What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
My issue with many members of my family is that they are sloppy. They do not treat the weapons as the instruments of war that they are. Having a shotgun, loaded and propped in a corner is not good stewardship, especially when entertaining visitors. Having an unlocked gun cabinet is not good stewardship. Tossing loaded rifles in the back of a pickup with the barrels pointing backward towards the tailgate and towards people who do not know the rifles are loaded when they unloaded the truck, not good stewardship. Blasé attitudes abound and as far as I can tell, blasé attitudes towards gun ownership increases the more the owner reveres the second amendment or protecting the constitution or whatever.
Worship at the gun alter if it suits your interests or if you have a legitimate need as the author seems to. Be a good steward of the responsibility that gun ownership entails.
A lot of the gun supporters live in rural America and only experience the types of threats related here when watching Hollywood productions. Everybody these days is feeling the threat of all the mass shootings, but very few in rural America have been personally touched by them. They also haven't really experienced gang violence, home invasion, mugging, etc. We all know those things happen, and some feel some distant anxiety about them. But most in rural America have not experiences them except through news reports.
Yet, gun support is strongest in rural America. Some point to hunting. Some will talk about self-defense. Many are just enthusiasts who like to target-shoot for enjoyment. Some feel some nationalistic pull to defend against Germany^H^HRussia^H^HChina^H^HNorth Korea^H^H or whoever is the latest poster child threat to the American Way. And some think that from the very beginning of America, there has been one constant threat--the one threat the founders new first-hand and the reason for the right to bear arms.
It seems like terrorism to actually say it, but for some the main reason to bear arms is to be able to rebel against tyranny--foreign and especially domestic. In other words, it's important for people to be able to occupy a wildlife refuge and "take it back" from the government. Taken to the extreme, this right is for the express purpose to allow civilians to kill policemen and military personnel in a pitched battle. It's not really about hunting or defense against home invasion. It's about an armed citizenry to keep the government in check.
That's a part of "gun culture" with which the author may not be able to relate. That's very scary to a lot of people. And to some that thinking is no longer needed to keep people safe in the modern world. But to some, it's absolutely vital to the preservation of the Constitution.
You may not agree with it. The author of this article may not agree with it either. But it just goes to show that there is not one true gun culture. There are different reasons to oppose guns and different reasons to support them.
It is. Let's just call a spade a spade here.. that interpretation of the Second Amendment endorses and justifies domestic terrorism. "Tyranny" can mean anything from an oppressive totalitarian state to the dehumanization of modern technological society to the existence of the IRS to too many foreigners in your neighborhood - or, of course, gun control itself. Tyranny is in the eye of the beholder.
Hell, when Benjamin Franklin said that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," he was arguing in favor of the government's right to form a collective defense, collect taxes and regulate the militia.
The founding fathers didn't mistrust centralized authority, they mistrusted the authority of the Crown.
Which made sense 200 years ago. Today, against a government armed with reaper drones et al, a populace armed with AR-15s would last about an hour if the government really wanted to put them down.
If such a conflict were to ever happen (and let us pray that it doesn't), I feel that it would be quite a bit more complicated than "government brings out the big guns, game over," for several reasons:
1. This ignores the historical track record of the US military in asymmetric warfare, fighting determined foes with inferior equipment and weaponry. I'm thinking of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Not perfect comparisons, but worth some thought.
2. It is likely that the US military would see significant desertion and insubordination in such a situation. Military personnel are people too, and many may be reluctant to go to war against their own country.
3. Every state has an Army National Guard and an Air National Guard, and many states has state defense forces. While the National Guard units are legally obligated to obey orders from the federal government, there is no guarantee of what would happen were there to actually be a domestic insurgency.
A populace armed with AR-15s may well be enough of a problem that the opposing force weakens its opposition and starts to fracture.
Again, let us all hope that nothing like this ever happens, but that shouldn't stop us from analyzing in more detail what might happen.
