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A lucid, compelling, and comprehensive argument against...
12 years ago
Gun Control.
(It has been pointed out to me by a very kind soul that the tone of the following article is somewhat self-defeating if its purpose is to convince people. I agree that this is so. If you find my tone offensive so be it. It is yours to allow that tone to put you off the message but know that the message is more important than the messenger and such being the case I hope those of you who've come genuinely interested in solid argument will forgive the messenger his bit of catharsis.)
I shall refrain in the following FROM the following: anecdotal evidence, hyperbole, pleas to emotion, straw man arguments and MOST importantly, ad hominem against proponents of the policies I intend to tear limb from metaphoric limb. If you've the stones after I'm finished to take issue, please also have the intelligence to make cogent arguments. If you lack this, I shall mock you mercilessly. Here we go.
To begin I will tell a story (which will not comprise evidence, just anecdote). I was recently in England visiting my one and only when I had the great good fortune to spend Christmas with her family. I was upon first meeting and continue to be at each subsequent event amazed at how well adjusted every single member of that family is and though some of them seem dedicated (to a fault in my view, but that's for later) to certain propositions I find absolutely appalling, they are in fact genuinely excellent people and treated me very well.
Post food conversation turned inevitably toward topics of a global concern, and as you well know one of the more gut wrenching events in recent history was a school shooting involving child victims. As mass shootings often do this one sparked a renewed national debate on arms control in the United States. My gracious hosts immediately took the position that arms in the possession of the populace, particularly those in the assault rifle class, should under no circumstances be permitted because their ownership by private citizens leads inevitably to tragedy. A member of the family waxed eloquent on how manifestly stupid it was that everyone didn't see the folly of owning weapons, and I took it for only so long before I spoke up, carefully mind you, saying that I was in fact a proponent of the second amendment and approved whole-heartedly of the ownership of weapons by citizens. In fact I believe, and forwarded the belief, that everyone ought to own or at least be certified to carry a firearm who is not precluded by mental health or previous criminal activity.
I am afraid that the animation that ensued prevented me from making a completely cogent argument in defense of this belief, and I left off rather early to prevent bad feeling because as my hosts pointed out, the English are raised to an entirely different culture and as they put it, in England such a thing just absolutely would not work.
Leaving aside the question of cultural ability or lack thereof to accept the responsibilities that come with firearm ownership for the moment, I will detail instead the rather potent arguments FOR said ownership, arguments which the recent speech made by an NRA representative left woefully unattended. (That man, who shall remain nameless in this article, is a fcking idio... oh wait, no ad hominem... well no, this man is on MY side so I can rip him at will. He's a fcking idiot.)
First I need to lay some groundwork for those who have been misled as to the solid rationale behind gun ownership. It actually doesn't start with the guns themselves, it begins with, surprise! the law. Specifically what the law does and does not do.
What it DOES NOT do: prevent crime. I don't need statistics because it is a manifest truth. If in fact the law prevented crime then there would be no crime because no one would engage in legally prohibited activities. They (people) do (commit crime), therefore the law does not prevent crime. This is a logically solid, incontrovertible truth. Don't fight it; you'll only hurt yourself (or more likely make yourself look stupid to anyone who even pretends to use logic to make arguments, though granted that group is shrinking.) I will take this argument a logical step further and surprise all of you again! Ha ha! IF in fact the law DID prevent crime, then there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever to prevent ANYONE from owning ANY TYPE OR NUMBER of weapons on grounds related to criminal activity. We could give assault rifles to children, so long as the law outlawed their use. Also an incontrovertible argument. (Don't even try. I promise, you're pissing on a brick wall hoping to knock it down and that, as any drunk will tell you, is a losing proposition.) If you have your head even loosely screwed on you've accepted the premise that the law does not prevent crime and we may thus move to point the second. (No I haven't forgotten you folk who scream about gun 'accidents.' Making that argument would require further that no one be allowed to drive an automobile, the use of which kills far more people in western society 'by accident' than guns. So don't go there, it's just silly.)
