So, after I put up a quick post expressing my contempt for David Niewert’s wave of the bloody shirt, I find that the usual cast of clowns from the left netroots – starting with “screw ’em” Kos himself are running with his claims and laying mass murder at the feet of their conservative opponents.
The quality of thinking is definitely juicebox, and the claims would be laughable if they were not so contemptible (note that fellow liberal Tommy Christopher sums up why) and if we did not have an endless new round of New York and Los Angeles Times editorials excoriating gun ownership to look forward to (it would be fun if once – just once – either of those papers’ editorial staffs could point to a firearms restriction they opposed).
But in spite of the contemptible (I keep using that word for a reason…) political thinking of Kos, Willis, Niewert and the rest of the Juicebox thinkers, the reality is that events like this prompt me – as a gun owner and supporter of people’s rights to own guns – to examine my own positions yet again.It’s not because I get letters like this one (from Blythe Withers) with the subject line: “Woo Woo: Gun nuts cream jeans from joy! More dead by guns! Hurray hurray! Dead women, dead children. dead liberals, dead immigrants!” – get help, Blythe!
Because, on the surface, my positions – that most kinds of guns ought to be generally available – have costs, and those costs were just made completely clear by the events of the last month. Crazy, evil people used guns to murder police officers in Oakland and Pittsburgh, to murder helpless innocents in Alabama, North Carolina, California, New York, and Washington states.
So in the face of this – why don’t I support laws to massively restrict people’s rights to buy and own guns? Why do I support changing laws to make it somewhat easier for law-abiding citizens to carry guns?
To be honest, I struggle with that question when I read the news sometimes. And my response is really threefold.
First, and foremost, I believe – as a matter of values – that people need the freedom to do things that have the risk of going horribly wrong. From eating bacon to riding motorcycles to doing home chemistry experiments, as we try and take the risk out of life, we wind up raising people who are less and less capable of responsibly managing risk themselves. And that as we try and restrict people’s freedoms more and more that we build a state that looks more and more like “Brazil” – or contemporary England, where police officers intervene to stop people from being rescued from a fire.
Next – I think that many of the gun regulations we’ve put in place – and that the folks publicly rending their garments above really want to see – are flatly counterproductive. They leave us with places like Washington DC and Chicago, where the worst get all the guns they want and the best are trained to submit. I can’t emphasize this issue enough; the issue is not just that there are bad people ready to do violence to the innocent, but that all of us are largely conditioned to stand by.
If I could change one thing, it would be to turn the dial away from passivity, and to try and get us – our society – to understand that each of us must every day bear some responsibility for our safety and the safety of others around us.
Finally, again as a matter of values – I’m an empiricist on matters of policy. There’s an immense gap between passing laws and changing the world; that’s a gap I think far too few of my friends understand (but we all live it when we drive 80 on a freeway with a speed limit of 55). In spite of my value beliefs above, if someone came to me and presented gun regulation policies that really, truly might prevent mass killing like these, I’d at the very least think hard about them, if not support them. But the gun regulations I see everywhere are really ‘feel-good’ photo-ops for ambitious politicians or policy hucksters looking to raise money and cover their overhead.
The reality is that there are more than enough guns in America today to arm all the crazies and all the criminals. And that as the arbiters of culture push to make gun ownership distasteful to the average American, we’ll wind up with two Americas – one that believes in the utility of violence, and one that’s horrified at the mention of the word “violence” (unless it’s in a really cool movie…).
And nothing is going to change that anytime soon while leaving us as any kind of country that we’d recognize. If we stopped selling guns and ammunition today, there is more than enough sitting on people’s shelves to last the criminals and crazies fifty or a hundred years. So to impact gun crime by impacting the average person’s possession of guns, we’d have to go house to house, mount checkpoints at public places, search cars, and place our Constitutional protections in the shredder. Because after all, citizen, if you don’t have any illegal goods, why would you object to our searching your home?
We are left with the choice between the tragedy of funerals we have today and the tragic farce of placing our face quietly under Orwell’s eternal boot. And the tragedy – the real tragedy of that choice – is that it isn’t a choice; because what we would get at the end of choosing it, I believe, is the worst of both worlds where law abiding citizens place themselves at the mercy of both an intrusive and useless state and of violent criminals the state cannot control.
Why do Kos and Niewert and my letter-writers feel so strongly about this? Because they want clean hands; the morality that matters to them is not the morality that comes from taking responsibility for what goes on in society, but in standing apart from it, holding your hands high and showing everyone that you, personally, are pure.
Sartre had an answer for that…
You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don’t move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my hands are dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is possible to govern innocently?
If you believe in a social morality (as I do), then as an American, I carry a share of the tragedies of the last months – a larger share because I own guns and support the freedom to do so; so do Kos, Willis, and Niewert. They just refuse to admit it.
–
As many people know, I am not a gun supporter or a gun owner, but reading this blog for the last (5?) years has tempered my feelings a bit.
