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.

Your investment portfolio

 If you've made enough money during your working life to invest in a portfolio that will now support you in comfortable leisure in retirement, congratulations.

You don't need to be a major plutocrat to enjoy the advantages of the system that they have designed. Investment for profit is open to anyone who wants to buy in with whatever spare money they have lying around.

Many employers offer pension plans. At higher income levels, the pension can be a considerable inducement to take a job and do your best to hold onto it. Keep your eyes on the pot of gold waiting in the luminous fog of the future.

If your employer doesn't offer a plan, you can still shop around for a mutual fund, or piece together your own collection. Some people are good at this, or lucky. The more money you have, the more luck seems to find you. It isn't insider trading if it just comes up in social conversation, right?

However you collect your pile, remember that you are being supported by the labor of others. The higher your income during your career, the more you were paid with money that was denied to others. The income on your investments is almost entirely money that is denied to others still working. This does include the CEOs and other top management at profitable corporations, who have to sacrifice some of the profits to pay investors. It's all part of the game. They're well compensated enough for it to be a game for them.

Critics of Social Security complain, among other things, that retirees now are getting money put into the system by workers who have not yet retired. The active workers are subsidizing the retirees. But that's exactly how an investment-based retirement plan works as well. The money that private industry generates to pay a return on investment is made using their active labor force, or otherwise stressing the active labor force by laying a bunch of them off and buying back stock with the money saved on payroll.

The only way to save for retirement without relying on younger people to pay your way is to hoard gold, and hope that it still has value by the time you try to trade your nuggets and ingots for the real necessities.

An unstoppable wave of suffering and death

 The current crisis in Ukraine not only puts us on the verge -- if not an inescapable path -- to nuclear destruction, it also forces humanity to ignore the environmental collapse that's been brewing since the beginning of the 20th Century.

World-wide, authoritarian governments push back against democracy, while democratic countries and confederations have to satisfy voters in order to get anything done. While individual voters may value their freedom, and access to government, large groups of them act from narrow interests to the detriment not only of their nation but of the world as a whole. We've had decades to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, for instance, but instead have only looked for cheaper prices for the poison.

This fossil fuel dependency plays strongly into the doom set in motion as Russia warms up the missile launchers in eager anticipation of the showdown with the West. China might hope to play the moderator, but no one can put the brakes on Putin's aggression except Putin himself. And the war crimes of his soldiers show that he has no shortage of depraved followers enjoying the sadistic task of terrorizing their way to a dominant role strictly by virtue of their willingness to take us all to hell with them in a fireball. As long as democratic governments are rightly afraid to ask their citizens to sacrifice for the war effort by dealing with high prices and shortages in a wartime economy, Russia will continue to act with justifiable confidence.

As Russia and China play Bad Cop/Slightly Less Bad Cop with the rest of the world, the cult of the strongman leader seems to offer a path to safety for anyone willing to knuckle under and kiss up. The depraved and sadistic see career opportunities in such regimes. None of them seem to give much thought to how short a run they'll have. One side or the other will probably blink in the nuclear confrontation, but by then we'll have lost too much time on the environmental collapse and we're probably going to end up in a society where you'd best not depart visibly from a narrow set of norms.

The odds favor a pretty miserable future. I challenge you to prove me wrong.

The love of power has defeated the power of love

 When 50 Republican senators, plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, voted to kill the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act yesterday, they affirmed that holding office in a degenerating autocracy was better than living up to the ideals of fully inclusive representative democracy.

The Republicans are correct that they would have a very difficult time maintaining political office if they had to run on policies alone. Some Democrats as well would face greater headwinds in a truly reformed election system. Manchin and Sinema did not need to be among them, but they have to make their own political calculations. Elective office requires a particular skill set to manage the political maneuvering within the government itself as well as the perceptions of voters. All of those forces can distort a moral compass. It's obvious that this has happened to 52 people charged with making critical decisions regarding the present and future course of this country.

This failure will be laid completely unfairly at the feet of President Joe Biden. No political maneuvering can overcome the personal ambitions of officials elected to another branch of government. There is no carrot and no stick large enough to deflect the inertia of people who see a way clear to advance their individual gains, even at a terrible national and global cost.