What the law DOES do: give society recourse against the criminal. As a fine author once said and I now paraphrase: once you turn your hand against society, all of society turns its hand against you. Laws give us justification to curtail the activities of those who turn their hands and set their wills against society, and nothing more. Our various societies have various limits on what punishments we consider it appropriate to impose, but in deciding to impose any punishment at all we have clearly availed ourselves of the social contract of which I have earlier spoken. Life in society is tacit AND explicit agreement to abide by social rules. Break those rules and be subject to punishment by the concerted will of the people in the form of government.
So if we're all on the same page (and Dear Gawd I hope we are because this is keeping things painfully simple) it is the punishment promised by transgression of the law which is supposed to deter crime, and it does! Yes it does work, but only so far, only so much, and only so often. As I said I will provide no anecdotal evidence, you've only to turn your mind to the most casual of historical considerations to realize that even the punishments wrought by the law only go so far to deter crime. Note my choice of word here because it is crucial. DETER.
Neither the law NOR its just application of punishment does the following: PREVENT crime. It never prevents crime, ever. Think about that for just a moment. At no point has the law or the promise of punishment ever physically manifested and stopped a crime. It just hasn't happened. It is in fact, beyond the realm of probability. I won't say impossible, because well, anything is possible. To MY knowledge however, it has never, ever, ever happened.
Not once.
Plenty of people thought of the risks involved in committing a crime and were deterred or talked down from the cusp of commission, but not one person in history ever decided to take those risks and been prevented from doing so by the law or its attendant punishments. This isn't Minority Report; the world just doesn't work that way.
NOW! YES! I've laid the cloth and set the table, now to dish up the meat of the argument. I do so with a question to which the answer SHOULD quickly manifest absent any further prodding from me. What does actually prevent crime?
Got an answer? Are you sure?
Did you say guns?
If you did I'm sorry to say that you were too eager to go for the obvious answer and you are sadly, wrong.
Guns do not prevent crime. Guns are, as we shall see, only a tool. What prevents crimes ladies and gentlemen? The answer is, drum roll please....
YOU!
ONLY those present at the commission of a crime have the power to prevent it. Well, they and Gawd, but since He seems to have left things in our generally capable hands I wouldn't pray too hard for Gawd to miracle you or an innocent bystander-cum-victim out of a jam.
If the criminal has no weapons and is weaker than the potential victim (a vanishingly rare occurrence I might add), this is a generally simple task. If he has weapons and/or is not weaker than the potential victim... well things get a bit harder. Nevertheless, here's the tricky, hard to sell point that most people just can't or won't accept: You are responsible, regardless of the odds for or against you, of stopping the crime in progress. If you do not prevent the crime, then it will not be prevented. By all means weigh the odds and decide they are so overwhelming that your chances of success are far outweighed by your value alive and (perhaps) unharmed to your family or the future, but that argument really only works if you're a bystander. If you're the victim and particularly if you are alone, the buck stops with you. That's it. There is no one else. If you do not stop the crime, then the very BEST you can hope for is vengeance. That's it, because that's all society can give you.
If you are raped or murdered, social vengeance will not give you back those horrible moments and take away the nightmares, or restore to you your life. There are no guarantees that if the criminal is later caught what treasures were stolen from you will be recouped. The toil it took to achieve what you have lost vanishes with the commission of the crime.
Add all the preceding arguments up, and Gun Control laws start to look a bit... flimsy. We know they don't work, the proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say, and in the most recent case, the guns used to massacre children at the school were not legally allowed to the man who used them. He STOLE THEM from his first victim.
I can hear it now, "If SHE hadn't had the guns, he wouldn't have been able to get them either!" Look in the mirror. Look yourself in the eye and say that with a straight face. If you can... well, you and I know either you've not given it any thought at all, or you're delusional.
A casual traipse through history shall illumine us: Was there a SINGLE GUN on ANY of the three planes that destroyed the Twin Towers or plowed into the field in Pennsylvania? Did Timothy McVeigh need a SINGLE bullet to kill 168 people including 19 children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD in Oklahoma? Even if we were to assume for a moment that the man involved in the recent shooting hadn't been able to lay hands on a single firearm, can we seriously say that he would have thrown up his hands and lived the quiet life? Without recourse to firearms and given his universally attested to intellect... well, let's simply say that any such argument treads firmly on the grounds of wishful thinking.
