Gundefined

The term "gun" is a broad one, and as such it has a number of definitions based on both form and function. But, when we talk about guns in public discourse, as we often do when "gun violence" makes its way into someplace that Mainstream America considers "safe," it's not always clear that we're talking about those definitions. Or at least, that's what my observation of the debate tells me.

Broadly speaking, when we talk about the gun/gun control debate in the United States, we're talking about a split in "working class" and higher America. Violence is endemic enough in poor Black and Hispanic communities that no-one bats am eyelash at it. Whether they consider it a side effect of a culture of inequality, or the predictable consequences of laziness and a bent towards criminality, it's just par for the course in some neighborhoods. And for all that we say that we value a unified nation, we've never really been a unified populace - and Americans are no less likely than anyone else to determine that "Not my problem" is the functional equivalent to "Not a problem." But in those classes of American society where violence is just enough of a factor that it has a place in the imagination, there are basically two camps. What they have in common is that they tend to equate guns with violence and lethal force.

Guns mean the ability to act on the urge to kill.

For Blue-State America (to use a common political breakdown which is of some use here), guns become the means by which violent urges become violent acts that become the deaths of innocent people, and although a world without guns (which is really simply a world in which only the right people have guns) is not entirely a world without violence, it is a world in which violence is more easily localized, contained and survivable.

For Red-State America, guns become the means by which one defends oneself and loved ones from the violent urges of others - and many of these Others are dangerous, even if they do not have guns. Others may be bigger, stronger, faster and more versed in the ways of violence, but a gun makes all things equal, so that those who were once vulnerable and weak cam now stand up for themselves without reliance on authorities - who are likely to be slow to respond - if not agents of dangerous Others themselves.

And when we add the nebulous category of "assault weapons" into the mix, meanings can shift again. The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, otherwise known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, dealt only partially with the function of the weapons it targeted, concerning itself mostly with outward appearances, potential accessories and even weight to some degree. For many members of the general public, assault weapons are like pornography - they may not be able to define them, but they know one when they see one. And again, there are shared elements in the way the two camps see them.

Assault weapons mean certain things about Others and groups.

For Red-State America, assault weapons can take the image of The Great Equalizer a step further - allowing one brave person to stand up against the dangerous Other even when the Other comes in groups.

For Blue-State America, assault weapons allow dangerous Others to kill and maim many more people at one time than they could otherwise, turning what would be at most a handful of dead or injured into dozens or scores of casualties, and to bring violence into areas that, because they are inhabited by groups, would otherwise be Safe.

This is, of course, not the whole of the divide, nor the whole of the debate. One could write entire volumes on the topic. An evening's blog post will barely scratch the surface. But when you look at these different understanding of what guns mean, of what assault weapons mean, it begins to become clearer why the two sides are so at odds with one another. Even if it offers no hints on how to bridge the divide.

Make Me Feel Fine

Blowing through the jasmine in my mind...

The Proper Time

I have nothing against accuracy, or even precision, in public discourse. It comes in very handy, and, to be honest, is all too often lacking. But it's one thing to make sure that we're all speaking the same language, or that we're broadly sticking to the facts, and it's another to attempt to derail another person's argument by picking away at the words they they're using.

The central problem that we have in the "debate" over firearms, and access thereto, in the United States, is that the two camps that are the loudest are diametrically opposed to one another. Speaking in generalizations, there is a camp that believes that the role of the State is to limit or deny access to personal weaponry to all but those institutions controlled or sanctioned by the State - the military, law, enforcement and security organizations - and that we will all be safer for it. The opposing camp believes that the role of the State is to protect access to personal weaponry for any citizen that wishes one who has not already been proven a danger - and that we will all be safer for it. Again, generally speaking, each camp believes that the other acts with bad faith, seeking to sacrifice others for its own ends. And for the most part, neither side owns up to the sacrifices that its chosen path entails, preferring to either deny them or blame them for their fates.

In an attempt to make what are often emotional arguments into seemingly objective ones, people fashion selectively-chosen facts into clubs with which to bludgeon their opposition, and seek to silence by demanding a rigid adherence to those facts and figures. Which moves us no closer to anything resembling progress.

Befitting the Crime

“Think of the value of a two-year prison sentence in terms of what this would communicate about our social norms,” [Michele] Dauber said. “No matter who you are, no matter how important you are as an athlete, or that you’re white, or that you go to Stanford, we make no exception for you [...].”
Adrienne LaFrance “What Makes the Stanford Rape Case So Unusual”

Other people have echoed this sentiment, making the point that longer prison sentences communicate that we take the crimes of rape and sexual assault seriously. But that prompted me to think, who are we making that point to? I mean, the only reason that I’d ever heard of Brock Turner was that the victim’s statement went viral. Otherwise, it’s rare for rape cases to make national headlines, and so how often do we really hear about the sentences? My own understanding of the social norms around sexual assault is that being accused of a rape has pretty good chance of landing me in jail for a very long time, if not the rest of my life - whether I did it or not. And I will admit that there are times I organized my life around the idea that being suspected of a crime is very, very bad for me, and something to be avoided at all costs.

