This first ran on Splice Today.
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If you want a glimpse into the sorry state of America’s gun policy debate, look at Brian Doherty’s smugly incoherent pronouncements over at Reason.
Doherty’s main point is in his article’s title: tragedy, he insists, shouldn’t make policy. The shooting at the Dark Knight showing in Colorado is a random incident without any broader lessons to teach us about guns, or assault weapons, or America. He declares:
Trying to “turn tragedy into politics” feels gross, because the deaths and the grief for the living are real and terrible and demand respect… If I weren’t a professional writer about the Second Amendment (in my 2008 book Gun Control on Trial) on record as believing in the right to bear arms, I wouldn’t dream of weighing in at all.
Or, to sum up, only people with credentials like Doherty should be allowed to draw conclusions from tragedy, and only as long as those conclusions are that we should dismiss the tragedy from theoretical consideration. Refusing to think about how the tragedy might involve our society or us is, apparently, the best way to show respect for those who have died.
In the real world outside the abstract libertarian compound, tragedies do very often lead to political thinking and political consequences. Sometimes, this has horrible results, as in our decade of foreign policy motivated by 9/11. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary and important. Surely it’s not disrespectful to suggest making sure nuclear reactors are earthquake proof after the disaster in Japan. To point out that people died because of inadequate safety features or (in, say New Orleans) because of poor policy response, isn’t callous. It’s acting as if we care about the dead, and about the living. Preventable deaths should be prevented. That’s not an insult to anyone’s memory; it’s simple human decency.
Not in Doherty’s world, though. On the contrary, he’s so myopically certain of his position that, without irony, he quotes himself blandly dismissing Gabby Giffords’ shooting.
Americans understand that even strange people should be able to own weapons, and not just for deer hunting. The very rare crimes of very unusual Americans should not dictate how everyone’s right to self-defense is managed, and even in the wake of tragedy that is fortunately unlikely to change.
Doherty apparently hasn’t noticed that putting “very” in front of “rare” and “unusual” is a rhetorical device somewhat undermined by the fact that such events are, at least, frequent enough that he’s got a canned spiel to pull out every time they happen. When, I wonder, will he notice this contradiction? The third time he reprints it? The fourth? The 10th?
Doherty is correct that it’s politically impossible to change gun laws at the moment, but I don’t think that’s because Americans have decided en masse that it’s a good idea for “strange people” to have unlimited access to semi-automatic weapons. Rather, it’s because the NRA and the pro-gun lobby has bludgeoned politicians into submission—and, perhaps most importantly, because the Democrats abandoned the issue. Doherty himself notes that at the beginning of the 1990s, 78 percent of Americans supported stronger gun control laws. Then along came Bill Clinton. Without a political party to lead or make the case for stricter controls—without a party to, for example, point out that perhaps we could stop our regular cycle of tragedies if we made an effort—public opposition to guns has cratered. Doherty sees this as a sign of America’s growing wisdom, but it’s just as likely a result of a craven lack of leadership.
That leadership might reappear, though, if people begin to get weary of random yahoos loading up with firepower so they can kill children. That’s why Doherty has taken to the Internet again to wave around airy phrases like, “The endless and unmanageable mystery of the individual’s power and choice to do evil,” as if somehow an evil person’s power to do harm is completely unaffected by the availability of machine guns.
Doherty insists there is no connection between violence and gun possession. That assertion is debatable. James Fallows, for example, points out that after a terrible 1996 massacre in Tasmania, “Australia tightened up its gun laws, and there has been nothing remotely comparable in all the years.” In the U.S., on the other hand, we’ve apparently decided that it’s better to accept the occasional multiple shooting than it is to reexamine gun policy. That’s a political decision. Which is why Doherty is taking the occasion of the tragedy to make his polemical points, and why he will use the next tragedy to do the same, and the next, and the next, and the next, until, at some point, Americans get tired of hearing the same words spoken over yet another grave.
Reagan was big on gun control win it came to the Panthers. The KKK was a gun control organization, too, for similar reasons. I’m with the leftists who are skeptical of the police state on the issue.
The majority of gun violence in this country has to do with the ghetto enclaves certain races of people have been shoved into. The violence has everything to do with racism, not guns per se.
Also, the majority of gun deaths are due to hand guns, not assault rifles.
I’m also wary of people who have no interest in exercising a right taking that right away from perfectly law abiding people because of that lack of interest, too (cf. “if you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry about the loss of privacy” arguments).
‘win’!?! I meant ‘when’. I bet those words aren’t homophones for a lot of people around here.
I’m anti gun.
Guns are legal in Canada. I don’t hear about them shooting people much. Maybe it’s as much a state of mind as gun availability.
“The endless and unmanageable mystery of the individual’s power and choice to do evil,” is a doozy. Particularly since the capital “C” conservative stance is usually all about managing the individual’s power and choice to do… whatever. The way the libertarian contribution to the discourse on this matter has been utilized by the more conservative party is pretty awesome in terms of raw rhetoric. it makes me nervous when right-wingers get all nebulous and philosophical, it means there’ some extraordinary bullshit being cooked up.
Charles, I’d agree that racism and segregation are a huge part of the problem. But racism and segregation plus guns ends up withe more people dead, is the problem, I think.
It’s true that banning assault weapons wouldn’t solve all the problems. But it would cut down on these high profile massacres, which would be a good thing. Just because you can’t solve everyone’s problem doesn’t mean you can’t solve some of them.
Since it was mentioned that most gun deaths were caused by handguns it bears mentioning that in most other developed countries their ownership is also very restricted. Hunting rifles are pretty much the only weapons ordinary citizens own in most places.
According to Mother Jones, of the 143 weapons used in the mass killings from 1982-2012, 71 of them were semiautomatic handguns and 23 were revolvers. The remaining 34% were rifles of some form. Anyway, all the guns used were one trigger pull, one bullet fired weapons. I’m no gun expert, but I’m not sure how, outside of banning guns altogether or eliminating the possibility of loading multiple bullets within guns, any of these bans will be of much use in decreasing the possible death toll in the mass killing situations.
Biden on NPR a few days back made a reasonable case that reducing clip sizes could be a big help in mass shooting situations.
Anyway, the assault weapons ban is probably dead. Universal background checks, which are overwhelmingly supported by the public pretty much, are the thing that are still on the table. I’d like to see that tried, myself. Seems like the least we could do.
Re handguns…in cities, they often do try to restrict handguns in order to reduce violence, right? But then the right prevent them from doing so. Then folks say, well, at least we can try to restrict assault rifles, and the response is, well, most violence is from handguns. It seems hypocritical to me to basically make it politically impossible to deal with the real problem and then insist that there’s no reason to deal with any part of the problem since you can’t deal with the real problem.
