handguns fire ammunition larger than the M16.
As far as the history of moving private ambitions of retribution to the state in the name of "justice", the central problem has been that the government has proven itself time and time again unworthy of the trust that you esteem to them. Maybe other governments, with bodies closer to the people, have closer relationships between the legislatures and the legislated, but the United States does not have this relationship. Since the 1960's the erosion of public trust in the government has been steady and seemingly inexorable, and time and time again the government's actions have proven the government unworthy of changing that paradigm. From the Gulf of Tonkin incident to "Fast and Furious", citizens are right to be skeptical about both the intentions government officials and their ability to execute their official duties in ways that do not put the public at great danger or lead the country into greater conflict.
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