Sneering

There’s another element of the conservative movement that has primed this shift toward gun rights. Historically, the first line of defense against danger is the state. But the rise in individualism of recent decades, the growing paralysis of our national government over recent decades, and intense conservative campaigns to sow mistrust of government as too big, too bureaucratic, and too incompetent combine to make the government an uncertain ally. A superficially realistic and healthy response is for individuals to take matters into their own hands and arm themselves to protect themselves and their families.
John Ehrenreich "Why Are Conservatives So Obsessed With Gun Rights Anyway?"

One of the issue with American politics, as I see it, is that the two primary sides understand that the other holds them in complete contempt. This passage (well, honestly, pretty much the entire piece, really) illustrates one of the reasons why Conservatives often feels that Liberals are contemptuous of them. I can understand the point that the state is the first line of defense against danger. But that's a lot different than saying that an individual's first line of defense against individual danger is the state. This would take the nanny state to its illogical extreme, requiring it to be involved in, and directing, people's lives 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. After all, it's difficult to protect that which you cannot control.

The law-enforcement apparatus of the United States protects us from individual threats, like violent crime, by swiftly and surely sanctioning offenders, giving people who may commit crimes a reason to reconsider their actions. Except for the fact, as many of us understand, that the system doesn't actually work that way. Many crimes go unsolved. Even for crimes in which a suspect is identified, a conviction may not be obtained. And even when a suspect is convicted, the convicted person may or may not actually be the perpetrator. And if an innocent person goes to jail, then one can presume that the actual criminal is still out there. One does not need to view a government as even moderately incompetent to understand the difficulty of of the task at hand. But Professor Ehrenreich seems to presume that the understanding that the government cannot be the personal bodyguard for 300+ million individuals leads to what he terms "pseudorealistic anxiety."

But outside of the very real phenomenon of people overestimating the risks from rare, but mediagenic threats (of which mass shootings are one), he doesn't explain what's so unrealistic about thinking that one may targeted by a violent crime. After all, even considering just those attacks carried out with knives the murder rate in the United States is higher than that for all methods of murder in Great Britain. And even in societies where murders and assaults are rare, it can make sense to have some means of protecting oneself. I live in the suburbs of Seattle, and the nearest police department isn't all that far away, maybe a mile as the crow flies. But were someone to come through my door right now with a baseball bat and murder on their minds, if my only hope is to wait for the police to arrive, I'd be screwed.

And this is the issue that Professor Ehrenreich never addresses. Firearms are popular tools of self defense because they are understood to be easy to use an effective. Despite the fact that guns are not inerrantly lethal weapons, we often treat them as such, and therefore we tend to discount the general usefulness of other tools. Not that most people would bother carrying a sword around with them, but they're very dangerous weapons. While police seem to understand this (I was stopped once while literally moving a naked sword ten feet between the trunks of two cars), however, Slate considers sword murders a joke (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/01/nerd_violence.html) with nerds as the punchline. A working of knowledge of martial arts and other hand-to-hand combat styles are also viable tools for defending oneself - given a trained martial artist and an untrained gunman, my money is on the martial fighter.

But guns are considered quick and easy. Despite the fact that without some basic training and some range time, the danger a gun represents is a random quality, which my kill someone or may not, and that someone may or may not be the person the wielder was intending to shoot, we tend to view guns as making any random Joe into a killing machine. And in a world were the average person lacks access to any sort of personal bodyguarding, taxpayer-funded or not, the ability to project (often lethal) force when you need it is attractive.

The problem with the government is not, as Professor Ehrenreich puts it, that it is an uncertain ally. It's that it isn't an ever-present one. Granted, the occurrence of crime isn't ever-present, either. And both are unequally distributed. But even with that, the places with the highest levels of policing are not, simply because of that, the least dangerous. (I will admit to noting a certain irony when people who would rather drop dead than be within 100 miles of "the inner city" cite "inner city violence" as a threat they need to protect themselves against.) So I'm not necessarily saying that everyone who worries about the need to protect themselves against violent crime has to.

But this works both ways. A Liberal mindset that sees danger in every gun is no more rational than a Conservative mindset that sees vulnerability in every moment without one. Mass shootings, despite the fact that they are very mediagenic, are rare. And there are pretty much no repeat offenders in the category. Given that they are such a small percentage of violent crime, if the state should be considered the first line of defense against being mugged, why not against being randomly shot? True, there is a mindset that says that if one could do away with all the gun, then muggings would drop too. And there may be some truth to that. But it presumes that weapons cause crime (that access to weapons create criminals), rather than crime causes weapons (that people who intend to commit a crime see access to weapons). But if Liberal fears of mass violence cannot be assuaged by the spotty presence of agents of the state, why should Conservative fears of much more common (but still rare) acts be?