To my mind the problem with gun violence and gun laws is in the double bind described by Noah. Basically, we’ve gotten to a point where small reforms won’t work (too many guns already in circulation), in a political climate where major reforms are impossible.
In my perfect world we’d all agree to a mandatory handgun/semi auto exchange, and everyone would just trade these weapons for the rifles and/or shotguns of their choice.
But that’s not going to happen, since the freedom to bear arms is considered by so many more important than the freedom not to get shot.
By the way, my state is considering allowing concealed into college classrooms and churches (because those are the only places left in the state where you can’t bring them). I’m not sure how this will affect my attendance policies if passed.
Right. My understanding is that Australia significantly reduced gun violence through new laws…but they had to collect old weapons to do it. None of this grandfathering in your dad’s submachine gun, or what have you.
Charles’ point about how you shouldn’t restrict law-abiding citizens rights just because others have done something wrong is interesting, since I’ve been reading David Graeber. He talks about the way that historically establishing rights as abstractions separated from social networks of responsibility required, basically, large scale violence and the threat of large scale violence (and not metaphorically.) I believe he traces it specifically to Roman property law, where you get the conception of absolute ownership or dominion over property, and therefore over yourself, or your own rights. And, of course, Roman property law, and those ideas of absolute dominion, are rooted in Roman slavery.
The idea that it’s an imposition to ask folks to act as if it affects them when their neighbors are being killed — that’s a very specific mindset, it seems like.
I grew up around guns. My uncles (6 of them) all hunt, so do my cousins (more than 40 of them now). I’ve played with guns. I attended a class put on by my elementary school principal, in which we learned how to unload everything from a revolver to a great big old West style silver Colt (those things are fucking HEAVY when you’re ten). Picture a bunch of ten years old clustered around a pile of guns, loading and unloading, supervised by one adult, and you’re got the picture.
What I find absolutely frustrating about the gun debate is the way gun owners and gun rights activists all gear up to shout that we shouldn’t restrict the rights of perfectly law abiding gun owners just because of a few lone nuts.
To which I say: Yeah, right. Here’s the thing. Each year, one of my uncles gets a special hunting license to go into the forest and track down all the deer that other hunters have shot and wounded, but not killed because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Every year, I hear stories about some other kind of random thing a bunch of drunk-as-fuck hunters shot to hell (cows, stop signs, cars, people, whatever–there’s a reason farmers buy orange paint to paint their black and white DAIRY COWS). I know for a fact that several people with mental disorders take part in the gun games–I’m not talking depression, I’m talking genuine bonafide bipolar disorder and adjustment disorder and PTSD. Some of them take medication so they don’t sit in the corner and rock.
(And yes, they all also own handguns. But the big let’s go blow shit up fest is usually rifles.)
The only person I know that they refused to let have a gun is my autistic cousin, and that’s because he has trouble reading.
For years and years, normal Americans have said, ‘You know, maybe we can limit selling to crazy people at least.’ Or, ‘You know, maybe not machine guns.’ The gun rights people all scream and stomp their feet: But you’re stopping us law abiding owners! WE’ve done nothing wrong! I NEED that semi-automatic to blow up squirrels!
And up til now, gun rights people have had exactly their own way. They say they police their own, they teach gun safety, they won’t let anything bad happen, because they’re good people, blah blah blah, they’re not knowingly letting crazies wield guns eleventyone!!!.
But they do.
Every group of gun owners that I know (and I know many, from rural rifle fiends to inner city handgun afficianados) allows all kinds of terrifying and deadly dangerous shit to pass on by without comment.
I’d like the gun groups to admit, just once, that their own approaches have not been working. That they have failed to apply social pressure (don’t kill cows, don’t kill wives, don’t kill your spouse coming in late thinking they’re a burglar, etc) and so maybe, just maybe, for once we could let some other group try handling this problem.
We’ve done it exactly the way the NRA has wanted it. We’ve tried that for decades. Let’s try something else. (And by something else, I do not mean arm kindergarten teachers for Chrissakes.)
The right to bear arms was established, in part, because of a concern for the potential abuse of governments. That’s social responsibility, isn’t it? And that concern wasn’t much of an abstraction at the time. I’m not sure how Roman property law is supposed to make some guy who never killed anyone, nor wanted to kill anyone partly responsible for all mass killings in schools. That leans towards totalitarian thinking, which only breeds totalitarian solutions. Those solutions can work, of course, but I don’t much want to live in such a country.
As for Biden’s argument, I wish he’d brought up why the police need clips with more than 10 rounds. Or is he for getting rid of everyone’s access to larger clips? He leaves out self-defense as a reason, except in the comment about the police being outgunned. Is it desirable that citizens are outgunned by the police? Well, that’s the violence that supports the system in which we live. How does that tie into Graeber’s argument? Let’s not forget that American slaves couldn’t own guns for a very definite reason.
It was established to provide for militias to enforce government power. It says so right in the amendment.
If you’re telling me that you think people could use guns to protect themselves against incursion by the government, I would suggest that you’re kind of crazy. The US military has tons and tons more firepower than anyone wants to let American citizens have (unless you think folks should be able to hunt with nuclear weapons.) What sort of apocalyptic scenarios are you imagining, precisely? You think the best way to deescalate our police state is to arm everyone so every pot bust turns into a firefight? Or what? The fact that there are genuine concerns about the extension of state violence simply is not an argument for increasing non-state violence unless you really think (a) a war of all against all is an awesome idea, and (b) somehow in a war of all against all the US government would lose.
Along those lines; I don’t want police to have that much firepower either. But pointing out that police have too much firepower is not actually an argument that everybody else should have more firepower. You want de-escalation. Then fucking de-escalate. Don’t use excessive state violence as an excuse to increase non-state violence, and vice versa.
Graeber isn’t arguing about gun laws specifically. But his point is that the idea of rights as absolute property and ownership…the idea that rights are about individual power and authority in a zero sum universe where I have to horde what I have and screw everyone else — comes out of a vision of people as things that can be owned. You can also have a vision of society as one in which helping your neighbor and the fate of your neighbor matters, and where the idea that you might change your behavior in some ways in order to help your neighbor isn’t necessarily seen as a threat to your absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.
The individual rights interpretation is now the law of the land, and it’s the correct one (it was a leftist who really got the ball rolling on this view, btw). Also, the Amendment says quite clearly “free state” — that suggests “enforc[ing] government power” to you? Hurm.
