Why "gun control" is doomed

Humans have been losing their temper and killing their own kind since before we were humans. We just keep improving the technology.

The AR-15 was created to secure a military contract by providing a more effective weapon for the style of combat American troops were encountering in jungle and urban warfare. It was designed to kill not just people, but people reduced to the status of varmints in the underbrush: dehumanized humans.

Beginning with the American Civil War, mechanized slaughter in warfare started generating shocking numbers of casualties that were quickly rationalized and normalized by supporters of the conflict. Combatant deaths and collateral damage have always been accepted as part of the cost of the revered practice of war. We accepted that we will always have wars, so we'd better keep improving our weaponry to improve our odds of success.

The sale of personal guns reflects on an individual level the defense industry's sale of large-scale weapons to government military forces. Between nations, those arsenals present a deterrent to potential aggressors, or intimidate potential resisters to a powerful nation's overtures to a weaker one with deals that they can't refuse. The dynamic is different on a personal level, where some gun owners like to wear their firepower openly, while others prefer to take advantage of concealment. With an ample supply of guns in the United States, anyone who is fully clothed could have one or more weapons in easy reach. Thus, almost anyone you see could be an unstable dictator with nukes.

When the world entered the Nuclear Age, in which country after country developed doomsday bombs and missiles, we counted on the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep any single state actor from starting The Big One that would blow us back to the Stone Age. Indeed, research indicated that we would go farther than the Stone Age, to a nearly completely lifeless planet. As appealing as that may sound to nihilists who say that the destruction of our species and all other life sounds great, no one of that bent has yet succeeded in gaining enough control over a country with a nuclear arsenal to make the dream a reality.

On the individual level, the prospect looks completely different. How often do we hear that the instigator of a mass shooting either commits suicide or accepts that the armed response will kill him? Because the motives for mass shootings vary, some shooters do survive, or might have hoped to. But anyone initiating an act of slaughter has to accept the risk that it will end their story at the same time that it ends the lives of their victims. Mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent, it's an enhancement.

A 2017 article from CNN provides a convenient history of the AR-15 and statistics on gun ownership in general. It reports that a 1999 Pew Research survey found that 50 percent of gun owners said that they owned theirs for hunting, and 26 percent said it was for protection. By 2017, 67 percent said they owned firearms for protection, and only 38 percent said it was for hunting. Put another way, the balance shifted from hunting animals to hunting each other. But the article also stated that gun ownership in the US had been steadily declining. The article is from 2017, with a graph showing data ending in 2014. That graph ends with a rising line indicating that could have continued to rise in the eight years since 2014. As with so many things, a lot can go unreported. Based on what I hear around my neighborhood on a regular basis, gun ownership is thriving.

Among my acquaintances I know heavily armed people and adamantly unarmed people. Because I'm not involved in shooting as a hobby or occupation, the subject comes up very little. I find a lot of helpful information and analysis at a YouTube channel  presented by a southern journalist who discusses this topic extensively.

According to more recent statistics reported in a BBC article, Americans use their guns to kill themselves more often than to kill others. But homicide is the next largest segment, followed by law enforcement, unintentional discharge (negligence), and uncategorized.

In the United States we are uniquely hampered by the Second Amendment when it comes to  restraining the supply and use of firearms. Other countries that supposedly provide examples of how easily it could be done with sufficient political will do not have the scriptural basis that the gun culture claims here. There is no "right to life" explicit in the Bill of Rights, but there is a right to the power of instant death.

Gun culture couldn't exist without guns. But guns already exist in huge numbers, leaving us to figure out how to address human attitudes toward them and their appropriate use. Bans promote sales. During the 1994-2004 ban, sales of the AR-15 and similar rifles increased. The rifles were simply reconfigured to comply with the wording of the ban. The prohibitions in the ban did little or nothing to reduce the lethality of the weapons, and absolutely nothing to stem the production of them or the demand for them. It created a scarcity mentality among people inclined to want a gun, and made them a sort of forbidden fruit that fed into anti-government rhetoric. True patriots stand up against their government, because you know we never really wanted or needed one in the first place, but back the blue and salute Old Glory and support our troops.