Sure but the whole "we need guns as protection against the government" argument is equally simplistic.
> many may be reluctant to go to war against their own country
Perhaps but the enthusiasm with which e.g. ICE officers have turned against their own country does not give optimism here.
Let's say that we did "ban guns" like we "ban drugs" and now we have a "War on guns". How affective has the "War on drugs" been? How evenly has it been applied? Why would anyone think that the same biased criminal justice system that applies punishment and enforcement of drugs unequally would all of the sudden start applying stricter gun laws equally?
Why do we think that we could anymore keep guns out of the hands of criminals than we could keep drugs out of the hands of people?
Your equivocation seems to imply that gun regulation would either have either no or negative effect on gun ownership and usage. Yet other countries with stricter gun laws than the US have fewer incidents of gun violence, which would appear to suggest that it is, in fact, possible for gun laws to be effective at limiting gun violence.
The question, then, is not whether gun laws can keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but whether one believes they should.
But the big difference is the culture, most people in Australia simply don't want to own a gun, it doesn't define who they are. They don't feel threatened or unsafe by not having one.
Why can't it just be a hobby, or hunting, or sport. I remember having fun shooting at a range. Around 8th grade I joined a local small bore club and shooting range and we shot .22 rifles. It was tons of fun. It wasn't in US, not sure if those things exist here for kids at that age. But anyway I can definitely see people doing it for that reason.
In 1991 (year I was born), a kid brought a sawed-off shotgun to my high school and held up a class, discharging something like 10 shots into the wall. Nobody was injured and everyone made it out alright. This did not get weeks of nonstop national news coverage like contemporary school shooting incidents do. The kid brought a sawed-off shotgun, and handgun legislation was the thing of the time (which has now mysteriously switched to rifle legislation for no perceivably valid reason). Also, nobody died, so there weren't any dead kids to use as the emotional bedrock for any sort of political activism.
When I was in high school, a kid at either my high school or maybe it was the school across town, got a felony for leaving a paintball gun (from the weekend or whatever) in his car and parking it in the school parking lot.
What's changed in the past 30 years?
The crazy gunman shooting at a school pictures himself as George Clooney in a Tarantino movie.
I'd really like to see the stats on this. because I have a feeling that this is quite possibly provably incorrect.
Preferably skip US stats as they are loaded with noise, mishandling and organized crime confusion.
Of course the world is a lot more complicated than that. Yesterday's good guy is tomorrow's school shooter. Domestic violence, alcohol, mental health disorders, theft, and accidents are all cracks in this simplistic worldview. No matter how you cut it, a world where all the good guys have assault rifles with high capacity magazines is a world where the effects of the inevitable -- the breakdown of social order -- are magnified. A shooting spree instead of a bar fight. A family murder-suicide instead of a black eye and a CPS visit. 20 school children dead instead of 10.
This is what NRA supporters don't seem to understand about the world. They're stuck in a comic book good-vs-evil story and they're the hero.
What to say instead? Perhaps that semi-automatic weapons, and magazines over a certain size, should be banned.
Sorry, but that's patent nonsense.
Somewhere north of 3 million AR-15 rifles have been sold. The number of mass murders (not all of which use AR-15s, by any means) committed at schools averages about one per year.
http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o...
You should be embarrassed to even make that claim.
School shootings are rare. Cop murders are rare. No one thinks anyone with a rifle is likely to do these things.
The point, instead, is that in a world full of assault rifles and high capacity magazines and bump stocks, more of these types of things will happen and they will be worse when they do.
This is not rocket science. If it was legal to own RPGs, some people would. And the more people did, the more crazy RPG-related shit would happen. And when we're grieving over a 50 death incident, we'll never be able to prove (to a degree that would convince a member of the National RPG Association) that it would have been 15 if RPGs had been illegal.