Yeah, if the government decided to raze the country, widely available guns aren’t going to prevent that. A suicidal government is going to win that one. But dictators, however crazy, don’t tend to simply want to destroy everything in sight. They want something to rule over, so most of the fighting would be on a smaller scale, most likely. And even if power differential would still be great — with the internal use of drones or whatever else this hypothetical despot might use against his people — I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be as great as in the case where the hypothetical resistance fighters have no weapons at all.
But, never mind that, if what gun control advocates really want is a de-escalation in overall firepower, then that’s the argument they should make. It’s interesting that the biggest mass killer, Timothy McVeigh, was a former soldier, so why not make an argument about what the military is teaching its soldiers, too? Include the military and police in these gun control debates. Make gun control about the danger they pose, too, not just the citizens who have no criminal record. Why do we trust a soldier with such fire power, but not our neighbor?
I don’t see individual rights as being opposed to helping your neighbor. If it’s all about what the group wants, how is that respecting your neighbor when he or she has a different idea. Truth isn’t democratic.
Noah — The Second Amendment was written at a time when every male over the age of 14 or 15 who owned a weapon was in the local militia. So when when the Second Amendment refers to a “well regulated militia,” they are, in effect, talking about the vast majority of the general male populace owning weapons.
The founding fathers weren’t stupid. They knew damn well that an armed general populace and the decentralization of weapons had some great benefits when it came to both individual, local, regional and national security.
Today, it is still virtually impossible for the police or other government security personnel to protect an individual from being mugged or having their home invaded unless the law enforcement people are right there when the event takes place. So any gun control law like the one Chicago had for decades does nothing to protect individuals. All it does is make them easier targets for the bad guys. This is certainly NOT something our founding fathers wished upon American citizens.
Where are you living? Leftists have been the main folks criticizing government violence and government power for decades. Its the left that’s against prisons; it’s the left that’s against increasing militarization (with the occasional honorable critic from the other side like Rand Paul.) And, for that matter, the leftist you’re talking to is me, and I’m making the argument!
It’s true that police departments are against having tons of weapons on the street, and politicians do often reference that. But…you’re really thinking we need assault rifles on the street in order to preserve liberty in a future dystopic disintegrating US? So the blood of the children of Newtown are the price we pay for our keeping the future jack-booted thugs off our lawns? Is Wayne LaPierre even really to make an argument that crazy in public?
Every state calls itself a free state, no matter how many people it has enslaved. And individual rights don’t necessarily have to be opposed to helping your neighbor. One way we try to negotiate that tension in this society, though, is through democratic institutions. So if, as appears to the be the case, you’re rejecting those, I’m not exactly sure where that leaves you.
The founding fathers were okay with slavery. So suggesting that they were some paragons of wisdom is not something I find especially convincing.
Crime rates have been falling for decades. Nations with far fewer guns than us have lower crime rates. Australia dropped its crime rates when it regulated guns. The argument that we need guns for personal safety just has really little going for it except that it appeals to a paranoid sense of war-of-all-against-all which many Americans appear to hold dear.
The 2nd Amendment was actually put in place to keep anti-slavery states from abruptly deciding to put Southern state militias out of business. Slave states maintained “well-regulated” militias that routinely ensured negroes weren’t somehow managing to get their hands on caches of weapons, & white gentlemen were required to arm themselves & spend a certain portion of their lives taking part in these “security actions.” No one in the North was all that terrified their new gov’t would suddenly turn tyrannical (& when it veered that way under Adams, they didn’t even much mind) but the South was terrified they’d either declare the national military responsible for security actions (leaving them unable to verify for themselves the slaves were disarmed) or they’d open the call to slaves to join the military in times of need & grant them their freedom in payment. (Not unprecedented.) By emphasizing state militias, which every state would be able to regulate for themselves, they ensured that if the national military required a drastic expansion – say, if the British attacked – the soldiers would be drawn from the ranks of the state militias, i.e., Southern slaves would be kept ineligible by dint of not being militia members. Following the Civil War & the collapse not only of slavery but of the state militias, the emphasis shifting off well-regulated militias to simply gun ownership, but it amuses me that an amendment constantly cited as America’s god-given bulwark against tyranny & to ensure democracy was actually pressed into service to ensure tyranny & suffering & repress democracy. But it was a trade-off to keep the Southern states in the Union, because our “founding fathers” were at least smart enough to get that if they allowed the breakup of the colonies they were opening the whole of the continent, including the colonies, back up to colonialist poaching. (Not to mention concern for the slaves, while it existed, wasn’t all that widespread at the time.)
I’d like to add that I also grew up around guns, my father trained me how to use them, & I’ve inherited guns from both my father & grandfather, so I’m also a gun owner. My experience with gun owners is they’re either pretty circumspect & reasonable people, or that they talk a lot of swagger about what they’d do in this situation or that without any real clue of what they’re talking about, & the ones with the most swagger usually seem to be the ones with the least experience & training. I grew up in Wisconsin, I’ve benefitted from hunting (fresh venison every year for years, mmm!), & while I’ve never hunted I have nothing against hunters – as long as they eat what they kill. The jackasses who load up on six packs & treat hunting like going to a football game, them I mind. Those are the ones who claim a hunter’s right to use automatic weapons, & they’re about on the ethical level of kids who drown cats. I’m not at all surprised they talk about how they’ll be the last bastions when the government enslaves us all, because they champ at the bit for apocalypses the same way kids who drown cats often start wondering what it would feel like to beat up that weak kid down the street. There’s a streak of sadism they love to indulge, at least in their heads where they can dress it up in camo fatigues & wave flags over it. But the ones who rave most vehemently about how the only way to be safe is to make sure they have all their guns at hand when that lone nut ruining it for everyone steps out of the corridor at the shopping mall & starts shooting long before the cops can get there, most of them don’t have the training or experience to do anything in that situation except miss, get shot or injured themselves, or nothing. But they sure do like to talk about how they’ll get it done.
I’m a constitutionalist, so the way I see it, if there’s something about the Constitution that’s bad, then the critics should follow the amendment process to change it — or shut the hell up. Trying to circumvent the Constitution by passing politically motivated local and federal laws is not the way to address a “problem.” Chicago’s gun laws, which banned the ownership of ANY handgun, was clearly unconstitutional, but they did it anyway. Ten years later, they finally got around to banning assault weapons as well, which, if you think about it, was ass-backwards. But the fact is, their ultimate goal was banning the private ownership of all guns — all in the name of reducing crime. But their gun control efforts clearly did not work, because Chicago’s murder rate rose to the worst, or one of the worst, in the nation for the next few decades.