Mental health accounts for only a fraction of homicides. Human volatility combined with an implied challenge from popular culture makes people wonder all the time how they would stack up in a confrontation. The hero doesn't win every time, but they never quit. There is no distinct line between normal human violence and pathological expressions of it. Just by stepping onto the continuum you open yourself up to further experimentation. What would it be like? Could I take it? Is this my time to be the righteous fist of justice? Or maybe you're just pissed off that day.

Any time someone cites a progression of events in a conjectural way, the dive bombers of logical debate will descend in a swarm, shrieking "slippery slope fallacy! Slippery slope fallacy!" You know what? Fuck them. Slippery slopes exist, and the refusal to consider them as a thought experiment is intellectually dishonest and cowardly. One thing does lead to another. Not every progression proves true, but dismissing them out of hand because you learned, in some class you took or book you read, to scorn them shows an ironic lack of creative and critical thinking. As someone who has slid off of a number of them, I offer you my one-finger salute.

The problem with the political process is that we get buried in statistics and arguments from all sides, amplified or suppressed depending on where the lobbying money is being applied. There's a whole lot of rhetoric before the energy dissipates because everyone is too confused to move forward. If something does get enacted, its more likely to be ineffective political theater, because that's what the American people actually want. A simple and inadequate solution, or the attempt to impose one, is much easier for the public to understand than a data-driven, somewhat complicated long campaign to address the behavioral basis of our problem.

What will you do when the ethnic cleansing starts?

Forces are gathering in this country that are eager to begin gunning down the people they don't like, randomly and at will. Their numbers are still small. The actual trigger pullers will always be a small percentage of the group. But they are supported by a much larger population of half-assed, wimpy bigots who would be happy to see the world made safe for their kind. They just don't have the guts to come right out and lead the charge. Maybe some of them would join in once the carnage gained momentum. Others would just run out and kick a corpse a few times to feel the emotional rush with absolutely no risk to themselves.

Looking at history, after the extermination of all of their enemies and inferiors, the remaining homogenized population will romanticize them and role-play, like a sports team with a native American mascot, or white performers made up as black, or Asian. Perhaps a few token populations of the other races will be kept alive in controllable communities.

There are conservative people who are not "Aryan." When they have helped the white supremacists to achieve dominance, will they be allowed to keep their holdings, or will they be stripped of wealth and thrown in the camps with the other losers? Do they think that they can avoid that?

There are about 300 million firearms in the United States. Of those, approximately 5 to 10 million are assault-style rifles. How many do you own? Three hundred million is just about enough to arm every person in the country with a gun. The high figure of 10 million combat-inspired weapons is still a pretty small fraction. But when you figure that the 300 million figure includes esoteric target-shooting weapons, single and two-shot guns, tiny handguns, and some cheap stuff just as likely to blow up in your hand as send a bullet at a bad guy, a lot of us will be undergunned in a firefight.

We peaceniks don't want a firefight at all, of course. A few of us are so committed to nonviolence that we would let ourselves be slaughtered rather than become combative. A somewhat larger percentage believes that they could be that calm, but would definitely hide behind something for as long as they could. In a larger ring around this stand the reluctant warriors who would resist force with force if they had to. The question is, resist with what?