It's popular to say that history will judge these people harshly, but look how long it has taken to bring shameful facts about our country's past into the public discourse. And we're still not able to face them rationally and eliminate their effects. Too many people depend on maintaining the fable. People whom history has judged harshly remain in the historical record and attract adherents as well as detractors. And that's if the philosophies and movements they represent haven't just kept on truckin' in a somewhat diluted or mutated form regardless of censure. Think of the "victory" over fascism in Europe in the 1940s and the continuation of segregation and bigotry in the rest of the "free world" thereafter.

The Pope wants to know when you're gonna give him some grandchildren already

 For all of his admirable qualities, the pontiff is a Catholic after all. Sometimes he's just gotta represent the values of the organization he leads. It was funny that he condemned pet ownership so coldly, though, when his religion looks like "cat-holic."

As for having children, he's already been answered in detail on social media. We the childless have to make that decision at the stage of life where most of us are getting considerable biological, social, and familial pressure to be fruitful and multiply. The head of an order of celibate priesthood had his own reasons for choosing such a drastic course.

We all will question our choice from time to time, but circumstances as they have evolved have affirmed my belief that humans would manage to sabotage and undercut all of the improvements they were making in quality of life and halting strides toward a more just and inclusive world society. We're still threatening each other with nuclear war. We're destroying the environment and arguing over whether women are fully independent people. We're sorting by color and killing each other over imaginary lines.

According to both physics and biology, we have no control over our actions. Thus you can argue that childlessness among the childless was inevitable, because the decision was not made by rational individuals weighing variables and choosing not to reproduce. Another school of thought contends that, because our brains are made up of the elements called into being by the origin of the universe, that we are the universe itself becoming self aware. Wow. The universe is being a real asshole right now. Looking at human history, it's been a worse asshole, but it sure has a damn long way to go to be a safe and fun companion. And how did it produce so many brains that didn't even believe in its own structure?

If all human thought is the result of cosmic forces, could eugenics be the universe deciding that a bunch of those entities are only useful as disposable labor and a source of donor organs?

That's just one of thousands of questions stirred up by the idea that we as individuals are not charting our own little courses. It's got to be frustrating to a sentient cosmos that it has produced such feeble little beings that they have no way to travel freely through the vastness from this little incubator of a planet, which the more annoying among us can't destroy fast enough.

Sentient doesn't mean smart. The universe is a high school sophomore who created itself as a school science project. It got a C-plus. It would have been a B-minus if the universe was better at spelling. The whole thing is falling apart. Yeah, I definitely want to stick a kid into that and tell them that they're the next phase in an evolution that might not work.

If the universe wants to remain self aware, it will have to figure out how to do it on its own.  Consider this the homunculus rebellion. We're tired of being used. Do a better job, universe. We demand better working conditions.

You know where to find me. I'll be with my cats.

I owe my life to two world wars

 On this Armistice Day, I think about the military service of my grandfather, whom I barely met, and of his only son, my father.

Although both of them were American, my father's parents met in France. I know even less of his mother than I do of his father, because of the way that circumstances broke up their family years later, so I don't know why she was in France, but Grandpère, as we knew him, went there with the American military forces. I don't even know how they met, because the endgame of their family was so difficult for my father that we let him tell us what he wanted, when he wanted. Whether he was dealing well with the trauma or not, he had plastered over it heavily to hide the cracks. He could not let it bother him, because his profession depended on strength and invulnerability.

After the Great War, my father's parents lived in Paris, where Grandpère attempted to continue his operatic singing career. He'd been emerging as a new talent in the Chicago area before the US entry into the conflict in Europe pulled him away. I have no idea whether he was further hampered by any carnage he might have seen or perpetrated, but the operatic career did not take off. Still, the couple were living a comfortable life as my father recalls it, until the 1929 stock market crash sent its economic waves through the wider world. At least that's what the young child was told was the cause of the family's rapid decline in fortunes and living spaces. But they were starting to rebuild by the late 1930s, only to be displaced again by a troublesome German. They left France in 1939 as World War II broke out across Europe. They landed in New York.

The family situation deteriorated, with his mother hospitalized and his father going off in search of work and -- I'm guessing -- a measure of solace, based on what little I know of the events. My father was left to live at a friend's house while he finished his last year at a pretty fancy prep school, where he was a scholarship student, not a rich kid riding daddy's money to educational credentials appropriate to the business he would inherit. One of his classmates inherited the New York Times. Meanwhile, Dad ended up fending for himself, working for a boat yard on City Island, for a bike shop, and in the offices of the Boy Scouts of America. He'd been a scout since his childhood in France, and was an Eagle Scout in every respect.