You see, the problem is liberals tend to demonize stuff that isn’t really the problem, and ignore the stuff that is.
Why was the murder rate in Chicago so high? Gangs, drugs, poverty, lack of jobs, poor education, out-of-wedlock births, racism, political corruption and cronyism — a whole bunch of stuff. If one was prioritizing things, guns are probably way down the list of core problems, yet that’s all the pols in Chicago ever talked about. Daley screamed until he was blue in the face about guns, but rarely ever addressed the other issues. Why? Because admitting those problems would point the finger directly back to him and the failings of his administration.
“You see, the problem is liberals tend to demonize stuff that isn’t really the problem, and ignore the stuff that is.”
The main problem in Chicago is segregation, there’s no doubt about that. But if there were tougher gun laws, segregation would result in fewer deaths…which would be a good thing.
The fact that there are other problems is not a good reason to ignore fixable problems. The fact that our society is imperfect and awful in many respects is not an excuse for ignoring gun violence, which lots of other imperfect societies have managed to reduce.
Steven’s point is that the 2nd amendment is about militias, which means that it doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with personal gun ownership. Courts have interpreted it that way, but court decisions can be reversed…and often are as public opinion changes.
The Internet complicates everything.
Steven, that’s pretty fascinating…and does dovetail with Graeber’s arguments about the links between discussions of rights and slavery. As with the Romans, rights here seems to mean the right to control your property, property being defined specifically as slaves.
There’s recent essay on The Root about Thom Hartman’s argument that the 2nd Amendment was ratified to protect slavery:
“however committed one may be to a political outcome, it serves no purpose to make historical arguments that are demonstrably wrong, misleading and inconsistent with what happened. Hartmann does not serve his cause well by purporting to write history when his version of history is mostly wrong, and very misleading.”
Re, as Noah neatly termed them, “these high profile massacres,” racism and how tough things are in the ghetto are irrelevant. It’s not the day-in-day-out murders occurring there which bestir the masses, but some lone white loony shooting up a bunch of mostly-white kids. Just like that white woman in New York who was supposedly “wilded” by ethnic youths (and was actually murdered by her husband) raised such a ruckus.
Interestingly, the members of the NRA are actually more sympathetic to certain gun-control laws than the organization’s leadership. Yet another example of Americans being actually more liberal than their supposed representatives.
“74% of NRA members and 87% of non-NRA gun owners believe all gun buyers should get a criminal background check. A CBS/New York Times poll released on January 17 found 93% of those living in households with gun owners and 85% in households with NRA members support background checks”: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/31/opinion/glaze-gun-control
Non-NRA-member gun owners are even more pro “gun control”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/23/gun-owners-vs-the-nra-what-the-polling-shows/
A very intelligent and liberal (but gun-owning) co-worker mentioned how Hitler banned guns. T’was not so:
“No, Hitler Did Not Ban Guns – And Neither Did Mussolini, Castro, Stalin or Pol Pot… “: http://everythingpossiblehappens.blogspot.com/2013/01/no-hitler-did-not-ban-guns-and-neither.html .
Which article — aside from understandable, if unfortunate, repeated reference to “gun nuts” — also points out how asinine is the idea that scattered armed individuals could possibly hold off the military might of an entire government. Which makes nonsense of the “we need guns to protect ourselves from a dictatorship” argument.
(Reading on, I see Noah’s made the same point: “The US military has tons and tons more firepower than anyone wants to let American citizens have…”)
One of the things that always strikes me about the argument for protecting ourselves against the government is that it asks me to decide between taking action on the concrete, day-to-day problem of gun violence on the basis of an imagined future in which I need my gun to protect me from an authoritarian government that a) does not yet exist, and b) if it were to come into existence would not likely be hindered by my handgun or semi-automatic rifle (no matter how big the clip).
The funny thing is, if a person makes an argument for stricter gun laws they get tarred for indulging in “magical thinking” about the roots of gun violence.
Charles, that article does appear to pretty much appear to devastate the argument. Oh well;another good theory shot to shit as they say.
No second amendment/NRA discussion is complete without a link to this article from The Atlantic magazine:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/
Yeah, Daniel, I recommend Adam Winkler’s very fair-minded book tracing the gun laws: Gun Fight.
Mike: “Which article — aside from understandable, if unfortunate, repeated reference to “gun nuts” — also points out how asinine is the idea that scattered armed individuals could possibly hold off the military might of an entire government.”
This argument also makes by implication, somewhat ironically and confusedly, two further points: that any resistance movement needs equivalent firepower for success (such as the American Revolution) and that you’re no better off with guns than your hands when fighting on the small side of asymmetrical battles (such as the Native Americans, or the Palestinians). Now, clearly, not wanting groups to get their hands on a lot of WMDs has a lot to do with support for current state power. Most people want to prevent any real destabilization of the status quo, regardless of superficial ideological distinctions. They don’t worry near as much about the government possessing all that devastating force as they do about the possibility that some rube in the Michigan forrest or a foreign terrorist might come to possess a small share of such technology. I’m sympathetic to this, actually, but if I were to find cause to join resistance fighters in a totalitarian America (led by some admirer of early Wonder Woman comics, I imagine), it would be a good thing to have access to WMDs. As for the second implication, if guns are so irrelevant given government’s superior technology, why all the fuss over people carrying around guns? If my only option when going up against a guy with a machine gun is a pocket knife, I’d prefer to have that to nothing at all. That should be a pretty obvious choice for anyone, even if chances for success would be depressingly low.
” if I were to find cause to join resistance fighters in a totalitarian America…it would be a good thing to have access to WMDs.”
Why? Because more dead bodies are better? Because it would be better to destroy the world or the country or kill tens of thousands of civilians (which is who you kill with WMDSs) than live under a totalitarian regime? WTF?
The speed with which you head for these apocalyptic fantasies is really pretty thoroughly depressing. Your claims that your enthusiasm for violent media has nothing to do with any possible personal interest in violence are strained pretty much past the breaking point, it seems like to me. And, as Nate suggests, the eagerness to head towards these fantasies doesn’t bolster the case for firearms. It undermines them, in that it suggests that the case for guns is built not on everday folks wanting to hunt, but mostly on preposterous yearnings for (at least the fantasy of) milleniarian apocalypse and bloodshed.
Guns in this country enable real tragedies over and over and over again. And in response, you basically say that we should continue to have guns so that we can fantasize about even greater tragedies committed in the name of something or other against some state that has done us the good service of blessing our murderous impulses with hypothetical righteousness. Congratulations on making a better argument against gun rights than I ever could.