One could simply chalk this up to being unthinking, but I think that there is an argument to be made that partisanship often goes hand in hand with the understanding that "the other side" is simply irrational. And people tend to view that as being disrespected. That may be an incorrect viewing of it, but it isn't an unreasonable one.

One In

So back when I was 15, I entered the demographic of Black (or African-American, if you like) males of between 15 and 34 years old. And as one might reasonably guess, I stayed there for 20 years. There's nothing really special about that, in the grand scheme of things. After all, everyone who makes it to 35 has spent 20 years in the 15 to 34 age cohort.

What makes that group interesting, or perhaps tragic is a better term, is that the leading cause of death for people in that demographic is homicide. For a little more than the first half of my time there, I lived in and around Chicago. President Trump might like to hold up the current violent crime rate in the city as evidence that Democratic mayors suck, but it was worse when I lived there. Worse to the degree that a Black male between 15 and 24 had some insane chance of being shot at least once; I can't remember it any more, but I think it was somewhere in the area of 1 in 6, or maybe 1 in 5. Of course, this is somewhat different than the homicide numbers - not all gunshots result in homicides and not all homicides are from gunshots, but I always had this looming sense that violence lurked nearby.

Not death, but violence. I'd been hospitalized for kidney stones (the first of many) when I was 19, and a tardy nurse wound up leaving me with the impression that my future was going to be cut very short by an air embolism. I, obviously, survived that very long night, but my fear of death didn't. My newfound respect for pain, however, survived intact and I knew that violence and suffering were close friends.

The biggest birthday party that I've ever thrown for myself was my 25th. I'd finally aged out of the Danger Zone. Of course, I still had 10 more years of being in a demographic whose leading cause of death was homicide, but the chances has gone down. Of course they hadn't gone away, and I knew that.

It's a weird thing, never feeling "safe." And not only because I understood my chances of being on the wrong end of a bullet. In Chicago, as I remember it, rain, and thunderstorms, were normally evening and night phenomena. Not always, but usually. One June, I think it was, it rained, and thunderstormed, a lot during the day. If I'm remembering correctly, 18 people were struck and killed by lightning that month, including a family of 4, killed all at once.

A very Christian acquaintance of mine remarked to me that some grievous sin must have led to a divine smiting. "It didn't happen for a reason," I answered. "The lightning doesn't care."

I didn't realize it at the time, but the world I was constructing for myself was both dangerous and random. Life could be shattered for any reason at any moment, but that didn't make it precious - it just made it life. This was the way the world was. It was not fair, it was not just and it did not care what happened to you. It just was. And that meant that sometimes, the lightning found you. Or maybe a bullet did. Or maybe a blood clot in your leg came loose and you never knew what hit you.

It sounds bleak, I know, but I never really saw it that way. My friends, most of whom were White, never saw it at all. Their worlds were safer and more orderly than mine. Where the death of someone like them was a tragedy. A cause for emotion and reaction. The death of someone like me went unnoticed. Not because they were cruel. I suspect that if the lightning or a bullet had found me, they'd have been heartbroken. But heartbreak is a finite resource. There isn't enough of it to grieve day after day after day. Besides, most of the unlucky dead were in the 'hood. Drug dealers and thugs, obviously. People who gambled on living dangerously, and lost. Nothing to do with them.

Eventually, I learned that one of the primary predictors or being murdered was knowing someone who had been murdered. That bit of order to the chaos calmed things somewhat. By the time I moved to the Seattle area, I wasn't as concerned that a bullet had my name on it. The lightning still didn't care, but thunderstorms are rare here. But still, I wonder what can be done about the 20-year span in which for people who "look like me," homicide is the leading cause of death. I wonder if the kids I worked with when I was in my early twenties all made it out alive. (The odds say at least some of them didn't.) And that wondering prevents me from being worked up about mass shootings. There are bigger fish to fry.

Yes, mass shootings make for scary headlines. And that's why I don't worry about them. Someone once noted, that when things were in the headlines, it didn't make sense to worry about them. They make headlines precisely because, in the grand scheme of things, they're rare, and that's what makes them newsworthy. When they stop making headlines, then worry. And the one here, two there killings of Black males from 15-34 are far too common for headlines. And the reforms and changes that people demand when the news trucks are around aren't likely to change that. Other measures will be needed. More measured ones, most likely.

It's been a while since I was in that demographic that was so marked, and marred, by violence. That blowout 25th birthday party is half a lifetime gone. I don't know that I'm wiser, but I am older, and I don't worry as much. After all, homicide is only the seventh leading cause of death for Black men my age. What are the odds?