A gun is simply a tool, and one of many, that makes both the commission AND the prevention of crime easier. So, that being manifestly the case, in which scenario is it easier for a criminal to commit crime: In the first scenario, it's illegal for anyone to own a gun and the criminal knows that as long as he's robbing law abiding citizens, he's the only one in possession of a firearm. In the second scenario the criminal still has a gun, but he has no idea who else is armed. The little old lady could have a .22 in her bag which makes her MUCH more lethal than the brawny but obviously unarmed jogger next in line at the grocery store. See what I mean?
With the realization that only those present can prevent crime, those actually INTERESTED in preventing crime MUST be in support of as wide as possible a dispersal of guns in society because gun ownership works on precisely the same principle as immunization. We cannot prevent diseases from entering our bodies, but we can inoculate against them. In refusing the vaccine, we have opened the door to infection.
People who honestly believe that a society can be free of firearms hasn't been paying attention. NO society ANYWHERE has EVER prevented a single thing they didn't want from getting into the country. Not guns, not bombs, not viruses or disease, not drugs, not even pest plants or animals. As the drug war in the states suggests, the harder you fight it, the more widespread and robust the underground market for it becomes. England has been vehemently opposed to guns in the hands of its citizens for a long long time... and gun crime there is on the rise.
In the case of Gun Control laws, all you have done in taking firearms out of the hands of law abiding citizens is ease the commission of crime against those same citizens. You've not prevented a single crime. You've not saved a single innocent life. You have in fact made it more likely that innocent lives be taken because those victims who are not cowards will defend themselves even though the assailant has a gun... and they don't.
And if a representative of the NRA had stood up and made THAT speech, I dare say the national conversation would have taken quite a different turn.
(It has been pointed out to me by a very kind soul that the tone of the following article is somewhat self-defeating if its purpose is to convince people. I agree that this is so. If you find my tone offensive so be it. It is yours to allow that tone to put you off the message but know that the message is more important than the messenger and such being the case I hope those of you who've come genuinely interested in solid argument will forgive the messenger his bit of catharsis.)
I shall refrain in the following FROM the following: anecdotal evidence, hyperbole, pleas to emotion, straw man arguments and MOST importantly, ad hominem against proponents of the policies I intend to tear limb from metaphoric limb. If you've the stones after I'm finished to take issue, please also have the intelligence to make cogent arguments. If you lack this, I shall mock you mercilessly. Here we go.
To begin I will tell a story (which will not comprise evidence, just anecdote). I was recently in England visiting my one and only when I had the great good fortune to spend Christmas with her family. I was upon first meeting and continue to be at each subsequent event amazed at how well adjusted every single member of that family is and though some of them seem dedicated (to a fault in my view, but that's for later) to certain propositions I find absolutely appalling, they are in fact genuinely excellent people and treated me very well.
Post food conversation turned inevitably toward topics of a global concern, and as you well know one of the more gut wrenching events in recent history was a school shooting involving child victims. As mass shootings often do this one sparked a renewed national debate on arms control in the United States. My gracious hosts immediately took the position that arms in the possession of the populace, particularly those in the assault rifle class, should under no circumstances be permitted because their ownership by private citizens leads inevitably to tragedy. A member of the family waxed eloquent on how manifestly stupid it was that everyone didn't see the folly of owning weapons, and I took it for only so long before I spoke up, carefully mind you, saying that I was in fact a proponent of the second amendment and approved whole-heartedly of the ownership of weapons by citizens. In fact I believe, and forwarded the belief, that everyone ought to own or at least be certified to carry a firearm who is not precluded by mental health or previous criminal activity.
I am afraid that the animation that ensued prevented me from making a completely cogent argument in defense of this belief, and I left off rather early to prevent bad feeling because as my hosts pointed out, the English are raised to an entirely different culture and as they put it, in England such a thing just absolutely would not work.