“Why? Because more dead bodies are better?”
Yeah, sure, but dead bodies on the other side. That would be the point, after all: to weaken the ideological side you’re going to war against. The fact that only the far right has any real fear of apocalyptic possibilities or the corruption of the American political system demonstrates a very real fact about our current politics: there’s the status quo (all leftists, liberals, libertarians and the majority of conservatives) and the radical right. Leftists in American are on the whole happy with capitalism and bourgeois comfort. And, of course, that’s what makes the militia fantasies of the far right all the more ridiculous: they have nothing to fear from the theoretical pacifists, anarchists and communists. They’ll have more conferences about how awful everything is, then maybe meet in Central Park in an ambiguous protest against global capitalism or whatever … once again. Perhaps the lack of commitment to any “fantasies” on the left (other than the fantasies that their critiques of capitalism et al. make a difference) is just another indication of what’s well known: no one can imagine oneself out of the current status quo.
And, really, Noah, I wasn’t promoting taking up arms against the government (I’m a pathetic American leftist, you see), so these fantasies of mine are created to make a point in an argument, sort of like all your fantasies about pacifism and peaceful submissions to authority. That is, if I agree with a view about violence expressed in a film or a book or a comic then the connection between my hypotheticals and those posed in various media is that of agreement. I don’t deny that I’m interested in violence, only that such an interest makes me violent (the facts are what they are: no acts of violence on my part since high school, and that wasn’t something I had much of a choice in). Rather than playing psychologist, you could just argue against the point of the hypothetical.
“you basically say that we should continue to have guns so that we can fantasize about even greater tragedies committed in the name of something or other against some state”
I support the gun rights of individuals because of the 2nd Amendment. I also think, for the same reasons that drugs and alcohol prohibition don’t and didn’t work, that banning guns wouldn’t work. And most of the contemporary gun control reactions to a tiny minority of gun deaths won’t do much to the stats. I don’t believe in reducing the rights of lawful citizens for some fantasy about saving children, whether it’s media censorship or gun control.
But the 2nd Amendment doesn’t say everyone and their brother should have an assault rifle. And there’s plenty of fairly decent evidence from other places that fewer guns actually does reduce gun deaths…so saying it’s a fantasy that fewer guns would reduce gun deaths seems like a fantasy itself. There’s a lot less evidence that viewing media violence reduces attacks. Equating the two is just sloppy thinking.
None of your arguments really makes much sense…which is why you end up talking about how you’re going to use WMD’s to defeat the US tyranny, I guess. I mean, they make sufficiently little sense that I actually don’t know why you oppose gun laws. The 2nd amendment wasn’t handed down by God, so you have to have some reason to think it’s a good idea. “Rights” in and of themselves don’t seem like a sufficient explanation; I mean, do you think seatbelt laws are a horrible infringement of liberty? (Maybe you do; I dunno.) Then there’s hyperbolic blather about apocalypse, and some nattering about efficacy, which seems again hypocritical since you’re not actually willing to do the things that would be efficacious.
Maybe Charles is suggesting that the real fantasy is that any meaningful gun control laws will be passed in the U.S. within our lifetimes (or ever). I think it would be akin to depriving Americans of the air they breathe.
You never know. I wouldn’t have thought America would elect a black president in my lifetime…or that we’d get some sort of universal health care passed for that matter. Or, less positively, that we’d decide to fight a ten year war in Afghanistan. I’d agree gun control legislation seems unlikely, but unlikely things do happen sometimes….
Let’s ignore all of the sideshow arguments about the fringe loons fearing the government.
Let’s focus on the real reason, which I stated above, it’s still in the best interest of the average schmoe to be able to own a weapon if they want to: “Today, it is still virtually impossible for the police or other government security personnel to protect an individual from being mugged or having their home invaded unless the law enforcement people are right there when the event takes place. So any gun control law like the one Chicago had for decades does nothing to protect individuals. All it does is make them easier targets for the bad guys. This is certainly NOT something our founding fathers wished upon American citizens.”
It ain’t about the loons and the kooks. It’s about the average guy who still, in this day and age, has a legitimate reason to want a weapon in the house.
And contrary to what that idiot Biden recommended, a double-barreled shotgun is pretty damn useless during a home invasion if the other person has a semiautomatic pistol or rifle, or there’s more than one person, or, in the heat of the moment, you miss.
I’ll take an AR-15 any day. Especially if I lived in the boondocks, where calling the cops for timely help is a joke; or in my old neighborhood in Chicago, where help may never come.
The idea that the best way to defend oneself is to set up a war of all against all is, to me, not at all self-evident, and actually the reverse of the truth.
Guns escalate dangerous situations, I think. You don’t de-escalate by throwing firepower around — at least not in most situations. Again, you’ve got revenge fantasies and Hollywood films about blowing away the bad guys, but the fact is that violent crime has been on the decline for decades (probably because of environmental lead reduction, is the best explanation I’ve seen) and that unsafe neighborhoods are unsafe because there are too many guns, not too few.
And our founding fathers really were not in any way, shape, or form, thinking about our current discourses on crime when they passed the second amendment. For pity’s sake.
Revenge fantasies? You’ve never lived in a bad neighborhood, have you? It’s self-defense against people would would shoot or stab you, a cop, or anyone, without hesitation or the slightest remorse. Denying such people exist is a fantasy, not wanting to own a gun for self-defense.
I live on the south side of Chicago (in Hyde Park, but still; you don’t have to drive far to find neighborhoods that are not thriving). I’ve been mugged multiple times, thanks.
The idea that I’m surrounded by super-predators is silliness, as is the idea that having me and all my neighbors armed would make me feel, or actually be, any safer. Even by your logic, it’s stupid. You’re surrounded by remorseless villains — so,hey, let’s dump a gigantic number of firearms into the city. Somehow they’ll all stay in the hands of the “good guys”; somehow the good guys, wandering around heavily armed and terrified of their neighbors, will shoot only the right people; somehow none of these remorseless bad guys’ll shoot back.
I feel safer already. Yay.
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Charles Reece says:
…if guns are so irrelevant given government’s superior technology, why all the fuss over people carrying around guns?
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I’ve no problem with law-abiding, mentally-sound people having guns. Why, the Missus and her mom, whose respective bicycling and exercise-walking take them into “no witnesses around” areas where they’d be vulnerable to attack (though hardly “bad neighborhoods”), are both planning on getting pistols and “concealed carry” permits. Which I consider perfectly sensible moves.