Still, while I agree with the sentiment of “enforcing the laws you have”, it seems to me that the NRA and gun rights groups are so paranoid of gun laws that the refuse to make any concession that will help police track down illegal weapons.
As I’ve said before, mandatory monitoring of guns by serial number to the point of sale would make it much easier for law enforcement to track stolen and illegally sold weapons (the same way that cops can track stolen or illegally moved cars) As I currently understand it, it’s almost impossible to catch stores that illegally sell weapons out of their back door.
While this would not prevent individual attacks, it would help cops identify and charge those with illegal or stolen weapons, especially in gang related cases.
Unfortunately it would also make it much easier for the government to track down and confiscate weapons. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable with that being only 1 SCOTUS vote away from overturning Heller.
Maybe in the coming years if the 2nd is incorporated and we get a better sense of which gun control laws are going to stand constitutional muster it will be more viable.
Do you suppose that if an opposition group made outrageous claims over and over again that they could call into question anything without regard to objective facts or well tested reasoning? Once the great lie is out it is all the easier to insert your own fabrications as truth.
“There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.” – William James
History shows that for gun owners and people who believe in a right to bear arms to prove they are reasonable by making reasonable concessions piecemeal on gun regulations leads to losing the right. On this issue, there is a steep, slippery slope, and if you are not stubbornly “unreasonable” as organizations like the NRA are, your country will be pushed all the way down the slippery slope (link).
Once you lose the right, there is no practical, proven way to recover it. It’s easy to keep the (legal, law-abiding) gun culture suppressed and the constituency for gun liberalization so small that nobody (and especially no politicians) care whether this constituency is treated fairly or not. Harsh enforcement of deliberately burdensome petty regulations, combined with an anti-gun media, ends the discussion.
For this reason, I support the “paranoid” attitude of pro gun rights lobbyists. And I don’t do any rethinking because of a set of ugly headlines.
Congrats, AL–this was one of your more enjoyable posts in recent memory. (You even managed to find a moment when Sartre made sense. 🙂
Alchemist,
We already have mandatory monitoring of firearm sales by serial number; the main difference between firearm sales and something like an automobile is that you don’t have to get a federal background check before being allowed to buy a car!
I’ll line up with Kos and his juicebox. I don’t see anything in that exchange calling for more gun control. What I do see is a tasteless but apt comment on the incitement poisoning the airwaves coming from the right.
Sure, Poplawski is a nut—but some types of nut look for patterns to superimpose order on their mental chaos. The fantasies of paranoids can be remarkably consistent internally; they just come up short in factual content. Poplawski (like Timothy MacVeigh before him) found conservative blowhard sloganeering gave him a pattern in phase with his delusions, and therefore adding to them.
Kos didn’t make up the conservative blowhard attitude towards the new Administration.
That’s Glenn Beck. We may have been using images like that on our blogs, but has Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow ever sent something similar over the air?
Nor is that a one-shot deal. With my own ears, while fixing a neighbor’s computer, I heard Frank Gaffney, a neo-con from the Reagan Administration, tell the audience that Obama’s nod to the King of Saudi Arabia coupled with his use of the word “respect” was “code word” for acceptance of Sharia Law.
And Beck has also had a platform for claims that FEMA was readying concentration camps, and that Obama intends to confiscate guns.
Beck probably doesn’t believe a word of it (nor do Savage-Weiner and Coulter); it’s just an easy way to good ratings and a good living. But for Richard Poplawski, it was enough to send him off the deep end. Yeah, he might have gone there anyway, and in another incarnation he might have been with the Symbionese Liberation Army instead. But in today’s Zeitgeist, he’s a nut who listened too hard to Beck and Limbaugh et al.
1) Yes, I think that anti-gun groups will be using these incidents. They happened, and they happened with guns. But I don’t think that’s what Kos and Dana Houle were talking about. AFAIK, more gun control is very low on Kos’s personal agenda; I’m not sure he supports it at all.
2) You know, I don’t think you can find quotes that are just that loony. Kos’s most infamous “screw ’em” quote was directed at mercenaries whose behavior in Iraq, as a class, was often abhorrent. Beck’s quotes appear to be directed at the elected government of the United States. We said that Bush was going to mess up the economy, and he did, and that he would botch Iraq, which he arguably did. Beck and company are saying things like capitulation to Sharia Law, gun confiscation, and “socialism” may in fact take place under Obama, bogeymen that I assume we agree will not happen. [BTW, do Kos and Willis get major shows on Cable TV? Even assuming you were correct, just for argument’s sake, isn’t it telling that the right-nuts get much louder mikes than the left-“nuts”?]
3) and 4). I do indeed think that gangsta rap has something to do with anti-police violence. I suspect that for gangsta rap, it’s more an expression of pre-existing conditions, and that the rappers’ view of pre-existing conditions has more basis in fact than Beck’s. And I do indeed think that a lot of bogus revolutionary rhetoric in the 1970s resulted in violence. Bill Ayres comes to mind. I’m a little too young to quantify how many leftists abandoned electoral politics for violence, but it was surely more then than now. Calls for “revolution” and “people’s militias” right now come from the right.