Leaving aside the question of cultural ability or lack thereof to accept the responsibilities that come with firearm ownership for the moment, I will detail instead the rather potent arguments FOR said ownership, arguments which the recent speech made by an NRA representative left woefully unattended. (That man, who shall remain nameless in this article, is a fcking idio... oh wait, no ad hominem... well no, this man is on MY side so I can rip him at will. He's a fcking idiot.)
First I need to lay some groundwork for those who have been misled as to the solid rationale behind gun ownership. It actually doesn't start with the guns themselves, it begins with, surprise! the law. Specifically what the law does and does not do.
What it DOES NOT do: prevent crime. I don't need statistics because it is a manifest truth. If in fact the law prevented crime then there would be no crime because no one would engage in legally prohibited activities. They (people) do (commit crime), therefore the law does not prevent crime. This is a logically solid, incontrovertible truth. Don't fight it; you'll only hurt yourself (or more likely make yourself look stupid to anyone who even pretends to use logic to make arguments, though granted that group is shrinking.) I will take this argument a logical step further and surprise all of you again! Ha ha! IF in fact the law DID prevent crime, then there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever to prevent ANYONE from owning ANY TYPE OR NUMBER of weapons on grounds related to criminal activity. We could give assault rifles to children, so long as the law outlawed their use. Also an incontrovertible argument. (Don't even try. I promise, you're pissing on a brick wall hoping to knock it down and that, as any drunk will tell you, is a losing proposition.) If you have your head even loosely screwed on you've accepted the premise that the law does not prevent crime and we may thus move to point the second. (No I haven't forgotten you folk who scream about gun 'accidents.' Making that argument would require further that no one be allowed to drive an automobile, the use of which kills far more people in western society 'by accident' than guns. So don't go there, it's just silly.)
What the law DOES do: give society recourse against the criminal. As a fine author once said and I now paraphrase: once you turn your hand against society, all of society turns its hand against you. Laws give us justification to curtail the activities of those who turn their hands and set their wills against society, and nothing more. Our various societies have various limits on what punishments we consider it appropriate to impose, but in deciding to impose any punishment at all we have clearly availed ourselves of the social contract of which I have earlier spoken. Life in society is tacit AND explicit agreement to abide by social rules. Break those rules and be subject to punishment by the concerted will of the people in the form of government.
So if we're all on the same page (and Dear Gawd I hope we are because this is keeping things painfully simple) it is the punishment promised by transgression of the law which is supposed to deter crime, and it does! Yes it does work, but only so far, only so much, and only so often. As I said I will provide no anecdotal evidence, you've only to turn your mind to the most casual of historical considerations to realize that even the punishments wrought by the law only go so far to deter crime. Note my choice of word here because it is crucial. DETER.
Neither the law NOR its just application of punishment does the following: PREVENT crime. It never prevents crime, ever. Think about that for just a moment. At no point has the law or the promise of punishment ever physically manifested and stopped a crime. It just hasn't happened. It is in fact, beyond the realm of probability. I won't say impossible, because well, anything is possible. To MY knowledge however, it has never, ever, ever happened.
Not once.
Plenty of people thought of the risks involved in committing a crime and were deterred or talked down from the cusp of commission, but not one person in history ever decided to take those risks and been prevented from doing so by the law or its attendant punishments. This isn't Minority Report; the world just doesn't work that way.
NOW! YES! I've laid the cloth and set the table, now to dish up the meat of the argument. I do so with a question to which the answer SHOULD quickly manifest absent any further prodding from me. What does actually prevent crime?
Got an answer? Are you sure?
Did you say guns?
If you did I'm sorry to say that you were too eager to go for the obvious answer and you are sadly, wrong.
Guns do not prevent crime. Guns are, as we shall see, only a tool. What prevents crimes ladies and gentlemen? The answer is, drum roll please....
YOU!
ONLY those present at the commission of a crime have the power to prevent it. Well, they and Gawd, but since He seems to have left things in our generally capable hands I wouldn't pray too hard for Gawd to miracle you or an innocent bystander-cum-victim out of a jam.