Indeed, considering that the U.S. has more guns than people, it’s absurd to even consider banning them; it’d be a fiasco along the lines of Prohibition.
All I’m actually for is required background checks (and possibly a “cooling-off” period) for gun purchases. To thereby cut down on (it can hardly be wholly eliminated) lunatics, or irate spouses discovering their Significant Other’s been cheating on them, from blazing away mindlessly.
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If my only option when going up against a guy with a machine gun is a pocket knife, I’d prefer to have that to nothing at all. That should be a pretty obvious choice for anyone, even if chances for success would be depressingly low.
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Sure. The thing that is troubling — if utterly predictable — about this “we’ll need guns to protect ourselves against the government” asininity is what it shows about the mindset of those saying it. It reveals a frothing hatred of our own democratically-elected (even though, God knows, highly imperfect and not-exactly very responsive) government. Look what the GOP was saying against Obama’s re-election: “We’re going to take America back.” As if some alien invader had seized control of our country, instead of slightly over half of Americans, well-meaning and reasonable folks, not voting the way they’d like them to.
This follows along with that vile scumbag’s Reagan saying, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I’d like every right-winger who, when his house is on fire and calls the Fire Dept., is burglarized and calls the cops, flooded out and asks help from FEMA or rescuing by the National Guard, asks the Gummint to bail out his failing business, etc., to be denied those services, and have that Reagan recording played back to him.
It also reveals apocalyptic thinking, neatly tying in with the Bible-thumping fundamentalism that goes along with such right-wing attitudes. Where the attitude is that the world will have to be virtually destroyed before Righteousness can reign. And, we should WELCOME this.
Not to mention, indicative of massive paranoia; that such an utter wimp as Obama, the Compromiser-in-Chief, eager to give the GOP most anything it wants, a moderate conservative, is seen as another Stalin, ruthlessly crushing the opposition, eager to impose his Atheist Islamist Feminist Sharia Law, institute Death Panels, and “take all our guns away,” reveals a mind-boggling disconnect from reality.
Or, as Tom Tomorrow nicely termed it, “The Republican Matrix”: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kittykowalski/76694164/#/photos/kittykowalski/76694164/lightbox/ .
Speaking of recycling arguments whenever the latest “shocking” mass shooting occurs, Tomorrow routinely does it, as here: http://thismodernworld.com/archives/7175 .
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Yeah, if the government decided to raze the country, widely available guns aren’t going to prevent that. A suicidal government is going to win that one. But dictators, however crazy, don’t tend to simply want to destroy everything in sight. They want something to rule over, so most of the fighting would be on a smaller scale, most likely…
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Nothing “suicidal” about a government which bloodily, destructively crushes opposition movements. Many have done so, and survived to oppress for decades more. So it’s hardly an irrational, incomprehensible move.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The founding fathers were okay with slavery. So suggesting that they were some paragons of wisdom is not something I find especially convincing.
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Can’t some have a major flaw in their thinking and still, otherwise, be “paragons of wisdom”? Or are wise people required to be, like Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way”?
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R. Maheras says:
Let’s ignore all of the sideshow arguments about the fringe loons fearing the government.
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We should ignore the Republican party? (More “wisdom” from the “pundit” of the GOP: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/28/reagans_radical_rhetoric/ . In his actions, actually far too liberal for today’s Republican leadership.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Guns escalate dangerous situations, I think. You don’t de-escalate by throwing firepower around — at least not in most situations. Again, you’ve got revenge fantasies and Hollywood films about blowing away the bad guys…
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Indeed! My wife was a jury member in a case here in Tallahassee where one youth gang had a blazing shootout in a gas station against another, and an innocent bystander was killed. Their actions arguably legally defensible under Florida’s new “Stand Your Ground” law. (She was the only one pushing for finding the defendant guilty of the more serious offense; other jury members were, as she put it, wimps, who said “I don’t want to be responsible for putting someone in prison…”)
“‘Stand Your Ground’ Linked To Increase In Homicides”: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/02/167984117/-stand-your-ground-linked-to-increase-in-homicide
I want to chime in on the dangerous neighborhoods theme. Part of what makes these neighborhoods dangerous is stray bullets. Also, has anyone here read “More Guns Less Crime?” It’s a pro conceal and carry book, and the author has this really neat rhetorical trick. Whenever he doesn’t have data to back an argument up, he simply explains that we have no idea how many lives are saved when a crime is thwarted because a weapon is drawn. After all, no crime, no report. He uses this to counter every argument against gun ownership, for instance, the statistical likelihood of dying by gun if there’s a gun in the house, etc.
You can’t argue with what ifs.
And yes, I’ve lived in violent neighborhoods. But I have no idea whether a gun would have helped. Frankly, the few tough spots I’ve been in, in violent and in nice neighborhoods, always involved the aggressor getting super close to me. Had I pulled a gun I can’t be assured it wouldn’t have been turned on me. But that’s just my imagination. I wouldn’t rest an argument on it.
[Let’s focus on the real reason, which I stated above, it’s still in the best interest of the average schmoe to be able to own a weapon if they want to: “Today, it is still virtually impossible for the police or other government security personnel to protect an individual from being mugged or having their home invaded unless the law enforcement people are right there when the event takes place. So any gun control law like the one Chicago had for decades does nothing to protect individuals. All it does is make them easier targets for the bad guys. This is certainly NOT something our founding fathers wished upon American citizens.”]
Unfortunately this is an utter fallacy, owning a gun results in the death of the owner or those close to them far more often than it results in the death of a theoretical mugger or murderer. Indeed, Brazil followed a similar policy to America on gun ownership due to widespread belief in the low efficacy of police. Murder rates soared, then they implemented gun controls and a nationwide buy-back program, murders plummeted. The guns had never been protecting people, they’d been used to murder them.
Noah,
“And there’s plenty of fairly decent evidence from other places that fewer guns actually does reduce gun deaths…so saying it’s a fantasy that fewer guns would reduce gun deaths seems like a fantasy itself.”
There’s enough evidence by now that there is no steady positive correlation between the number of guns and the rise in crime and/or gun deaths. However, it is quite obviously true that no guns would lead to no gun deaths. But that isn’t an option, even though you seem to continually come back to it as if it were in this discussion. That would be a fantasy.
“None of your arguments really makes much sense…which is why you end up talking about how you’re going to use WMD’s to defeat the US tyranny, I guess.”
You seem to forget: I talked about the wilder possibilities because you and others brought them up. The extremes are used for rhetorical purposes, but I don’t have a problem thinking through some right-wing or left-wing dystopian fantasy if that’s what you want. Why not? Interesting thoughts can come from it (such as the fundamental cultural values that you have with most conservatives out there). Why do they provoke such anxiety in you?
