I’ve been thinking of writing some version of this post since the days immediately after the Newtown shootings. It overlaps with but is distinct from the division between people who are pro-gun or anti-gun or pro-gun control or anti-gun control. Before you even get to these political positions, you start with a more basic difference of identity and experience: gun people and non-gun people.
So let me introduce myself. I’m a non-gun person. And I think I’m speaking for a lot of people.
It’s customary and very understandable that people often introduce themselves in the gun debate by saying, ‘Let me be clear: I’m a gun owner.’
Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me…
Go read the whole thing. This is the kind of conversation I have been wanting this country to have about guns. Marshall recognizes there is a cultural element…a Tribal element…to it, that makes communication among the factions hard. He’s reaching in to examine how that tribalism is making it hard both for him, and for those he lumps into the Gun Culture, to talk to each other. This is good. Before you can fix a problem, you need to understand it. You can’t make policy in a democracy when people can’t talk to each other. Well…you can…but not good policy.
And here I would like to put down my first marker sign: For all the same reasons I cannot speak for Gay People, though I am a gay man myself, I cannot speak for this Gun Culture he speaks of, though I own guns, though I take pleasure in shooting them, though I believe the second amendment confers a right to the people, not just to well regulated militias. I suspect he’s talking about a stereotype. I actually can speak to how that works; there are gay males who outwardly seem to fit perfectly the Hollywood/FRC/NOM flaming swishy limp-wristed lisping girly boy club haunting faggot. But a stereotype like a shade of skin or a religious belief does not tell you anything about the person within, nor does knowing that a person is gay, or Asian, or Muslim, necessarily tell you anything about the person within. People look to stereotypes for justification, not clarity. I don’t have a gay lifestyle simply because I am gay any more than I have a gun culture because I own a gun. I have a life. But try to tell that to someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. And if by gun culture Marshall means he doesn’t want the lunatic right running roughshod over him…hello…I don’t want them running roughshod over me either.
This is good:
More than this, I come from a culture where guns are not so much feared as alien, as I said. I don’t own one. I don’t think many people I know have one. It would scare me to have one in my home for a lot of reasons…
He goes on to say that in the current climate people seem reluctant to say they think guns are scary and they don’t want to be around them. That’s one big part of the problem we have talking to each other about guns. Not the guns are scary part so much though. Guns are dangerous. They have to be. They’re weapons. It is not completely irrational to be afraid of them. Point of fact, I would say it’s irrational to be absolutely unafraid. Some degree of fear that isn’t immobilizing is a good thing if it reminds you to pay attention. I am afraid of my table saw, I’ve witnessed a table saw nearly slice someone’s hand off. Every time I step up to mine to do some work I pause and reflect on what can happen if I am not careful. Will this be the time it happens…? Same thing with my guns. Every time I lay a hand on one of mine I pause and think. This thing could kill someone. And even more so than the table saw…Much more so…the gun is a weapon; it is supposed to be dangerous. The table saw is dangerous, but that is not its purpose. The gun’s purpose Is to be dangerous.
There is a completely logical connection between Gun and Dangerous. They are weapons. It is not naive to be afraid of guns. People should not be reluctant to say so in this conversation. It isn’t naive and it isn’t simplistic. It’s a completely normal reflex to have about weapons. If anything it is naive to expect people’s fears not to be a part of this conversation. Where fear mucks it up is when it gets in the way of knowledge and understanding. This is the sort of thing that really irritates the hell out of me, and I suppose most people who have experience with firearms:
But remember, handguns especially are designed to kill people. You may want to use it to threaten or deter. You may use it to kill people who should be killed (i.e., in self-defense). But handguns are designed to kill people. They’re not designed to hunt. You may use it to shoot at the range. But they’re designed to kill people quickly and efficiently.
Charitably, this is the sort of rhetoric that comes from “…a culture where guns are not so much feared as alien.” Uncharitably it is manipulative rhetoric, and the sort of thing that quickly destroys trust that the conversation is being held in good faith. Handguns are not designed to kill people. A soldier’s rifle is designed to kill people. By nature and design a handgun is a defensive weapon. It has not the range, the accuracy or firepower of a long gun. It’s useful as a defensive weapon for the person holding it and that’s about it. The only instance where a handgun can function as an aggressive weapon is where an attacker knows their victims are unarmed and unsuspecting. But if the complaint about handguns is they’re more easily concealed, which makes it easier for an assailant to get close enough to be dangerous, I have a photograph I took back in the 1970s, a couple days after a period of unrest in Washington D.C., of a group of youths, one of whom was carrying a sawed off shotgun under a very lightweight jacket. He was holding onto it through a hole in one pocket. You would never have known he had it on him until he swung it up in your face. All it takes to make a long gun easily concealable is a hacksaw, and then you have a weapon of much greater force than any handgun. I own a 30-30 lever action rifle, the bullets it throws bear more force than the ones coming out of Dirty Harry’s 44 magnum, and it is an old cartridge design…the first meant for smokeless powder. Long arms are aggressive weapons. Handguns are defensive weapons. That is their nature.