Return of Winter

Know-Nothing

One thing that I don't understand about the some people on the American left is their dogged insistence on entering the firearms debate without accurate information.

Consider this graphic. The weapon labelled as: "The gun our founding fathers used," simply isn't. It's a modern black powder percussion weapon, not even a reproduction of a known period weapon. The U.S. didn't use percussion weapons until the 1840s. The one illustrated has double set triggers, which weren't around until the 1820s; still too late for the Revolution. The weapon illustrated would have been more at home on a Civil War battlefield. In the Revolutionary war, it would have been bleeding edge, if not literally futuristic. From what I've seen many early percussion rifles managed three or four shots a minute, so one or two rounds a minute would be slow, but reasonable, especially since you have decent sights and can aim carefully.

But inaccuracies in the illustration aside, if you stepped out on to a Revolutionary war battlefield with a smoothbore Land Pattern Musket, you'd have been armed as well as everyone else on the battlefield. Depending on how good with the gun you were, you'd maybe be able to double the numbers given, so between 2 and 4 rounds per minute, but if you could only manage one or two, you'd be in the ballpark.

Now the illustration of the "AR-15" is also inaccurate. With a barrel that short, the gun would be a Short Barrelled Rifle under federal law, and those are restricted under the National Firearms Act. A teenager could simply have walked into a gun store and bought one, but they require a special license. The Smith and Wesson M&P 15 that the shooter used doesn't come with a barrel that short for just that reason. (Short barreled weapons also have crappy resale values because of the limited pool of people who can buy them, so they'd be unlikely to simply be on the shelves.)

But again, inaccuracies in the illustration aside, if the best your weapon could do is 45 rounds a minute, you'd be outclassed on any battlefield in living memory. Even the World War 2 M1 Garand rifle, which is bolt action and only holds 8 rounds at a time, could manage 40 to 50 rounds per minute. In just about any military conflict that anyone alive is old enough to remember, you'd be facing people with weapons that either fired (much) farther, used heavier bullets, had higher rates of fire or all three. Pretty much any semi-automatic weapon, or bolt-action weapon with a multiple-round magazine, could sustain 45 rounds a minute.

I mention this because the weapon as described in the Occupy Democrats graphic wouldn't be a frontline military rifle. It would be the sort of thing that you'd find paramilitaries using. In fact, there are very few weapons available to the broad base of civilians who lack special licenses that would be capable of keeping up with even second or third-tier frontline military weapons. And in that sense, the Second Amendment has more than kept up with the times. If you reported to General Washington with a Brown Bess musket, you were likely using the very same weapon that the British soldiers were using. If someone were to send me out onto a battlefield with an AR-15, I'd be tempted to ask what I'd ever done to them, because as someone who hasn't done much shooting in the past 30+ years, I'd really be in trouble if that was the best I had to work with.

The problem with the Left being ignorant of weapons is that it makes them non-credible in a debate. A gun control advocate asked me the following on social media:

Are you opposed to national laws for gun licensing, including closing loopholes like gun shows, safety standards, including things like RFID to make sure only properly licensed users can use their guns? Banning bump stocks, magazines holding more than 10 shots, exploding bullets?

And I responded:

It's interesting. I look at the list you provided, and I don't see a plan for reducing firearms deaths. It strikes me mainly a list of reactive measures designed to prevent mass shootings with particular weapons and using specific technologies. (And I'm pretty sure that explosive rounds, which are of dubious use in small arms, are already illegal for civilians - I don't even know if a class three SOT would allow you to deal in them them.) Despite the media headlines, these things are rare. If I remember correctly, domestic violence and suicide are the big drivers of firearm assaults and deaths. Street crime might slot between the two or it might be further down. I'm not sure.

And I think that this is the problem with this only being an issue when there are headlines around it - it leads to a focus on the causes of the specific headlines that driving the awareness, rather than the factors that are driving the actual occurrences.

His reply was:

Look at how the kid in FL and also the kids for the Columbine massacre purchased the weapons. And how the Sandy Hook. shooter got the weapons. Look at the kind of weapons they used. And 'Many states today consider it legal to use exploding bullets weighing less than 400 grams against material targets.' from Weaponslaw. Not sure where the disconnect is. The biggest problem is that the left talks about gun restrictions and safety, and the gun lobby interprets that as disarming law abiding citizens, leading to government tyranny, and creates waves of FUD and angst.

The problem was is that his statement about "exploding bullets" didn't refer to the states that make up the United States, but rather to nation-states, like, well the United States of America. "The disconnect" was that he was citing a source that he either didn't understand or hadn't actually read. And at that point, I started tuning him out. Why debate someone who clearly doesn't know what they are talking about? And when I pointed out to him that he's basically misinterpreted the entire statement, he attempted to label hollowpoint bullets as "exploding." Why debate someone who isn't interested in having their misconceptions corrected?

