Ungunned

I read a couple of articles today that took issue with the fact that people attending Vice President Pence's talk at the National Rifle Association's convention won't be allowed to bring firearms into the venue with them. There were some rather pointed comments about how, if more law-abiding citizens carrying guns made society safer, why didn't that apply to the Vice President.

For me, the issue with this is that there is a fundamental difference in understanding about the "good guy with a gun" argument. It's designed to work on the sorts of fear of crime that animates a lot of this discussion. An armed citizen on the scene of an attack can intervene much more quickly than a first responder who's not present. But that intervention still needs a trigger. And if the trigger for intervention is the first gunshot, an armed citizen would be unable to stop an assassination attempt.

And this is the issue with positing an armed citizenry as a means of preventing a shooting, rather than lowering the potential body count of that shooting to the first person shot.

Of course, there is also a certain level of motivation in this perception of hypocrisy. Slate's homepage teaser read "Parkland Survivors Noticed That the NRA Banned Guns for Pence's Convention Speech;" and the article says: "The NRA is blaming the Secret Service for the prohibition." I was unsurprised by this; Slate is a commentary site, and an openly partisan on these days, rather than a news site. (The Washington Post seemed to take a less openly partisan stance on the issue.) The rule that there will be no weapons (or potentially easily-improvised weapons) allowed in the presence of the Vice President IS a Secret Service rule, not the National Rifle Association's. After all, the Secret Service is responsible for the security of the President and Vice President, among others. It seems strange that they would suspend their standard operating procedures for protecting their clients in the name of some partisan understanding of intellectual consistency. And, to the best of my knowledge, the Secret Service has not, as an organization, taken up the idea that their jobs could be made redundant by arming more ordinary citizens. Likewise, the NRA has not, to the best of my knowledge, officially promoted the idea that citizens should actively carry weapons into places where they are legally barred from doing to, in anticipation of violence.

This is not to say that gun-rights advocates as a whole have settled on a single, internally (and externally) consistent message. I recently picked up a personal-defense magazine that strongly implied that the overall drop in violent crime that's been happening since the 1990s can be chalked up to greater personal ownership of weapons. But just because the editors of a particular magazine see guns everywhere as a prophylactic doesn't mean that anyone who claims to stand up for the Second Amendment is obligated to belief in armed audience as a viable anti-assassination measure.

But in the end, this issue is driven by one of the same factors that both drives and derails conversation and "debate" about guns in the United States: filter bubbles and ignorance. Slate's article, in particular, does nothing to educate readers on what the Secret Service's rules for venues that VIPs will be visiting are, and implies that the NRA is deflecting its own responsibility. Educating people on the actual rules the Secret Service wants followed, and then laying out what the NRA could have done within that framework would be much more helpful.

That, however, would have made the Parkland students who criticized the NRA appear uninformed. Which, to be honest, they likely are, if they think that the NRA had any direct control over security measures for the Vice President. But I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. Sometimes, the best incentive to learn is being shown to be ignorant.

Wor[l]d of Difference

"There is," according to the posting, "a whole, giant WORLD between thinking you 'deserve' and knowing you are 'worthy of.' Learn the fucking difference."

The righteous anger is almost palpable, and the judgement explicit. And it makes sense, even if, underneath it all, there is a hint of unintentional irony.

While I'm uncertain that this could be classified as a thoughtful posting, I did think about it, and it lead me to understand something. While there may be a world of difference between deserving and being worthy of, "having a right to" often includes both of those concepts. For instance, in the United States, education from Kindergarten through High School can be thought of as being deserved - it is provided free of charge (mostly, anyway) to the public. Likewise, when campaigners for universal access to health care speak of everyone having a right to adequate care, they often mean that in the sense of deserving. Health care is seen as an entitlement, and if people lack the means to obtain it for themselves, then it should be provided for them. Rights as being worthy of is a slightly different animal, but also present. When we talk about a right to dignity, it's mainly in the sense that every person is worthy of being treated with a level of the same, rather than a direct and enforceable entitlement to a specific standard of treatment that may be seen as "dignified."

To be sure, not everyone understands rights as encompassing both concepts. I, for my part, don't. In my understanding of the world, a right is limited to something "deserved" in the sense of a formalized entitlement granted by a body ready, willing and able to enforce it. So I don't recognize, for instance, that there is a right to health care in the United States. That may be the ideal, but currently, no such actual right exists.

And so when I first read Graeme Wood's assertion, in his (inapt, in my opinion) comparison between Alek Minassian, and the "Involuntary Celibate" subculture with which he is associated and the Islamic State, that: "To have a sex life of some sort seems to me a human right," it seemed utterly inane. Especially considering that Mr. Wood goes on to note that: "It’s claiming the right to another person’s sex, or retribution if it is denied, that crosses from an exercise of one’s own humanity to an infringement on someone else’s, in a form of slavery." After all, it if takes two to tango, how can one have a right to dance, if everyone can legitimately decide they won't be the partner?

But if you read the passage as: "To have a sex life of some sort seems to me something that all humans are worthy of. It’s claiming one deserves another person’s sex, or retribution if it is denied, that crosses from an exercise of one’s own humanity to an infringement on someone else’s, in a form of slavery," it makes much more sense (even if I am still a bit dubious about it). But in the original, in both instances, the word "right" is used. Both the exercise of one's own humanity and an infringement on the humanity of another are categorized as a "right." And so it comes down to what rights one does or does not have, rather than the fundamental difference between "knowing you 'are worthy of'" and "thinking you 'deserve'."

And while this example jumped out at me because it was fresh in my mind, and I was planning to write about it anyway when I saw the social media post that heads this essay, I have encountered this sort of thing before. Mr. Wood's conflation of two very different things under the heading of "rights" is not unique. Part of it is a basic problem with English vocabulary as it used in everyday speech and writing; a notable lack of precision. English has a wide range of synonyms and near synonyms. (One thing that I learned while working for Wizards of the Coast is that Magic: The Gathering cards that have different names in English will sometimes have the same name in other languages {Japanese being the specific example I recall} because those other languages lack enough synonymous terms to carry the same concept with all of the different wordings that English can manage.) And to the degree that language governs thought, the fact that "knowing you 'are worthy of'" and "thinking you 'deserve'" can, in certain contexts, be gathered together under the heading of "rights" blurs the distinction between them, often beyond recognition.

And so we are left with people who do not learn the difference, because, as they understand the language, there isn't one.

Blanket

I normally don't make this many photo posts in sequence, but it's been nice out recently, and I've always felt that I tend to write about things that annoy me, rather than positive things.

Surf's Up

Ad Infinitum