And here’s where tribalism and the stereotype of the Gun Nut and Gun Culture get in the way of communication. Just my saying these things makes me a gun nut in some people’s regard and their eyes glaze over. I know too much about guns to be a normal person. I must be an NRA goon. But no…I simply enjoy shooting. I enjoy it enough that I have become familiar with guns. I appreciate that some folks simply don’t want anything to do with guns, but a big part of the problem of having this conversation is people talking past each other and loosing trust. You may not like guns, but when you say a handgun’s only purpose is killing people, those of us with experience with guns hear that as a backdoor argument for banning all guns.
We “gun people” should recognize that “non-gun people” have completely rational reasonable fears and issues with guns in the public spaces, and we should have those same issues actually. Guns are dangerous. “Non-gun people” need to get past their Gun Nut stereotypes. I will admit that given the efforts of the NRA and Ted Nugent, that is very very difficult. But we are not all of us unreachable on this issue.
I don’t hunt…did it long ago to get it out of my system, to see and understand those ancient passions within me, so they would never take me by surprise. So…been there, done that. I don’t shoot because I want to kill anything. But I went to the range with my brother last month while I was visiting, and enjoyed myself thoroughly all the same. It isn’t always about blood lust. In fact, for a lot of us I would imagine, it’s about that eminently human joy in wielding fire. I enjoy firecrackers and lightning storms and watching Myth Busters blow things up too. I don’t go out to the range with those human silhouette targets you often see…I hate silhouette targets. I am not about killing things. I am precision hurling little slugs of lead at unreasonable velocities with the fire in my hands. The targets my brother and I practiced on that day were round metallic bulls-eyes of various diameters, placed at various distances. You could hear it when you hit them, and there were several sets with very small round metal dots you had to hit to flip up, and when you got them all flipped up there was one square one at the end you hit to drop them all back down again. I was pleased to find that even with guns that were not my own but my brother’s, I was pretty good at hitting things squarely.
I think it’s fun. Your mileage may vary and that’s fine. But yes, there is another aspect to all this gun play that is serious and needs to be talked about among us Americans, and that is that guns are weapons, they are dangerous, and while I recognize an obligation to my neighbor’s safety and to the common welfare, I also believe I have a right to defend myself from violent attack, and that means I must also have the right to possess the tools to do that. I don’t ever want to be put into that position, Atrios’ comment that all gun owners have vigilante dreams is ignorant. When I think about what I might have to do with one of my guns I think about how to prevent it from getting that far. I have a household alarm system, we have a neighborhood watch, and this kid who was bullied all through junior high stays alert when he’s out and about because keeping my eyes open for trouble was drilled into me long, long ago. But there it is…that irreducible bottom line. I have a life, I’d like to hold onto it a while longer thank you. I have a right to bear a weapon in self defense. But I completely agree that right is not unconditional. There is always that little matter of the common welfare. Public spaces, convey public obligations.
Arguments about the meaning of the second amendment are not trivial, but there is a point being missed when cardboard revolutionaries yap about private ownership of guns balancing the power of the state against the individual. No. The ballot box is our protection, our check against the power of the state. Those who advocate the gun over the ballot box betray the American Dream. That is the old way of kings and armies and strongmen, not the way of democracy. But there is another argument to be made here. If I am not allowed the means to defend myself, if I must instead rely on the state, utterly, to defend me, then I am not so much a citizen, as a subject. I don’t think you can get many people to buy into that notion, hence the effort to convince people that owning a gun makes them less safe. Yes, yes…and owning an automobile makes you less safe too if you don’t bother learning to drive.