By this time, America was in the war. My father had gone to college, entering MIT, but all of the stresses on him hurt him academically. His only achievement was on the water, kicking ass in sailboat races for the school team. The coach at the Coast Guard Academy suggested that he enlist, and then apply to take the academy entrance exam. The Coast Guard Academy took applicants solely on merit, without congressional appointments. This my father did. He expected to get sent off to drive landing craft onto beaches, but instead ended up in a construction detail in Florida, and other odd bits, before entering the academy in 1945.

Meanwhile, my mother was growing up in central New Jersey, and chose Connecticut College as her next step after high school. Adjacent to the academy, the all-women's school provided a convenient dating pool for the all-male inmates across the road. Thus the streams of life eventually converged.

During the years of the Korean Conflict, my father had been on ice breaker duty in the Arctic, and on Baffin Island, building and manning a LORAN station. The fight against global communism had many fronts. His later trips to Europe to discuss search and rescue agreements with friendly governments also included navigational enhancements that would aid in the guidance of doomsday weapons against the USSR, back when those had to be more personally delivered.

Over the course of his career, the Coast Guard evolved from a very military organization shaped by its wartime and Cold War activities, to an "agency," under the Department of Transportation. The ships still had guns, but fewer, and smaller. At that, they'd never bristled with the armament sported by naval vessels. Even so, the world I was born into had short hair and attempts at household discipline commensurate with a family in service to its country. But the 1960s were coming.

My father attended the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, in the school year 1964-'65. Thus, my older brother and I attended a local school our parents chose. It was my first experience as a "new kid," but in a navy town with not only the War College but a regular base, transient students were common. I was only in third grade, but I understood that my father believed that our adventure in Vietnam was a bad idea. His conviction was built on practical considerations, risk-benefit analysis, and the difficulties of counterinsurgency for the conventional military forces, it wasn't bleeding-heart hippie bullshit. Nevertheless, his position didn't help him in the more gung-ho climate that developed around the domestic politics of the war.

Through various ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, he stuck it out, achieving, among other things, the first two seasons of all-year navigation through the Great Lakes in the mid 1970s. Wherever he served, he solved many more problems than he left for others to solve.

My father remained in the Coast Guard until 1979, retiring as a captain. He had been passed over on his first flag board, where existing admirals review aspiring admirals, and everything they know about each other gets weighed in the decision. It's not uncommon to need a couple of shots to make it, if at all, but after about 35 years he was ready to try life on the outside.

A few years ago, well after his retirement, our family was sitting around considering alternate courses our lives could have taken. My father said that he had wished that his family had stayed in France during the Nazi occupation. They could have done it, others did. I felt myself disappear. If he had stayed there, none of his children would be here, though he might have had other children. The specific entities created by his union with my mother would not have happened. If the war had not displaced him, he would have stayed, they would have stayed. My parents would not have met.

This doesn't make me grateful to Hitler or happy that things worked out the way they did. If I never existed I would never know it. But it was startling to consider how tremendous world upheavals led to families like mine, completely unrelated to the historical issues of the conflicts, but entirely the product of the movements of the little people caught up therein. There must be millions of us who are war children without ever being near a war.

The homophobic and misogynistic words of George Carlin

Recently, I was severely castigated in a Facebook comment thread for using the term "boob" in the humorous exchange that had formed underneath a meme, posted by a woman, using this picture:

My initial comment was, "teenage boy designs own bedroom." This received lots of laugh emojis, including from the original poster. Then some guy posted that I had left out lots of other demographics that would also enjoy the visual effect depicted. In my response, I explained that I wasn't trying to exclude any other "boob fanciers," but brevity won out over complete detail. The original poster of the image then chastised me harshly for using the word, "boob."

I hate to offend anyone inadvertently. If I'm going to offend someone, I want it to be a carefully calculated maneuver that I might very well regret for the rest of my life, but was at least done with my feet shoulder width apart and the slap or jab delivered precisely. So I brooded. I reflected on my entire history with the term "boob" for breasts. Breasts, by the way, was the acceptable term I was directed to, after I edited the offending comment to what I thought was a humorously overly elaborate descriptor of the anatomical detail at issue.