Yes, seatbelt mandates are an infringement of liberty. Of course they are. Are they horrible? Not particularly, but I don’t agree with them. And then, once accepted, they’re used to justify more rules …
And I know you’re a with me or against me kind of ideologue, but I never said anything about being opposed to all gun control. I actually changed my mind about gun rights over time, because of similar arguments used in other matters made support more consistent for me (I know you’re skeptical of using rationality, too). For example, taking rights away from the vast majority because of the fear of people not being able to control themselves is one thing I apply across the board with free speech to gun rights to drugs. We’re never going to have a safe world, even if there were no guns, no drugs and no free speech. You could say that the possible damage is much larger with guns (even though they’re not the primary cause of deaths and gun deaths have been going down despite the rise in the number of guns), but who would rather live in the middle ages than contemporary America?
I see nothing particularly wrong with background checks. And, like religious conservatives with abortion, I don’t have a problem with a waiting period. But my support is contingent on their being capable of achieving something productive. Background checks wouldn’t have mattered much for the vast majority of mass killings, though, which is ostensibly your concern here. The one exception that I know of was Columbine, where the gun show loophole in the Brady law allowed one of the guys’ 18 year old girlfriend to buy their weapons without having her name dragged through the system. That was, she said, the only way she was willing to buy them guns. Again, these mass killings are a drop in the bucket of the stats, and one should be wary of making laws based on a few extreme cases where fear is the motivating factor. “If it saves just one child” is a horrible way to run a country.
Really, your concern is that you’re opposed to individuals owning guns, right? That’s where all the discussion of the hypotheticals and the purpose of 2nd Amendment comes from. You have no desire to own a gun, so others shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds about it. And these vague gun control laws that are going to fix some very minor fraction of the total gun deaths is, like religious conservatives with abortion waiting periods, just a way of retarding people’s ability to exercise a freedom granted them. Anything that interferes with that freedom is acceptable to you. Isn’t that about it? But surprise me and tell me why you support the 2nd Amendment.
Mike, I agree with that.
“We’re never going to have a safe world, even if there were no guns, no drugs and no free speech. You could say that the possible damage is much larger with guns (even though they’re not the primary cause of deaths and gun deaths have been going down despite the rise in the number of guns), but who would rather live in the middle ages than contemporary America?”
Most of what you say seems fine…but I really don’t know what the Middle Ages has to do with it. Most of the improvements since then are about technology and health. Government was way less intrusive back then, for practical reasons. For folks like yourself who are libertarianish, you should want to return to the Middle Ages, pretty much.
I see some terms thrown around recklessly in this argument. Two are “machine gun” and “submachine gun,” both implying fully automatic weapons. They’re not legal for private citizens to own, and they’re hardly ever used in crimes, not even these (decreasingly) rare but horrifying and tragic mass killings. So they have no role in this debate, and their use makes the writer look uninformed. Another is “assault rifle.” They’re just lighter, shorter rifles, built for easy carry and maneuver in tight spaces. Deer hunting rifles are more powerful, as are many handguns, which are even more convenient in narrow halls and plenty accurate at classroom distance. That’s why handguns are typically the weapon of choice in street crimes, mass killings, and self-defense, all the way back to the 1800s.
There are some non-semantic inaccuracies, too. While it’s true that reduced access to guns and ammunition can reduce the use of guns in violent acts, they do not necessarily reduce violent acts. London has very effective gun control and a much higher violent crime rate than large cities in Florida or Texas, where guns are widely carried. A knife death, a tire iron death, or a machete death (as in mass killings in Africa) has the same potential to be senseless and tragic that a gun death does. And, unlike the statistics the gun lobby points to, you can’t prove a causal link between the national plunge in violent crime in the nineties and the proliferation of concealed carry permits, even though they’re coincident in time. The best research shows that the sociological causes of violent crime are manifold and complex. The effect of gun access is negligible, and neither an armed society nor a disarmed society are panaceas.
Furthermore, on a philosophical note, individual rights demonstrate the value of the individual, including property rights. It’s only when they’re perverted so that people are seen as property that they can be used to oppress. They”re generally the bulwark for liberty and mutual respect, in my opinion.
In the U.S., we don’t have significantly greater access to guns than we did thirty years ago, but we have much less violent crime and noticeably more frequent mass killings. What caused both changes? The latter one, I suspect, had more to do with the glorification of murder and it’s widespread use in entertainment, especially first person shooters that are essentially training simulators for mass violence. They inure their users to the horror. For most of the users, personal morality, social opprobrium, and a distaste for the personal consequences prevent them from using their capacity to kill, just as they do for the overwhelming majority of demobilized combat infantrymen. But the entertainment degrades one check on violent behavior and some mass killings are a result, in my unsupported opinion.
It’s = Its in this case. It irritates when I do that, but I’m not going to shoot anyone over it.
Kevin Drum’s argued, very convincingly, I think, that the most likely cause of decreases in violent crime over the last decades is decreases in environmental lead.
I actually edited a volume for high school kids on media violence. I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be much of a causal link. The most ingenious study I saw, and the most convincing, showed that violent movies tended to reduce violent crime — simply by dint of the fact that young men like violent movies and are most likely to commit violent crimes, and if those young men are sitting in a movie theater, they’re not on the street drinking or hitting people.
“Furthermore, on a philosophical note, individual rights demonstrate the value of the individual, including property rights. It’s only when they’re perverted so that people are seen as property that they can be used to oppress. They”re generally the bulwark for liberty and mutual respect, in my opinion.”
Right; this is our American ideology. Graeber doesn’t exactly say it’s untrue…but he points out that, in historical context, conceiving of individual rights as property rights (which is basically how they are conceived) is very much linked to the logic of domination over slaves — the idea that people can be property, and that you can be the complete master over property.
Individual rights, historically, demonstrate the value of some individuals. They originally were developed to make sure everyone knew that other individuals were less valued. You could argue that things have changed now, of course, and that those rights have been purified…and to some extent I’d agree with you (the gay rights movement, for example, has been built, like it says, on the idea of individual rights.) But I think Graeber puts a lot of pressure on the idea that individual rights and human dignity are synonymous, and even more pressure on the idea that property rights and human dignity are, or have always been.