If you want to argue that police are trained in the use of firearms why shouldn’t anyone who wants to own a gun also have to go through training…I would agree with you. If you want to argue that you need a license to drive a car, why not also license gun owners…I would agree to a point. When you take your car onto the public roads, the public has every reasonable right to require you to demonstrate you know how to drive safely before you’re allowed on the highways so that you are not a danger to others. Public spaces convey public obligations. No man is an island on I-95. The same can be said for bearing a gun in the public space. First prove you know how to handle a gun safely. First prove you understand the relevant laws. I could be convinced that training on gun safety, and demonstrating an understanding of it before a purchase is allowed is reasonable. I think licensing carrying a gun in public the same way we license automobile drivers is completely reasonable. I agree there are public spaces where guns simply should not be allowed, period. Like…oh…courthouses…hospitals…Schools. I get that urban crime argues for carry permits, but I also get (and I think my fellow gun-people need to get) that densely populated zones aren’t swell places for firefights to break out. It does not greatly bother me that I can’t carry a gun on the streets of New York City. What I don’t find reasonable is the position that since guns are dangerous nobody should be allowed to have them. And what I don’t get is why this became a left verses right argument. The welfare of the common man and woman is not greatly improved by rendering them defenseless.
If Marshall wants to draw a distinction here, I would suggest a more useful one than between non-gun people and gun people, is that between democrats and oligarchs, between those of us who believe in that liberty and justice for all thing and those who think the world would be a fine place if the everyone knew their place. Yes, yes…free people own guns…but not because they own guns but because they are free. And free people cast ballots too. Ask some of the people busy waving their guns around since Sandy Hook if they believe in the right to vote. Then ask them what they think of all the voter suppression that went on in the last election. There’s your problem. I saw it driving through Texas last month, on the way to California, in literally dozens and dozens of billboards advertising military style and SWAT firearms. This business about “assault weapons” is mostly misdirected, but contains an element of common sense: the difference between a six or seven round clip and a hundred round clip is the difference between a weapon of self defense and an weapon of aggression. In my opinion you can draw a line between them, on the basis that self defense is a right and aggression isn’t. But there are those who do not accept that aggression is not a right. Not all of those are criminals in the usual sense.
There’s the problem. This argument isn’t about guns. The violence racking our country isn’t about guns. It’s about “Who is my neighbor?” It’s about the culture war. It’s about tribe. Guns Don’t Matter. Some nights I fear we are working ourselves up to another civil war. What matters is that Americans can’t look into each other’s faces, and see a neighbor whose life is precious too. Guns Don’t Matter.
Fred Clark, one of the most completely decent people you will ever read online, posts a link to this column by Garry Wills that makes me want to throw up my hands and give up on any chance of reasoned discussion concerning guns, let alone violence, in the land of my birth and my heart…
Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture…
You just know where this is going…
The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
…and with that I just want to say I’m Done! Done will the lot of you. Hurl yourselves at each other with your lizard brains rattling at full throttle, I just don’t fucking care anymore. There will be no rational discussion of guns Or violence in this country in my lifetime obviously. Or as Wills says without any apparent irony…
The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:
1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process.
Sure did a number on yours didn’t it Gary. You could wish those first and second commandments were a tad more exact. There are no other Gods…Period! Idolatry is a lie.
Also…I really meant what I said in number nine! But…no. We always have to take this argument into culture war territory. Always.
Here’s the thing about idolatry…when you worship an idol you are surrendering what makes you human to a piece of stone. But point your finger at the idol worshiper if you like, attacking that piece of stone as if it were a god-object is the same thing as worshiping it. By tearing it down you are acknowledging it has power.
No. The power is within. The power is always within. Actually Gary, guns Are mere tools, bits of technology, and a political issue we really need to discuss. But that political issue exists in a context of a culture that is astonishingly violent and discussing the one without the other is as pointless an exercise in generating hot air as I can imagine. If you could reach around that rattling lizard brain getting all offended at the other tribe’s god to the part that’s capable of reason and empathy you could see that. But idolatry has made you weak. You think that if you can just smash the idol it’s power will be gone, but unfortunately Gary it is not Moloch you are dealing with but human beings, and the fault dear Brutus is not in our guns, but in ourselves. Guns. Don’t. Matter.
I posted a wee rant on Facebook the other day, about Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and his one last swing at gay people before leaving congress. I wanted people having this argument about “the gun lobby” to please notice something. Yes, they are part of the problem, but not because they defend the right of citizens to own guns. So long as people keep thinking of them as a gun lobby they are missing it. This man, Todd Akin has their lifetime ‘A’ rating and the NRA supported him in the 2012 elections Even After he began yap, yap yapping about “legitimate rape”. So women can own guns, but not their own bodies? No…just, no. That simply isn’t how people who are genuinely concerned about freedom, individual rights, and “big brother government” think. They are not that.