The advocates for gun control want background checks. This is an excellent idea. We want to filter out people with documented tendencies to violence. But the current administration in Washington, and the governments in many states, clearly want a certain demographic to be armed and ready to do violence on their behalf. It can't be an official policy, but if you look at trends in law enforcement, and at the pervasiveness of white privilege in all things, you can sketch in how it might develop from here. The people who insist most strongly on being armed are the ones most likely to be useful to a wealthy, racist state. And the wealthy, racist state doesn't even have to pay them and put them in matching uniforms. The "well-ordered militia" is perfectly happy to act on their own. As long as no one treads on them in a way that they can actually understand, they'll do the wet work for free, just for the pleasure of it. Governments will drag their feet on background checks until the shit is about to hit the fan. Then they will enact them. But they won't be filtering out the abusers, the bigots, the borderline mentally ill control freaks. They'll be filtering for the reluctant warriors for peace. They'll look at political leanings, personal and published writings, any hint that you might stand in the way of what they call progress.

I have never wanted to die from a gunshot. As a normal male in a culture shaped by testosterone, I have imagined putting a few slugs into someone who might "have it coming," but it only took a little more thought to realize how that might apply to me. And it isn't just cowardice to say that perhaps blowing each other away is not the best way to solve a long-term conflict of belief systems. It's an emergency action. I certainly don't want to give any satisfaction to a punk with a bumper sticker that says "Visualize no liberals," by letting him put one through my forehead, either execution-style or as a sniper. But I would still rather that he wised up, rather than have me gun him down.

They've got us by the paradox when we say that no one should be killed for their beliefs, and then they go start killing people for their beliefs, forcing us to kill them back. We are then killing them for their beliefs. And if we seek them out and kill them beforehand because we knew that they were about to kill us, we've hopped right over the line and played by their rules.

So what do you do when the genocide starts? What do you do when a killing madness finally erupts in the small but significant number of people who want it to be that way? The question is especially acute if you don't happen to have a soft, fuzzy belief in a loving god smoothing the upholstery on a radiant heavenly couch for you to relax on after your martyrdom. There are atheists in foxholes, just as their are gay, lesbian, and transgender members of the armed forces. Some belief in a better future makes the idea of personal sacrifice palatable. Unfortunately, history has shown that every bloodbath has only brought partial and temporary relief from the forces of darkness. Sometimes it hasn't even brought that. So perhaps one accepts the martyr's death because there's nothing worth sticking around for anyway. Say a sad farewell to beauty, pleasure, joy, and love, because darkness will always force itself on you and make you kill or die.

If you plan to put up a fight, you might do well to arm yourself now, while it's easy, get trained, practice, and stockpile ammunition so that you can give as good as you get in the hail of gunfire. Train as well with hand weapons and with no weapons. Become as much of a super soldier as possible, while still doing whatever else you might have preferred to do with your life. Or start thinking differently, and talking relentlessly about the choice being forced on us now, and in other countries where the dark side has risen again.

We may not be able to stop the ethnic cleansers from starting a few massacres, but we can at least put governments in place that will recognize it for what it is and prosecute it. We can take the high ground and make the bigots scale it. We can demand that government be for all the people. Like it or not, we're all equipped with a racial identity. We're born with physical characteristics that other people react to. We have a limited ability to control the reactions of others, but we can control our own. That's why any durable change has to come from within individuals, one at a time. It may never work. But it definitely won't if we don't keep the idea alive that it should.

AR-15s and stuff like that

I just got a commission to work on some drawings for political advertising. The first assignment was easy: it supported environmental science. The second one is extremely hard, and it may make or break my chances to draw for hire for any other installments in the campaign. This is a bummer, because overall I support the "progressive" policies that this group espouses.

The second target of the ad campaign is gun control, notably the control of so-called assault weapons.

Let me be clear. I don't like the proliferation of guns. I find the point of view that we have to be ready to kill each other at a moment's notice extremely depressing. I deplore the use of semi-automatic, militarily-styled weapons as fetish objects, and particularly their use to slaughter crowds of what we call innocent people. That being said, I hear the arguments of the pro-gun contingent, that murderers use a much greater variety of weapons than the "assault" category, and that militarily styled weapons in responsible hands are just a different style of projectile thrower, better for some uses and worse for others.

