Letter #1 to Von: 'A Vision of Peace and Safety'
Reframing the Gun Control Argument
This is my first letter to
on the subject of gun control. While people might not (generally) be as emotionally committed to this debate as they would tend to be in debates about pornographic books on middle school library shelves, or sex modification procedures for minors, some feel quite passionate about gun control. I actually oppose gun control as a general proposition and I agree with ‘s arguments. I am a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a former infantryman and a patriot and a committed defender (by conviction and by oath) of the US Constitution for life-and that includes the 2nd Amendment. Nevertheless, I will here try to ‘steel man’ the gun control position, that is, to understand it thoroughly and marshal the best arguments in its favor that I can think of.Much of what I write relates to political belief-how we form and defend our political ideas. There’s a real value in reading things that you disagree with, but it can feel anxiety-provoking and unpleasant, so people often avoid this activity. With algorithmic biases and an endless ocean of personalized content most people ONLY read and watch content that is consistent with their worldview. Most of us are slowly brainwashing ourselves… and the effects are clear in the tenor of our political discourse.
This is an effort to resist those trends. Thank you for the opportunity,
.Tentative plan for letters:
Letter #1 - ‘A Vision of Peace and Safety’ … in which I will try to articulate what I believe is the real vision and value set motivating gun control advocates. I will comment on Von’s two essays concerning gun control throughout.
The moral dimension of the gun-control argument
The Best Gun Control is a two-handed grip
Letter #2 - ‘The Costs of Rights and Wrongs’ …in which I will finish my response to Von’s two essays on gun control and respond to his response to Letter #1. I will finish explicating my position by pointing out the weaknesses of Von’s deontological (rights-based) moral reasoning, both as an ethical philosophy and especially as a guide for public policy.
Letter #3 - TBD …where I will lay out my responses to Von’s commentary on Letters #1 and #2
Letter #4 - idem. (same as #3)
‘A Vision of Peace and Safety; the Promise of Effective Gun Control’
In many of these debates the two sides seem to be speaking past one another. Each remains committed to her own position and believes in her own values so fervently that she simply cannot imagine how one could believe otherwise. The gun control debate may be such a case.
I will avoid the proposal-by-proposal and social science-heavy debate terms which are usually favored by gun control opponents. The truth is that the pro-gun control side is not energized, I think, by the idea that magazine size limits or waiting periods are going to drastically improve public safety. They support these things, certainly, but they would be far more ambitious with their policy proposals if they didn’t exist in a country with 400 million privately-owned firearms and an entire amendment in the Bill of Rights dedicated to the subject. Rather, they support those measures as incremental steps toward what they truly want: a country without much private ownership of guns, like Japan or Australia or Great Britain. In those countries gun crime and gun deaths (of all kinds-accidents and perpetrators and suicides) are drastically lower and the police aren’t required to carry the level of armament we see in the US. We should be honest about what the gun control advocates really want: a country (for the most part) without guns and the risks and dangers they occasion.
Here I want to invite to Von to respond to that vision. If I grant that it is an extremely heavy lift-in terms of law and policy and culture-and that the data might very well support the proposition that in a gun-saturated country like ours private firearm ownership can well improve the safety of citizens and shoppers and even schoolchildren… can he address my claim: that the benefits of gun ownership (as a collective reality and a culturally-embedded norm) don’t really justify the tens of thousands of deaths that we experience every year in the United States? Is hunting and target practice and collecting really worth the waves of blood and tragedy we experience every year? Answering as a utilitarian or a theonomic Christian or a father: how much theoretical autonomy and constitutional protection does the murder of a hundred schoolchildren cost? How much should it cost? I will address the argument of ‘defense against tyranny’ separately, below.
Pointed Rebuttals:
‘Gun Control’ as a useful term…
The use of terms such as ‘gun crime’, ‘gun violence’, and ‘gun deaths’ distorts the gun control issue. They are unhelpful and I reject them out of hand.
Suppose eight people get murdered on Tuesday night. One of them is shot. One of them is knifed. One of them is bludgeoned to death with a bat. One of them is drowned in a bathtub, intentionally. One of then is stabbed to death with spaghetti noodles. The other three are tied up in the car and pushed off a cliff.
All of them are now dead.
The expression ‘gun death’ makes it sound like one of these things is not like the others. But to their victims the result is the same. Speaking for myself I'd rather be shot then drowned or stabbed to death with spaghetti noodles. But in any case the end result is the same: they are all dead.
If the overall homicide rate does not go down it matters not one whit that there are fewer gun deaths. If people are stabbed by knives or spaghetti noodles they aren’t relieved that it wasn’t a gun.