If the criminal has no weapons and is weaker than the potential victim (a vanishingly rare occurrence I might add), this is a generally simple task. If he has weapons and/or is not weaker than the potential victim... well things get a bit harder. Nevertheless, here's the tricky, hard to sell point that most people just can't or won't accept: You are responsible, regardless of the odds for or against you, of stopping the crime in progress. If you do not prevent the crime, then it will not be prevented. By all means weigh the odds and decide they are so overwhelming that your chances of success are far outweighed by your value alive and (perhaps) unharmed to your family or the future, but that argument really only works if you're a bystander. If you're the victim and particularly if you are alone, the buck stops with you. That's it. There is no one else. If you do not stop the crime, then the very BEST you can hope for is vengeance. That's it, because that's all society can give you.
If you are raped or murdered, social vengeance will not give you back those horrible moments and take away the nightmares, or restore to you your life. There are no guarantees that if the criminal is later caught what treasures were stolen from you will be recouped. The toil it took to achieve what you have lost vanishes with the commission of the crime.
Add all the preceding arguments up, and Gun Control laws start to look a bit... flimsy. We know they don't work, the proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say, and in the most recent case, the guns used to massacre children at the school were not legally allowed to the man who used them. He STOLE THEM from his first victim.
I can hear it now, "If SHE hadn't had the guns, he wouldn't have been able to get them either!" Look in the mirror. Look yourself in the eye and say that with a straight face. If you can... well, you and I know either you've not given it any thought at all, or you're delusional.
A casual traipse through history shall illumine us: Was there a SINGLE GUN on ANY of the three planes that destroyed the Twin Towers or plowed into the field in Pennsylvania? Did Timothy McVeigh need a SINGLE bullet to kill 168 people including 19 children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD in Oklahoma? Even if we were to assume for a moment that the man involved in the recent shooting hadn't been able to lay hands on a single firearm, can we seriously say that he would have thrown up his hands and lived the quiet life? Without recourse to firearms and given his universally attested to intellect... well, let's simply say that any such argument treads firmly on the grounds of wishful thinking.
A gun is simply a tool, and one of many, that makes both the commission AND the prevention of crime easier. So, that being manifestly the case, in which scenario is it easier for a criminal to commit crime: In the first scenario, it's illegal for anyone to own a gun and the criminal knows that as long as he's robbing law abiding citizens, he's the only one in possession of a firearm. In the second scenario the criminal still has a gun, but he has no idea who else is armed. The little old lady could have a .22 in her bag which makes her MUCH more lethal than the brawny but obviously unarmed jogger next in line at the grocery store. See what I mean?
With the realization that only those present can prevent crime, those actually INTERESTED in preventing crime MUST be in support of as wide as possible a dispersal of guns in society because gun ownership works on precisely the same principle as immunization. We cannot prevent diseases from entering our bodies, but we can inoculate against them. In refusing the vaccine, we have opened the door to infection.
People who honestly believe that a society can be free of firearms hasn't been paying attention. NO society ANYWHERE has EVER prevented a single thing they didn't want from getting into the country. Not guns, not bombs, not viruses or disease, not drugs, not even pest plants or animals. As the drug war in the states suggests, the harder you fight it, the more widespread and robust the underground market for it becomes. England has been vehemently opposed to guns in the hands of its citizens for a long long time... and gun crime there is on the rise.
In the case of Gun Control laws, all you have done in taking firearms out of the hands of law abiding citizens is ease the commission of crime against those same citizens. You've not prevented a single crime. You've not saved a single innocent life. You have in fact made it more likely that innocent lives be taken because those victims who are not cowards will defend themselves even though the assailant has a gun... and they don't.
And if a representative of the NRA had stood up and made THAT speech, I dare say the national conversation would have taken quite a different turn.
MStrand
~mstrand
Would you mind if I sent a copy of this to a friend of mine? I will warn you, he has a habit of resending things without crediting the creator, so feel free to decline.
Cebelius
~cebelius
OP
Fire away. If it goes viral, I can always point to the date on this posting.