Can we please stop the idol worship and look at this…really look at it. They are not a gun lobby, they are a right wing political action committee that pushes people’s buttons about government taking their guns away to get right wing extremists elected. Guns are to them, as the bible is to the Family Research Council. They are tools the right uses to drive people to the polls and vote against their own interests. So is abortion. So is The Homosexual Menace. So is the Angry Black Man. So is The Illegal Immigrant. That is how idolatry works. That is what it does to otherwise rational human beings.
Why are we such a violent society? Well…the right certainly has its opinion about that:
National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting”…
Actually, if our culture wasn’t so out of balance when it comes to male verses female leadership it would probably be a whole lot less violent. Which is almost certainly why the hard right (religious and secular) is so relentlessly against female leadership. There’s the problem. Or at least a big part of it. Men must either dominate women or be emasculated by them. What does this right wing trope accomplish other than making males more aggressive? Yes, we can and should talk about sensible restrictions on firearms and firearm ownership. But can we talk about this too? Because if we can’t nothing, Nothing we attempt to do regarding gun control will do any damn good whatsoever. Nothing. And it’ll just be wash-rinse-repeat every time another horrific crime of violence happens.
So long as we are busy fighting a culture war of the right wing’s making, that only the right wing benefits from, discussions about the roots of violence just aren’t going to happen. It’s a win-win, not for the culture of guns but the culture of hate. Please…just stop. And…Think!
A lot of the people you see (I’ve seen and talked to myself) at gun shows are or were once blue collar union workers, who have been systematically cleaved from the democratic party over this one issue by the NRA. A lot of them, not all of them certainly, but perhaps a critical mass of them, could be won back if democrats would bother talking to them, and not screaming at them that they’re responsible for the deaths of 20 children, let alone that they are Moloch Worshipers. Those people have children too and they love them very much.
Also…I really meant what I said in number nine! The first person dragged down into the gutter when you lie about your neighbor, is you.
It is very difficult to get someone committed against their will, unless they have committed violent acts. After all, I’m still at large. In states with big public sectors, aid for the mentally ill — assuming they accept assistance — can be very spotty. There are agencies with phone numbers, but try calling and getting some service. (I have.) In Arizona, forget it.
The icing on the cake is that in some places almost everyone has access to firearms. Efforts to deal with guns or magazines or bullets are doomed, like Prohibition or ‘The War on Drugs.’ There are just too many around, and too many people who want them. Better coverage of mental illness would be worthwhile, but it wouldn’t stop homicidal people from reflecting back the hostilities of extremists with prominent platforms. We know who the extremists are.
P.S. I would concede that some kind of gun control would make it more difficult for incompetent, crazy people like Nutboy to get guns. As crime control, however, forget it.
P.P.S. An attack of this intensity on a Congress person is an exceedingly rare event, so in that sense it’s futile to diddle with ‘how could this have been prevented.’
Glenn Greenwald Tweets somewhat sarcastically, “Remember the 1960s, when 1000s of people were involuntarily locked up in insane asylums and there were no assassinations? http://is.gd/kAbza”
I remember part of the impetus for getting people out of the asylums was far too many were committed who didn’t really need hospitalization, and the ones who did weren’t getting it as long as they were being held safely out of public view. In far too many cases they were more dumping grounds then hospitals.
It’s tempting to engage in a little sarcasm myself when I hear my fellow liberals start yapping about gun control now. Hey fellas…I’ve got a Swell idea on how to lower the temperature of the rhetoric in this country…let’s start making noises about gun control…!
Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) health care-era “you lie” interruption of President Obama is now reportedly being commemorated with a place on a new, limited edition line of assault rifle components.
The Columbia Free Timesreports that the words are being engraved on a series of lower receivers manufactured for popular AR-15 assault rifles. Lower receivers are one of the primary pieces of the firearms.
“Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new ‘You Lie’ AR-15 lower receiver,” the weapon manufacturer’s site writes on the product description. “Only 999 of these will be produced, get yours before they are gone!”