AR-15s are kind of like the pit bull of guns. People get cranked up over a breed of dog which might or might not be more prone to take someone's face off or mutilate someone else's family pet, and out come all the pit bull devotees with their stories of loving canine companions who live in homes full of happy children. We have a mass shooting and the voices rise again to ban the weapon. Other voices shout back about mental health care. Supporters of the particular piece of killing hardware make their points again about the total acceptability of the tool itself, and the Constitutional amendment that guarantees every citizen's right to have as many as they can afford.

I also hear the arguments specifically aimed at restricting militarily-styled rifles. Militarily styled weapons feed into a fantasy that does not have animals as its targets. Armies don't fight deer. They don't even fight grizzlies and mountain lions. They don't fight coyotes, peccaries, groundhogs, or raccoons. Armies of humans aim high-capacity, automatic rifles at each other to kill each other. The purpose of a military weapon is to put a round or rounds through the flesh and bone of an adversary who would be just as happy to reciprocate.

How much does form follow function? Much of the sinister looks of a militarily-styled weapon grow from the design requirements to make it do what it does with the least amount of undesirable feedback to the shooter. These include recoil, heat, and muzzle rise. Even a silencer and flash suppressor have actual uses during certain hunting conditions.

All that being said, when I looked at a half-dozen "best deer rifle" lists, nothing with military styling headed any of them. The "best" deer rifles were bolt-action, with a capacity of about three shots. Militarily styled weapons did appear in every list, but as an option for the shooter already so inclined. If you want that style of rifle, reviewers have checked out a few choices. If the militarily-styled rife is your preference, you'll then want to accessorize it to make it work better for you.

This does not answer why the militarily-styled rifle is your choice. People are attracted to some weird stuff, that's for sure. However, lots of people like things that aren't used to kill. It's the killing part that moves the gun hobby from harmless diversion to political firestorm. It's what motivates people to take a position inspired by the perfectly valid desire to go about their daily lives without wondering when they might be caught in a hail of lead.

I'm left with an approaching deadline and a nuanced situation I'm asked to depict in a simple manner. So I'll do the drawing and take the check, but I guarantee that it will not have the desired effect except on readers who were already inclined to agree. As much as I support the Parkland survivors, I see this election turning on other issues. Some people I know who are Republicans who don't particularly care for religious people or hunters will still vote the party on the basis of other issues, or they won't vote at all. And the real participants in the debate will continue to throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other in an endless war that no one wins.

Thoughts, prayers, and argument

Another lone gunman has raised the bar yet again for mass shootings in the USA.

My employer's son was at Virginia Tech in 2007. He just missed being in one of the classrooms where that shooter struck. Ten years later, he lives and works in Las Vegas. He dodged these bullets, too. But I wonder how the world looks to a young person whose life has already been closely invaded by unhinged murderers not once but twice.

Along with normalizing virulent bigotry in the name of free speech, we have normalized personal violence. America was settled at gunpoint. The wave of white people moved westward, hunting, gathering, and subduing the natives as it went. A gun was a tool, like an ax or a plow. The gun was woven into our national identity here far more than anywhere else. It is as American as the flag, and more widely worshipped.

Popular fiction has long celebrated heroes who can handle a shootin' iron. From tall tales around the camp fire to pulp fiction to radio, movies, and television, we admire the man who says little while his gun barks a sharp response to the impertinence of evil. And our super villains push the arms race. Deadly combat is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage.

Actually, singing solo, unaccompanied, on a stage in front of a large audience is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage. This probably explains the greater popularity of gunplay.

I'm sure that watching people drop before your hail of lead is very satisfying. Many of these killers have already accepted that this will be the last thing they do. Good luck figuring out how to detect those tendencies in a free-range population.

Here in the Land of the Free, we must be careful when we tell people what they cannot do or own. But how many times do we have to see someone misuse a high-capacity weapon before we acknowledge that the tool itself is part of the problem?

