Posted on 12/16/2012 6:29:18 AM PST by CharlesMartelsGhost
If you’re the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you’re evolutionarily minded, then it’s a “chicken and egg” question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang; it was always here, coded into the DNA.
The issue isn’t really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.
The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It’s not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.
Mostly it’s about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren’t. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.
After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year-olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students who bring pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn’t happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything.
Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you’re sure to stop all the shootings.
So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.
But this isn’t really about stopping shootings; it’s about controlling when they happen. It’s about making sure that everyone who has a gun is in some kind of chain of command. It’s about the belief that the problem isn’t evil, but individual agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop. Or if it doesn’t stop, then at least there will be someone higher up in the chain of command to blame. Either way authority is sanctified, control or the illusion of it, maintained.
We’ll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We’ll never know how many were killed by Obama’s regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, “Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying.”
Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it’s the lack of a controlling authority for all those guns. It’s the individual. A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it’s the millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.
Moral agency is individual. You can’t outsource it to a government and you wouldn’t want to. The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual. Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies, nor do they even do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders. Organizations are the biggest guns of all, and some men and women who make Lanza look like a man of modestly murderous ambitions have had their fingers on their triggers and still do.
Gun control will not really control guns, but it will give the illusion of controlling people, and even when it fails those in authority will be able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.
We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, whose great faith is that the power to control men and their environment will allow them to shape their perfect state into being, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting, that utopia has its tigers, and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.
The clamor for gun control is the cry of sheltered utopians believing that evil is a substance as finite as guns, and that getting rid of one will also get rid of the other. But evil isn’t finite and guns are as finite as drugs or moonshine whiskey, which is to say that they are as finite as the human interest in having them is. And unlike whiskey or heroin, the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun.
People do kill people and the only way to stop people from killing people is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything, but to everyone else, it’s just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.
An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.
Very well written.
Bingo! Government gunmen, performing their official duties under proper orders, issued by the appropriate authorities, killed well over one hundred million human beings, just in the last century...
Overall gun violence is really a criminal management problem and can be reduced with criminal management solutions. These mass murders committed by people going off the edge are much harder to pervent.
But so wrong. The cause in cases like this is almost always a psychological med that causes rage or violent outburst.Doctor responsibility would require no access to weapons or car until he is cured if ever.
Can you imagine where Big Government/Big Brother Liberals would take this line of reasoning?
Clear thinking at its best......
You put forth a nice thought but not practical or achievable. The diagnosis in this case was apparently aspergers syndrome, which does not include aggressive tendencies. From what I have read, the mother was a very responsible person. It is hard to believe that she would not have secured the weapons better if she had doctor's advice to do so or any other reason on her own to do so. It is always possible the boy may have gotten a hold of some illegal drugs. I highly recommend Greenfield's common sense articles. He is one of the best. As he says, ". . . the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun." I still want to know who the guy in the woods was that the first reports said was Adam Lanz, at the same time saying the shooter was Ryan. Then they said Adam had Ryan's ID.
Once in, I found my supplies and decided it might be a good time to buy that Kimber Ultra Crimson II I've been wanting. The shop had one left, so I filled out the paperwork, handed the guy my credit card, and he said he would contact me before the close of business on Tuesday. I said what happened to the instant check? He said it was impossible to get through to NICS and that he had over two hundred applications ahead of mine to complete, and that was just from Saturday alone.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is a polarized country. Now the question becomes, which side has the greater will to fight? I for one stand for liberty! How about you?
Indeed the best line
Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.
Gun control?
When EVERY, OF EVERY AGE, of EVERY office, HOLLYWOOD and NEW YORK narcissistic, egotistical paid-for-entertainment fool, fires their body guard ....
When EVERY Democratic mayor and higher politician fires their bodyguard,
THEN, and only then, can we begin “the discussion”.
A good plan ... if your goal is to substitute the tyranny of the medical community for the tyranny of the government.
First you must assume that the answer to the question, "Is this patient so ill as to lose their right to keep and bear arms", even has an answer.
Then you must assume that any particular doctor would be able to KNOW the answer to that question.
The PRACTICE of medicine is not an exact science. Human physiology is simply too complicated to empower doctors to control people's lives.
Perhaps in the distant future this won't be so, but somehow I doubt that either you or I would care for that future.
Indeed now how to get this message before the fools on the left before they make us all as helpless as they are.
It is worth noting that the means of resistance against such dictators is entirely depended upon our ability to organized a coherent enough force to overthrow or pertinently obstructed their organized force.
A brave individual can make it costly for a tyrnacal government to impose without the consent of the governed, but he cannot on his own stop such an organizational without an organization of at least comparable power of his own.
Our forefather did their best to create a system of government which could be stopped from ruling without the consent of the governed. But over the proceeding 200 years that system has been systematically dismantled by each generation of political leaders finding its weaknesses to consent inconvenient or intolerable to their ambitiousness for power. What we have been left with today is a mad out of control machine(weapon as all governments are) with all its safeguards effectively bypassed or overwritten.
The self-destructive impulses of the mob(democracy) will inevitability bring down this machine but not before it brings us down with it. If we have any operunities left to save ourselves it will be but a few that exploit that same shifting mob’s passion for a temporary opperunity to cut ourselves free.
Cuting ourselves free of course means a great many things, big, small, possible, and regrettable impractical, but all of theses things boil down to one simple concept: removing the power of government torment us at the lawless passions of the mob(democracy). We cannot trust the future behavioral of the government to anyone, for the mob is as unstable as it is inclined to rob its fell man for its own preseved benefit.
most of these mass murdering cowards are looking to make a name for themselves... outlaw the media identifying the perpetrator as anything but a “coward and insignificant loser” and you will see the shootings stop.
they will end when these worthless scum realize their existence will be erased forever.
teeman
I don’t think that can be accomplished the fifty-state national level, the country is too far gone. Regions of relative liberty are the best hope we have, I think. That’s why I always bring up the CW2 cube. The best thing anybody can now do to get through the storm is to move away from the predictable hell zones.
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