I believe the 2nd amendment guarantees the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms. I believe that freedom is part and parcel of democracy itself. And I despair. Never mind the lunatics who are selling the above back handed incitement to kill a president (I sincerely hope the Secret Service is watching where those rifles are going!). Never mind the NRA’s grotesquely dogmatic stances on gun regulation and crime. The biggest reason we can’t have a rational discussion about gun control in this country is the gun control crowd was very successful back in the 70s in convincing people that their ultimate aim was to eliminate private gun ownership in this country. People quite correctly concluded that even the smallest most perfectly rational regulations on gun sales and ownership was just a first step toward total confiscation. That wasn’t paranoia…it was often stated quite openly by gun control groups.
That seems to have changed on the democratic side of the isle. Good. But it isn’t enough to get us to where we need to be regarding guns. There’s a lot of things I think we could do, including bans on high capacity clips for instance. But the first step has to be acknowledging Americans, if they are peaceful and law abiding, do in fact have a basic right to own their own guns, which is to say, the means to defend themselves.
How denying that somehow became a staple of democratic politics completely baffles me sometimes. I understand and share the liberal democratic impulse to hate war, revere life, nurture love and defend liberty, to work for justice and toward the peaceful society where we are all equals in the eyes of the law. I am completely disgusted by the the republican lock them up and throw away the key approach to crime. That we incarcerate a higher percentage of our own citizens then any other industrialized nation should be a matter of shame to all of us. But if democrats represent the interests of the common everyday working people as opposed to the rich and powerful, then they really need to remind themselves from time to time that the lot of the common people is not greatly improved by rendering them defenseless.
I am not going to stand here and argue that had someone in Gifford’s crowd been armed some or all of the killings may not have happened. I’m certainly not going to argue that a state that can’t at least Try to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people isn’t asking for trouble. The argument I often hear that an armed society is a peaceful one seems grotesque on its face. You need your gun when the peace has broken down, not when its alive and well. So the first thing is to nurture the peace.
I was bullied horribly during part of my grade school years, the middle school ones, and it left me with a perfect understanding of how it is that your personal safety and security is ultimately on you and you alone. You need to prepare yourself for the worst. But having a fire alarm in your house is a pathetic excuse for playing with matches and gasoline. What…I had a smoke detector…why is my house on fire…?? The bromide is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But turn that around. Guns don’t make a peaceful society either. People do. And one way you Don’t make a peaceful society is this:
Or this…
Or this…
And this…
And this…
That last is from an ad that was televised in West Virginia as part of the campaign to enact an anti-same-sex marriage amendment in that state. It’s a family in the crosshairs of an unseen homosexual sniper. More specifically, the unseen homosexual sniper is targeting their children. This is what gets people killed. This is what makes a society violent. This is creating the climate of hate that can set off a mentally unstable individual. But also the perfectly, murderously sane gay basher. Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been on the receiving end of this hate incited violence now for decades. What’s changed is now the right is doing it more broadly, and more openly, and with even less compunction. What we’ve been seeing in this country in recent years, your gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing for decades. A climate of hate, meticulously, relentlessly cultivated for political and social ends.
There’s your problem. Not guns. Hate. Last Saturday it was a crazy man. Tomorrow it might be the chillingly sane. Timothy McVeigh. Eric Rudolph. Scott Roeder. One political party has been ginning up hate as a way to win elections for decades now. The problem is when the inevitable violence results the other party responds by calling for more gun control, as if that’s even possible in a nation that hates itself as much as this one is starting to.
I understand that first amendment freedoms are sacred to a democracy. If we can’t talk to each other we can’t govern ourselves. Speech, even ugly disagreeable speech, is a right government cannot be allowed to trample on without opening the door to tyranny. Our ability to speak truth to power depends on that freedom. My hope is the killings in Arizona can finally, finally, enable us to also speak truth to hate without fear that we could sabotage freedom of speech in the process. If we don’t confront hate we will loose that too. Hate will silence the democratic dialogue if we let it, and then we Will loose our precious democracy.
All the gun control in the world won’t matter if we hate each other enough. And if we love and care about each other as neighbors, as fellow Americans, regardless of race, creed or religion, then guns cannot do us any great harm. Just there in the background, like the fireman’s hose if you need it, but the point is not to. How much crime could be eliminated if we actually cared about each other as fellow Americans enough to make our schools strong, and the economy work for everyone? How many gun accidents could be avoided if we cared about each other enough that we held our neighbor’s safety, and their children’s, as if it were our own? Yes actually, guns do kill people. When people hate each other enough. If you’re worrying about the availability of guns in this country you are worrying about the wrong thing.
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