Is gun control low on the list of priorities because it’s just not an issue near and dear to their heart? Or is it low on the list because it’s an issue where they don’t get much traction and they’re, if you’ll excuse the expression, more worried about keeping their powder dry?
When a religious conservative group comes out in favor of a minor restriction on abortion (say, not allowing minors to have one without approval), it’s pretty fair to say that the restriction is not in and of itself the conservative group’s goal; the goal is the abolition of abortion, and the policy is good insofar as it is a restriction on abortion (but bad in that it’s not a total ban.) It doesn’t take a genius to divine that relying on the momentary position of the religious group as an accurate representation of its long-term goal on the issue is going to give you a false view.
It’s much the same with anti-gun forces. When the Brady campaign comes out in favor of a particular gun control measure, it’s not because they think that measure is a good balance between gun owners’ rights and the safety of the general public. They favor it because it’s a restriction on guns, and good thereby (but bad in that it’s not a total ban on all guns, which is their organizational goal.)
If you’re not operating in bad faith by assuming that religious organizations that oppose abortion have total bans on abortion as an end goal, don’t assume that a conservative is delusional when he looks at anti-gun organizations and says “they want to take my guns.” They do! Seriously, they do. Whether that’s possible in the current political climate is another matter, to be sure, but it’s not paranoia to worry about such things.
As far as the discussion about the responsibility for “revolutionary rhetoric”, that ship has sailed, long ago. It’s no less immoral for Beck to make a buck talking about black helicopters than it is for a rapper to talk about offing pigs back in Compton (and Beck probably isn’t going to go on about slapping his women.) You can certainly argue that it’s not tasteful. But if P. Diddy isn’t responsible when some kid pulls out a nine and dusts off a cop because his music told him that’s how men should act, why should we be holding a talk-radio host to a higher standard?
And in such a world, how would you judge, say, Karl Marx? Talk about people taking your ideas and running off a cliff with them…
(Apologies to Mr. Diddy if he’s not actually guilty of singing about cop-murder and violence against women. Not the genre of music I enjoy…)
_”What I do see is a tasteless but apt comment on the incitement poisoning the airwaves coming from the right.”_
Do we really need to go to the video daily double of the Bush years to display the craziness of the far (and not so far) left? Or can we take it for granted that the airwaves have been saturated with warnings of genocide and tyranny?
To get back to the post at hand… David introduced a good history of why gun owners are worried about a ‘slippery slope”. And even though I disagree that it could only happen that way, I understand the train of thought. I’ll also give the hat tip to Avatar… many of the most outspoken groups against guns want them eliminated altogether. Trying to find a public tone that treads lightly on this ‘slippery slope’ would be difficult.
So then, what now? Most gun owners I know say “nothing”. But I find that view frustrating. Surely there is a better way to reducing illegal guns without impacting legal gun owners. I just wish the gun-rights groups were the ones spearheading it.
Alch, the federal government saw some success in aggressively prosecuting gun crime with additional penalties (and advertising that they were doing so), to the point where they actually saw repeat felons stating “I don’t want to take a gun when I commit a crime, that’s hard time in the Federal pen”. On the other hand, the federal government has limited legal resources and expanding that kind of program nationwide would only strain them further, not to mention the federalism problems. ‘course, individual states could adopt similar policies.
But that won’t stop “he just snapped” muckers. Generally we’re talking about people who have not committed a crime before. They might not be the most socially well-adjusted people (in point of fact, they aren’t more or less by definition), but there’s no legitimate reason to deny them guns without denying them to everyone, which we can’t do. (And even that wouldn’t work, of course, since a sufficiently-motivated crazy – all of them, that is – could purchase an illegal weapon.)
One thing that we’ve found is that these rampages are almost inevitably concentrated where people are forbidden to carry guns – schools, universities, and businesses with no-guns policies. Where someone tries to go on a rampage in an area where the law-abiding are allowed to carry guns, the carnage is often reduced by a good bit. Something to think on, that.
Alchemist:
I think most lawful gun owners would support tougher sentences for gun crimes.
Lovelle Mixon, who killed four police officers in Oakland, was out on parole for assault with a firearm. He is suspected of having committed another murder before his shooting rampage.
The gun he used was not an “assault rifle”, but it was of course illegal for a felon to possess it. The law (though a good law) was obviously no remedy in his case.
Honestly, I’m generally less concerned about ‘rampages’, which generally cause less than 100 deaths a year then those who traffic in illegal weaponry, or those who use weapons illegally. At some point, you can’t stop random individuals.
Legalize drugs, sentence anyone committing a crime with a firearm to life in prison no possibility. We will still empty most of our prisons, gun crime will decrease markedly, and we can use all the drug war resources for rehab, prevention, and to catch people committing gun crimes.
That’s obviously the sensible solution, hence it will never happen