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Charles Reece says:
Yes, seatbelt mandates are an infringement of liberty. Of course they are. Are they horrible? Not particularly, but I don’t agree with them…
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What I’d like to see is for people who won’t wear seatbelts, or motorcyclists who won’t wear helmets, or smokers, or those who refuse to evacuate when a weather emergency occurs, be denied assistance when their recklessness gets them messed up or imperiled.
Ambulance driver to medic: “This guy who went through the windshield? He didn’t have his seatbelt buckled! Let him stay where he is…”
Unfortunately, and contrary to the “there is no such thing as society” preached by Maggie Thatcher and other right-wingers, “no man is an island.” For instance, those who have health insurance have to pay an estimated $1,000 a year extra because of emergency treatment given to those who don’t.
That twerp who went through his car’s windshield because he didn’t want to have his “liberty” restricted by wearing a safety device? He’s likely got a wife and kids who’ll suffer because of his injury or death; his incapacitation will have, even if on a small scale, negative consequences for the larger society.
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For example, taking rights away from the vast majority because of the fear of people not being able to control themselves is one thing I apply across the board with free speech to gun rights to drugs.
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Does it make sense to find some nutcase’s access to guns no more troubling than their doing drugs, or freely talking noxious malarkey?
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We’re never going to have a safe world, even if there were no guns, no drugs and no free speech.
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This reminds of the anti-helmet-wearing bicyclists, who say that, because a helmet won’t save you in a 16-wheeler plows into you, then it’s nonsense to wear helmets.
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You could say that the possible damage is much larger with guns…but who would rather live in the middle ages than contemporary America?
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(?????)
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John Hennings says:
…While it’s true that reduced access to guns and ammunition can reduce the use of guns in violent acts, they do not necessarily reduce violent acts. London has very effective gun control and a much higher violent crime rate than large cities in Florida or Texas, where guns are widely carried.
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First, how does that “violent crime” break up statistically? Why, someone getting punched in the nose certainly qualifies as a “violent crime.”
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A knife death, a tire iron death, or a machete death (as in mass killings in Africa) has the same potential to be senseless and tragic that a gun death does.
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Sure, the same “potential”; a pillow held over someone’s face can kill surely as a bazooka can.
But, which is proportionately far more dangerous, lethal? As Ty Templeton pointed out after one of those school massacres, in China a deranged creep attacked 22 people in a school.
But the only weapon he has was a knife, and no one died. ( http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17740-guns-and-knives-a-tale-of-two-tragedies )
And gee, because a ballpoint pen jabbed in the jugular can be fatal, does that mean “we need our GUNS for protection!” types would feel just as safe if allowed to carry Bics or pillows instead?
I’m not arguing that guns aren’t more lethal. But in discussions like this, we act as if guns are special, somehow, as opposed to just another modern labor-saving device — hence all the talk about “gun deaths.” Who’s asking how we produce better people, i.e., ones who value life and don’t commit mass murder? Have we given up on that?
Really, the debate here is pretty reasoned, but the visceral anti-gun advocates always seem to project agency onto the thing, as though it had an evil spirit that made one murder. I think, subconsciously, this was the rationale behind the modern grade school rules against even drawing a picture of a gun — more latent animism, a belief in invoking the demon’s power through its image.
There are countries (not the UK) with very limited gun access and low violent crime. There are also places like Switzerland, where a near universal militia puts an assault rifle in most homes, and people still manage not to shoot one another. I just don’t think they’re as big a factor as we act like they are. I’d prefer to talk about things that will make more of a difference.
” Who’s asking how we produce better people, i.e., ones who value life and don’t commit mass murder? Have we given up on that?”
Producing better people is really, really hard — a lot harder than restricting tools.
People talk about better mental health care, which would probably help some.
But we used to do it, Noah — or maybe their crimes just weren’t mass, public murder I previous generations. What changed?
I = in
Agree on better mental health care, by the way.
It’s not especially clear to me that people used to be better? I mean…not that long ago large portions of the country enforced slavery through systematic torture and violence; even more recently, they enforced Jim Crow the same way. I don’t generally think people are getting better in some sort of progressive teleology, but it’s not clear to me that they’re getting worse, either.
So, different crimes then and now. There’s an obvious profit motive for slavery, but why do people shoot up schools now and not then? What changed? Because gun technology has not changed significantly in a hundred years.
“Because gun technology has not changed significantly in a hundred years.”
But has ease of access to things like assault weapons?
Sure, but they’re irrelevant. The “assault weapons” (remember, just shorter, lighter, rifles, usually of small caliber) aren’t a significant advantage, since the AR15s and the like that private citizens buy won’t shoot in fully automatic mode (“machine gun” fire). They’re semi-auto — one trigger squeeze gets you one round, just like Grandpa’s deer rifle. People almost never use assault rifles in for-profit crime, and they don’t even always use them in mass killings. Handguns beat assault rifles for concealabilty and mobility. They’re just not as accurate at a distance. For shooting a lot of people in a crowded theater, they work fine. The other scenario we’ve seen in these events is the sniper in a bell tower in Texas (or wherever). For that, a hunting rifle with a scope is ideal. Assault rifles are a compromise weapon — good for clearing buildings room to room and pretty good for shooting someone 100 yards away. Even the ones carried in combat, which are capable of full automatic fire are rarely used that way, as it’s inaccurate and wastes ammunition. Full auto is good for suppressing fire, i. e. keeping the adversary passive and behind cover while your buddy moves to a better position. Many military assault rifles now have a three-round burst option, which seems to work well. But private citizens can’t buy those, either.
My point is that if someone had wanted to go into an office building in 1913 and shoot twenty-five people, he could have done it just as easily as people do today. Either they didn’t do that, or we just haven’t learned about those events. It may be the latter. Every other kind of crime I can think of happened back then, except those requiring a computer.
Massacres have occurred throughout history. I really doubt we’ve invented a new kind of crime. Seems a lot more likely that press coverage has changed than that there’s been some sort of fundamental cultural or psychic change.
I suspect you’re right. The old West seems like the kind of environment where some maladjusted, lonely person might have steppedinto a saloon and tried to shoot everyone. But he didn’t last very long. In the mid-nineties, Palestinian terrorists tried a massacre tactic where they would go into a crowded market and shoot as many people as they could. They gave it up quickly, because the terrorist was always shot by a cop or soldier or private citizen before he got very far. They attempted the same thing at an El Al ticket counter somewhere more recently — I want to say it was L.A. — only to find out that El Al ticket agents were armed, too.
That doesn’t mean “an armed society is a polite society,” however. In cultures where honor and “face” are more important than life, an armed society is just one where arguments and insults easily escalate to gunfighting. Duels and street gang drive-bys can both result from armed people having these attitudes.