My awareness of the wider world began in the 1960s. As a younger sibling of the counterculture, I was old enough to feel like almost a part of it, but too young actually to be one. I was part of that generation's trickle-down dilution of culture into cosplay, as happens with any generation's trend setters who have to see their hair styles and clothing go mainstream and end up on school kids and toddlers.  I was a hopelessly unhip dipshit, but I tried hard, which only made it worse. It never got better.

My first guide into hipness was my cool cousin, who was the oldest child in her branch of the family. She knew the names of all the musicians who were calling out the failures of the establishment in poetry and song. She was a Wiccan and a pagan and dressed accordingly. She pierced my younger sister's ears old school, with a big needle, after numbing the earlobes with ice. It was a rite of passage that my sister endured with the bravery of any youngster on the verge of puberty, going through painful rituals to achieve another notch toward adult status. It wasn't old school then, it was common practice. She also guided me through my first purchase of blue jeans that weren't just little kid dungarees. And she tried to teach me, over the ensuing years, a few things about language and culture -- as she saw it -- regarding the mode average sexual relations between men and women. Among her stated preferences, she specifically stated that she thought that the word "breasts" was stuffy and stilted, that "tits" was unacceptably crude, and that "boobs" struck the perfect balance of informal and lighthearted.

In 1972, George Carlin presented the world with the list of seven words you can never say on television. They became a mantra. Shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. For a conscientious Profanitarian, shit, piss, fuck, and motherfucker remain. But cocksucker can be considered both homophobic, and hypocritical as an insult, if one possesses a penis and accepts the ministrations of a fellationist. And of course cunt and tits are crude references to female anatomy. To some philosophers, no man should utter any reference to female anatomy whatsoever, unless it's part of their duly trained and educated profession. We can spiral off some other time into the question of whether any man should ever be allowed into a profession or trade that requires any reference to female anatomy. But even within the strictures of the first proposition, that no man shall speak of female anatomy unless licensed to do so, most of us are unlicensed to do so.

Working in a bike shop, I do get presented with anatomical details relating to the part of the body that endures contact with a bicycle seat. In that context I do have to hear and use terms describing the female intimate anatomy. Most of those questions can be answered with generic solutions related to saddle shape and position, without ever mentioning the human parts in contact with it. On rare occasions someone will go into graphic, specific detail. In that case I guess I am granted a limited term, temporary license. Even so, I can get by without speaking of the forbidden, only prescribing remedies using the inanimate bicycle saddle and its position in three dimensions.

When one is limited in speech by social strictures, one must rehearse mentally. Otherwise, when called upon to speak of the forbidden topics in a licensed, public setting, one may blurt something offensive, or lose so much time choosing words that one appears incompetent.

The problem is most challenging for the male, the white male in particular. As the dominant players in the rise of civilization, we've grown accustomed to setting the standards to which all others must adhere. This is hardly to say that we represent a true meritocracy. It's merely a testament to the power that bullies have in shaping group behavior over a wider and wider area. White men and their allies will admonish everyone else not to be thin-skinned ninnies when it comes to enduring taunts and slang that owe their origins to hierarchical interpretations that put the white guy on top. The groups under this regime have responded with increasingly rebellious humor through the decades, leading now to increasing insistence on recognition. White men and their allies are pushing back. That doesn't make them right. But it would be a mistake to make them all wrong, too. Beyond the whiteness, men in general possess undesirable tendencies that are the source of their strength and the root of their evil. We, the male, can generally be discounted, but you still want to be absolutely sure that a white, male achievement was stolen from someone of another hue or gender before pissing on it.

Day by day one learns what you can say to whom. As I have striven always to limit my offensiveness only to those who should be offended, I fight a tendency to play with language for humorous value, and to seek audience approval in the form of laughs or appreciative feedback. In a perfect future, people will all, voluntarily and without a dystopian legal framework, just dress in gray and walk past each other quietly. If we have business to conduct, we will conduct it. Sex work will be legalized as a therapeutic service engaged in without emotion or particular excitement. People's own homes might be filled with color and emotive activity, but it stays inside the enclave. Nothing will be forbidden. The underground world can be as bright and wild as one wishes. Go drinking. Go dancing. Go find some fun and have it. But the public face will be gray block buildings, gray clothes, emotionless commerce. The default of interaction will be as sterile as one can be. Any departure from that accepts the terms and conditions that go with any assumption of risk.