These two things are linked in that we rarely hear about the run-of-the-mill cases in which the justice system works more or less in line with our expectations - mainly, I think, because being unsuitable for sympathy and/or outrage mining, these stories are not deemed worth reporting. And so what makes the news are those cases in which a young man receives a six-month sentence for sexual assault because a judge wants to cut him a break or when a man is released from prison after serving part of a life sentence because it turns out that the confession was bogus or an eyewitness identification was flawed.

What occurred to me when people were making the argument that the light sentence in the Turner case sent a message about how much we valued the victims of sexual violence was that I had no real idea of what the standard sentence for rape was. It turns out that I vastly overestimated it - mainly because of the effect that I noted above. I’m accustomed to hearing about men being exonerated while serving long sentences - but it turns out that, for example, some of the members of the Central Park Five had already served more than the average sentence for rape cases before being exonerated.

So if we’re only hearing about the outliers - the cases where the outrage mill has ginned up in its never-ending search for attention - how will we ever understand what our broader social norms are, let alone what we intend them to be? If the cases in which there are no disparities, where justice truly is blind and the system works never make the headlines, who other than lawyers and legal junkies will ever know about them? In this, I think that all of us are flying blind. The legal system’s effectiveness as a deterrent is undermined by a lack of understanding of what punishments fit what crimes, and people are unwilling to trust it, because it only enters the picture when something goes wrong with it.

Not Unanticipated

“And [Congress] certainly didn’t anticipate that manufacturers would utilize the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] to kill competition, stop software tinkering, chill research, and prohibit ‘unauthorized’ repairs.”
Kyle Wiens “Copyright, the Internet of Things, and the End of Ownership”

I’d be surprised to find that’s true. The idea that it would be illegal to make modifications to technology is older than 1998. I suspect that Congress, on many occasions, has written laws that grant powers that are remarkably easy to abuse, and simply taken it on faith that companies won’t abuse them.

There is an idea, I think, that the general public watches corporate entities like hawks, and is ready to vote with their wallets en masse at the first sign of assholery. But I don’t think that this is anywhere near the truth. The fact of the matter tends to be that many people feel that corporations can be trusted to one degree or another (in large part, I think, because they've convinced themselves that _someone_ out there is looking out for them). Take the case of Leo Skolnick.

“Mr. Skolnick smoked, and smoking caused his cancer,” said Scott Schlesinger, one of the attorneys for Mrs. Skolnick. “But he trusted the word of tobacco companies who told him over the decades that tobacco was safe.”

Yes, one can make the case that he should have known better than to believe that cigarettes weren’t dangerous, but it’s worth pointing out that tobacco companies once featured physicians in their advertising. And it’s unlikely that they would have pushed the line for so long, if they hadn’t expected, on some level, to be believed, at least by someone.

And many of our interactions with businesses operate in a decidedly one-sided manner. As I noted back in 2011, we’ve become accustomed to signing legally binding contracts before we've actually read them. When I asked for a copy of cellular phone company's terms and conditions beforehand, so I could use that as a way of differentiating between companies, only Verizon had copies in their retail stores in an easily-accessible place. The employees and Sprint and T-Mobile wouldn’t even have known the document if they saw it. And while the management of my apartment complex are used to it now, I used to throw them for a loop by asking them to print up a copy of each new lease a week before I planned to sign it, so that I could read it, word for word, first.

Of course, not everyone is convinced that corporations are on the up and up - or that the public is paying attention. Elizabeth Warren crusaded for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency precisely because believes that people don't read contracts, especially financial ones, and wouldn’t understand them if they did. (After listening to her, I was surprised to find that my bank’s credit card contract was only about one-eighth as long as the ones she references.)

And I think that there is also another factor at play, one more deeply rooted in American history, and that is that wealthy people and organizations are inherently more moral than the rest of us. This allows for a society that expects companies to always act in a trustworthy manner, and looks askance at the public. Despite the fact that no-one is perfect, and the United States Postal Service is no exception, business are allowed to assume that a) if they put a correspondence in the mail, the intended recipient absolutely received it and b) if they didn’t receive a correspondence, it wasn’t sent. By the same token, they’re allowed to make reimbursements for errors on their own timetables, yet punish customers for failing to do things when the company wants them done, without oversight - despite the fact that a business having a customer’s money for a long period of time is likely to be much more damaging than a customer having a businesses money.

None of this is a secret. It’s just way things are organized. And, given that, I think that we should be prepared to assume that the Powers That Be are fully aware of this reality.