The best analogy I can summon for this is the equivalences (and not) between deaths from tired drivers and ‘drunk driving’ deaths. While the effects are exactly the same, the patterns of behavior and the legal imperatives and cultural values are different. To whit: people tend to make decisions to drive drunk in a different way and with different incentives than they do to drive tired. We have estimated that one entails a level of recklessness (or even malice) that the other often does not… so we have made one a cultural cliché, while the other one goes fairly unexamined.
Similarly, the numbers of deaths caused by guns are more and will always be more than those caused by spaghetti noodles. More importantly, the risks of untrained use, the temptations for criminals, and the ability to cause death and destruction with a given input of effort are all much different for guns than they are for noodles (or for knives, or for virtually anything else). Laws and policies should reflect this. If you support training for handguns more than for knives than you have already granted the point. ‘Gun control’ is understood to be a discrete set of policy proposals not just by those individuals who support them… but also by those who oppose them.
undermines his argument somewhat by using (some of) the very terms he claims to reject (see the title of this essay, for example).Leveling… versus Aggregate Harm
The point here is that guns provide a ‘levelling’ form of self-defence. The small woman cannot go ‘mano a mano’ with the large guy, but even a small gun in the hands of a small woman provide a certain equality to the encounter.
Only a fool would contest the point that guns provide a reservoir of power and danger which could be employed to defend the weak.
The counterpoint to that is that guns are dangerous for everyone. Guns (especially handguns) are accident prone. They are beloved by criminals (even in well-armed areas) for a reason. They are convenient tools to administer death. They certainly increase the numbers of suicide deaths beyond what they would otherwise be in the U.S.
I saw an Air Force Major (in Afghanistan) drive up to a small base near the airfield in Jalalabad. She took her service weapon out of its holster and racked the action, checking-ostensibly-the chamber and point it into the clearing barrel and pulled the trigger, as is the standard operating procedure. ‘BAM!’ She had forgot to eject the magazine! She racked the slide again and made the SAME mistake… and shot another round into the clearing barrel. BAM! Distraction or idiocy could explain the first error… panic the second. The reasons are irrelevant though. Even professionals with dozens to hundreds of hours of formal range safety training will sometimes make terrible mistakes. The risks of those mistakes rise dramatically with firearms.
You can argue that safety and training can ameliorate the factors of accident and carelessness and malice, and they can, but they cannot eliminate them. In a country with 400 million guns some children will gain access to them and kill their friends by accident. Some hunters will shoot humans, innocently.
This is the other side of the ‘levelling’ coin. They level the risk of tragedy up for everyone in societies with widespread gun ownership and carry.
Now: for the cherished claim that guns are necessary to protect us against government overreach. I will point out here that the most successful revolutionary and reform movements of the past century have generally been nonviolent. Certainly Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) fought state oppression and organized violence… without a single gun. Meanwhile the Black Panther Party aroused fierce resistance against their (admittedly more radical) political program and ended up with nothing, broken by internal schism and a concerted campaign of federal counterintelligence. Their guns availed them nothing and squandered some measure of public sympathy. Mohandas Gandhi won political independence for the entire Indian subcontinent with a nonviolent mass movement. Meanwhile the Tamil Tigers (credited with the savage innovation of suicide bombings) couldn’t even win a tiny homeland in Sri Lanka with their thousands of guns and bombs. Even armed movements often find that their peaceful democratic organizing is more effective. Anarchists achieved absolutely nothing (at least nothing productive… they managed to start World War I, after all) with their wave of bombings in Europe and America more than a century ago… but their more moderate brethren achieved the universal 8-hour workday. The African National Congress (Nelson Mandela’s overall political organization) both organized peaceful protests and boycotts… and carried out bombings of power plants and railroads (with their armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, or ‘Spear of the Nation’). Ultimately their armed struggle accomplished nothing (other than mobilizing a larger share of white society in Durban and Johannesburg against their goals) while their popularity and peaceful grassroots organizing and the living martyrdom of their leadership on Robben Island brought the apartheid regime down and won Mandela the political power and egalitarian civil regime for which he was willing to give his life.
My point is that guns are satisfying for revenge and can be effective for defending a home. Are they really the best tool available to protect freedom? If they were… would that benefit be worth the many hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths that their widespread ownership cause in our country, throughout the years?
What say you?
My next post in this series should be out Saturday morning.
Using the verb stab as in to be stabbed by a knife (or spaghetti noodles) reminded me of one of Jünger's character in Eumeswil explaining the difference between to stab and to slay. Just me being autistic I guess. Good essay!