When I first got a handgun, I had the weirdest flood of thoughts. I looked at it and saw all the ways in which it could inflict suffering. I could shoot someone else. I could shoot myself. I could shoot an animal. I could put a bullet hole in anything I could hit. I did not buy the gun. My first wife already owned it. It was never enough gun for her, it was just the gun she could afford at the time. She left it behind when she left me.

The idea of inflicting suffering repelled me, I'm happy to say. But we are primitive creatures who have killed since before the invention of language. In all those years, some of us have clearly enjoyed it more than others. That willingness to push things to the ultimate extreme lives inside all of us. It's controlled in some, and unbridled in others.

My gun-worshipping friends repeat over and over that humans are dangerous creatures, and that access to weapons is all that will save the good ones from the bad ones. Sometimes, people get killed who don't deserve it. That's an unfortunate side effect. To the gun believer, it reinforces their contention that everyone should be armed, in order to participate fully in the exchange of lead when it inevitably breaks out.

That sounds incredibly bleak to me. It may be true, but it's sad. Any family picnic in a park, any public entertainment, any convergence of people whatsoever, may be interrupted by a murderer. Get used to it. It's the will of the people and the intent of our founders.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the other forms that had been tried. Granted, a majority could vote to give their government strong police powers, and agree that only trained professionals in the government's service should be allowed to have the most powerful weapons. But we already voted to let the wealthy have all the money, and now they're using it to crush ordinary citizens. In other words, a free society needs to pay attention and stay in control of the people's government to keep the power from being misused.

I wonder if it can be done. How do you keep everyone informed at all times about the actions of all the public officials at all levels of government, in real time? The internet? That hacker-infested, troll-plagued repository of convincing disinformation? What else ya got?

I wish I had an answer. A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes tied. That concept has been attributed to a number of famous people, but its origin matters far less than its validity. Especially now, a lie can travel at the speed of light. So can the truth, but a good lie sounds convincing, and a great lie can cast doubt on the truth.

And then there's opinion. An opinion may turn out to be true. It may sound so attractive that its supporters treat it as true, regardless. All this competes for attention in a busy world where increasing numbers of strivers struggle to stay alive and feel like it's worth something. We are asked to make quick decisions about policies with far-reaching consequences. We are represented by elected officials that most of us don't fully trust, because we don't have time to keep track of all the influences  on them.

Broad-brush government haters and conspiracy theorists simplify their lives by condemning the whole thing. It's rotten, they all stink, destroy it all. Maybe they scale it back to certain departments and party affiliations, but a nihilist view of government in general is the foundation of both anarchy and tyranny.

By now I'm sure that someone has already posted the opinion that the tragedy in Las Vegas could have been contained with much lower losses if trained individuals in the crowd, openly and legally carrying their own automatic weapons, had been allowed to identify the target and pin him down with return fire. If we really live in a land where outbreaks of gunplay need to be tolerated, we all need not just weapons, but combat training as well. The best remedy for bad speech is more speech. The best remedy for bad gun use is super-precise, heroically competent, instant retaliation. That would obviate the need for heavily armed police forces and eliminate the lag time between calling 911 and the actual arrival of help.

When you're writing the script, you get to pick who wins. Reality is seldom so courteous.

Police misconduct further complicates any simplistic prescription. Armored vehicles and extensive arsenals present quite a temptation. As we learn from many reports of misbehavior ranging from mildly questionable to outright heinous in both law enforcement and the armed forces, some who serve are gratifying a personal urge to dominate more than a lofty calling to protect. Anarchy or tyranny will serve their purposes equally well.

Anyone with a heart feels wounded when we hear of a murder, mass or otherwise. Naturally, those inclined to care will offer warm words at the very least. Those inclined to celebrate violence will exult. There will be a lot of opinions and statistics back and forth. Thoughts, prayers, and argument will create a jumble of noise that will fade to the usual grumble until the next time.