We can presumably agree that there's more legal civilian-owned firearms in the US than ever before, yet the national homicide rate has steadily decreased since the 90s https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-30/chicago Bump stocks were first sold in 2010, yet the homicide rate has still slowly declined since then. How does any of this match up with your belief that more firearms owned by civilians, higher capacity magazines available for civilian use, and even the invention and sale of lesser-known (until recently) novelty firearm accessories such as bump stocks lead to increased violent firearm crime?
Your argument is equivalent to the guy holding a snowball and arguing that global warming obviously can't be real.
And if you don't think high muzzle speed and high capacity magazines increase effectiveness (read: ability to kill more school children faster) then you'd better let our military know.
It really takes willful ignorance to pretend that having higher numbers of more effective killing tools has nothing to do with deaths.
maybe this indicates that it's not the firearms themselves that are the problem
And again. The incredibly simplistic way of thinking. The problem? There are many problems! Properly addressing this would take many solutions. Mental health problems are fundamental to our species and may never be completely be eradicated, but we can do better.
One problem that is not fundamental to our species is the easy access to weapons of war. But we do like our toys, don't we.
Actually, it hasn't (at least for school shootings) despite the impression you'd get from the media. See the link I posted before:
http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o...
Only in America you will find someone saying, with a straight face, that one mass murder at school per year does not constitute social crisis...
Something like 15 teenagers (comparable to the number killed in Florida) die every day from texting and driving.
Why aren't those things "social crises"?
Note that I’m not even attacking your premise that accidental deaths during an activity voluntarily engaged, in some way relates to mass murder.
Not really. Life would change for the better if the bad guys found it very difficult to obtain and keep possession of weapons, so the rest didn't have to play the arms race. Of course, since we don't know who's bad and who's good, that means everyone should find it extremely hard to buy and possess. Angry ex-boyfriends would then probably not be (fire-)armed unless they were, or willing to become, serious criminals.
The whole "responsible ownership", and "guns don't kill people, people do", argument also appears broken. It is not legal to own a cruise missile for example, so clearly the weapons themselves are the problem, and there is a level of destructive power beyond which individuals should not be trusted.
IMHO that level should be drawn lower; everyone gets crazy or depressed sometimes, we should reduce the potential for severe consequences.
And even an AR-15 isn't going to be much help against an oppressive government, as the tanks roll down the street, so the whole 2nd amendment argument seems very weak too.
If "guns don't kill people", we'd trust (good) people to wield cruise missiles. Clearly the weapons do kill people.
As for cruise missiles, those are covered by international treaty so outside the scope of discussion.
America also had a decline over the last 25 years.
What about hunters and people who use firearms to obtain some of their food? Not everybody lives in a major metro area with access to the latest food delivery startup.
I have neighbors who own dozens of guns. Some of them hunt. They don't hunt with the Gatling guns or automatic shotguns or any of the really impressive stuff. And yes, there are some pretty impressive guns in my neighborhood. But when they hunt, they break out a .308 or .30-06 or even a little .270. Bolt-action. Their hunting rifles carry 5 shells.
So let me offer a different answer. With what level of destructive power should George Washington have been trusted? Or Sam Houston? Is a cannon too much? With what level of destructive power should anti-Assad Syrian rebels be trusted? Or Ukrainians fighting a Russian incursion? Are shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles a little overkill? If you lived on the Estonian border, what might you be willing to own in partnership with some like-minded neighbors? If you lived in a remote mountainous region and were surrounded one day by "officials" who shot your domestic animals, your wife, and your house without explanation, what level of destructive power would you wish to possess? Would it make a difference if that mountain was located in Idaho? Or Yugoslavia?
You trust individuals with F-22s and tanks. You trust BLM employees with sniper gear. BLM!!? You trust individuals with bombers and nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads. You may justify this as not trusting individuals, but those things are literally in the hands of individuals.
This month a SWAT team was called out against a local police officer. Both sides were trusted with major fire power including grenades and assassin robots, and with major defensive gear. If it takes a SWAT team to deal with a cop having a bad day, what recourse are the neighbors allowed?