I get that being anti-gun to the point where you know little to nothing about them is a point of pride for some people on the American Left. But the problem with being ignorant about a topic is that you can't effectively debate it. Because it's really hard to come to rational and reasonable conclusions from faulty information. For the gun debate to get anywhere, there needs to be knowledge on both sides. And if one side feels that the level of information available to an informed layperson is somehow off-limits, they're always at a disadvantage.

Logic Bomb

Christianity, as a general rule, has a problem with sex. Perhaps not a big a problem as Islam may have with sex, or Hinduism, but the stereotype of Christians, especially when you move to the conservative end of the spectrum, wanting sexuality to be controlled and limited to circumstances that comport with their reading of the Bible, is fairly grounded in reality.

The Republican party of the United States, as a general rule, is the party of Christianity. This isn't to say that one must be a Christian in order to be a Republican (although it certainly helps). But the stereotype of Republicans, in that if anyone is likely to propose or push for legislation that effectively encodes Christian mores and strictures into ostensibly secular law, it will be a Republican, is fairly grounded in reality.

This semi-overt religiosity forms one of the commonly understood pillars of the modern-day Republican party: Social conservatism, generally understood as adhering to a particular brand of more-or-less Christian ethics; defense hawkishness, commonly manifesting itself as a commitment to a strong national military (and, collaterally, a strong military-industrial complex, even in the negative connotations of that term) and fiscal conservatism, which is something of an umbrella term that generally encompasses a desire to see government spend as little money as possible and leave things to private industry whenever remotely feasible. Pro-business and pro-capitalism may or may not be considered a pillar, depending on if you park it under the umbrella of fiscal conservatism. And there's small government/"individual liberty." This is a contentious one, because it's often at odds with other things that Republicans tend to associate themselves with, such as law and order.

But one of the big conflicts in the stereotypical Republican platform is between individual liberty and social conservatism. Grover Norquist may be famous for driving the Republican party to support the idea of a government so small that one could drown it in one's bathtub, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a push to allow it remain large enough to effectively police people's morality.

And that's where Republican moves against pornography come into play. It doesn't take long to figure out that a political party that wants to both encode lip service to Christian sexual morality into law and allow people to do as they please is going to have a conflict in this space. To be sure, regardless of whatever principles a political party claims to hold, political pillars are generally matters of expediency. The American Right might claim a desire for greater personal liberty, but if that results in the perception that the Left is indulging in libertinism, all of that goes out the window. Enforcing sexual continence trumps small government.

But this fact, in an of itself, does not mean that everything trumps small government, and so the Liberal argument that says: If Republicans are willing to entertain bans on pornography and use social harms as a reasoning, then they should be willing to entertain restrictions on civilian access to firearms, since the arguments for those are also a reduction of social (not to mention physical) harms. While on the one hand, it's a clever trap to use the bogus cover story for what is mainly an attempt impose Christian morality on society at large as evidence of hypocrisy, on the other, because the Republican focus on alleged social harm is transparently a cover story, the hypocrisy angle becomes moot. The article in The Atlantic that makes this case becomes something of a straw man argument in this, mainly because while it attributes support for pornography bans to Utah Republican representative Todd Weiler, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Boyce College professor of biblical studies Denny Burk, it never attributes support for small government and personal liberty to them, instead describing the infrastructure needed to enforce it as "contrary to many conservatives’ stated objectives and free-market approach." (Emphasis mine.)

That sort of charge of institutional hypocrisy is not only logically dubious, but it works both ways. One could easily see a conservative publication making the point that if writers for The Atlantic are willing to employ the tools of government to ban firearms in the name of preventing social harms, Democrats should conceivably be open to discussing further restrictions on abortion, which car be argued to cause social harm. And if liberals are willing to use the use the arguments that some Republicans and conservative voices have used as a rationale to ban pornography to argue that those same people should support greater restrictions on firearms, does that mean that they would accept bans on pornography, or sex-related media more broadly? Should prosecutions of sex-workers be stepped up? Should the crackdown on illegal drugs be continued? What about illegal immigration? If the point is that socially-conservative Republicans should be willing to deploy the government to fight guns, as well as social issues, does that mean that Democrats should also work with them to implement the social bans?

Setting hypocrisy traps for people whose ideas one doesn't like is a waste of time. Especially when, as in the column in The Atlantic, the point is little more than to cast the other side as unreasonable and inconsistent. The world is a complicated place. And people have complicated views on it, that tends to lead to a interwoven raft of compromises. Pretending not to recognize that, so that one can criticize people for failing to shackle themselves to a foolish constancy accomplishes nothing.