Your Right to Bear Arms

Gun ownership says, "I need, want and deserve to control the power of instant death." This is true whether your possession is legal or not.

 Because United States citizens are afforded the unusual constitutional protection of their right to control the power of instant death, they are free to arm themselves against whatever need to commit homicide they might anticipate. For instance, some unsanctioned possessor of the power of instant death, or an attacker bent on causing them pain might confront them. Second Amendment fans also like to point out that the federal government might get too big for its boots and need to be shot out of them. What if fascists or commies took over and started rounding up undesirables? Ha! I'd like to see them try while I've got old Betsy in my warm, live hands. We have a moral obligation to go down fighting.

Then there are the undesirables themselves. They could form groups and start disturbing the peace. Armed bands could begin to roam the landscape, falling on the homesteads of staunch normal people to raid and pillage. This could happen. It could. Combine the epidemic of homelessness with desperate ideologies constantly recruiting and it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to radicalize a whole bunch of hobos and issue them assault weapons. Why has no one thought of this before?

And what if Muslims try to impose their Sharia law and displace the Biblical law that good Christians want to place over us?

I don't debate any of the arguments in favor of gun ownership. Constitution says you can have them. Go get some. An apocalypse has to hit sometime. And personal crises won't arrive on a known schedule. If you want to be able to blast an attacker back against the far wall with a rain of hot lead, you have to have the tools in reach.

Let's just be honest. Get tee shirts, bumper stickers, embroidered jackets and other regalia that say, "I need, want, and deserve to control the power of instant death." Make sure that is in the front of everyone's mind when they discuss guns and gun control. That's all that really needs to be in anyone's mind when considering firearms. Sure, you can shoot for sport and for fun, perforating paper and plinking at cans and bottles, but that's not why humans invented guns. Guns are the power of instant death. And that is a fundamental human right.

Another massacre, the usual exchange

Following another mass shooting, the debate follows the familiar pattern. The advocates of gun control ask why this does not -- finally -- spur lawmakers to action to implement regulations that will keep deadly hardware out of the hands of people who will misuse it. The passionate defenders of guns respond with their usual arguments against restricting access to weapons.

The gun lovers are right when they say that restrictive laws will inconvenience law-abiding citizens far more than they will impede bad people who will get their killing hardware outside of officially sanctioned channels. Evil finds a way.

The saddest part -- after the actual slaughter of innocents -- is the passionate devotion gun lovers display toward the tools of killing.

Gun control attempts to solve a behavioral problem by regulating equipment. The guns themselves do serve a function, but the problem lies in the willingness to use them in a certain way. The mental and emotional climate moves steadily toward a more paranoid population. You can't call it a society, and it's certainly not a community. It's just a bunch of people living in forced proximity, getting on each other's nerves.

We are learning to fear each other and to broadcast our opposition to the multitude of viewpoints we know conflict with our own.

I've certainly gotten to the point where  I automatically distance myself from anyone with a coiled-snake sticker on their car. Many of them are nice enough, even treating me with great courtesy when they pass me on my bicycle. But the signal flag is flown by misguided libertarians who want to be free to use their wiles to claw their way up in a culture based on personal advancement to the detriment of everything else.

The coiled snake can appear by itself or in a group of stickers ranging from one or two more to a multicolored collage of xenophobia. The accompanying stickers can say things like "Shoot protesters," "Imagine No Liberals," and worse exhortations to take positive action to rid the world of viewpoints the owner of the vehicle feels should be eradicated.

The libertarian Utopia is a wild land dotted with the personal forts of sovereign citizens. That might be better for the environment. As humanity devolves through isolation and the collapse of collective culture, our life spans will shorten and our population will drop. Eventually, we will settle into equilibrium with our environment.

On the other hand, if this pure application of philosophy gets diluted by personal weaknesses and alliances, you just end up with a species choking on the pollutants released by its job creators and feeding each other hot lead. We're pretty close to that now.