A blog post long enough to guarantee that nobody who cares about gun control will read it to the end.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I’m certain that almost nobody will read it, and also that anyone who does will not be influenced by it. The personal firearms debate in this country has left the realm of conversation- it has devolved into deafening attacks and absurd statements and accusations, each side trying to drown out the other in a cacophony of hatred and rage. I wish I could reset the conversation, but that’s just a dream. So I’ll write my thoughts here, a whisper of hope drowned in a sea of vitriol, anger, and logical fallacies, all worn thin by repetition, yet still amplified and projected at such an extreme volume that either side can only hear their own bullhorns. Whatever comes of this disagreement, at least I will know that I spoke my piece and that even if nobody hears it there are still voices of reason adrift in the sea of willful ignorance.

Guns are neither sacred nor evil. They are tools, and they are tools of violence. Violence is neither sacred nor evil. Nuclear energy is neither sacred nor evil. If I tackle a stranger to prevent them being struck by a vehicle, I have probably used violence to a positive end. If I tackle a running man after witnessing him snatch a purse, I may have used violence to a positive end. When the United States nuked the Japanese civilians in the closing days of WWII, they arguably used violence to a positive end. That nuclear weapons have not been used since is a testament to the human capacity for restraint, and to the lasting impression those two nuclear attacks made.

I would not advocate that we keep guns in the American populace at literally any cost. But I do firmly believe that the empowerment that comes out of having the capacity for violence is a valuable part of democracy. So let’s not give that up in pursuit of some fallacious line of reasoning. Allow me to explain:

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," said Mao Zedong. I don’t think he was wrong about that. The anti-gun argument I’ve heard regarding the assertion that gun ownership is necessary to protect our civil liberties from oppressive government goes something like this: "If the government wanted to take over, then your hunting rifles and pistols wouldn’t do any good against tanks and helicopters and warplanes. Also they have nuclear weapons." First of all, this is incorrect. I fought against poorly equipped and untrained militias in an occupation in Iraq. We had the most advanced ground vehicles, unchallenged aerial superiority, and the greatest firepower in human history at our disposal. We were among the most highly-trained regular soldiers in the history of modern warfare. If our mission had been annihilation of the populace, we would have faced no real difficulty other than our conscience. Our mission was control and pacification, and all our gadgets and firepower and aircraft didn’t give us much advantage against the guerilla warfare of the militia. This is not a new dynamic, either. Look at every guerilla war ever. Furthermore, the soldiers who would presumably be executing the orders of this hostile government would in reality likely refuse, or stage an outright coup. And no power-mad dictator wishes to reign over a desolate smoking crater, so this argument is flawed. It’s actually just kinda stupid. QED.

Moving on. I believe there is a huge psychological component to this disagreement. It seems that the subset of Americans who favor a ban on gun ownership do not, in fact, own any. This subset is not personally familiar with firearms, and therefore they conceptualize them as something scary and dangerous. People who are comfortable with owning and using a firearm are in favor of owning firearms. This may seem a little bit obvious, but there is an important kernel here. The unarmed populace are fearful for their safety and clamoring for the government to protect them from the threat of gun violence, a threat which they erroneously attribute to the armed populace. The armed populace are fearful of gun violence, but they correctly attribute it to the criminal element and correctly reason that they will achieve a better outcome by being prepared to defend themselves than they will by relying on legislation and police alone. By way of analogy, I don’t own an enormous diesel pickup truck with poor fuel economy, and I think that the folks who use these merely as commuter vehicles are wasteful and polluting and unconcerned about their environmental impact. In material terms, the world would be better off if these vehicles were restricted to hauling and towing, should we give up our freedom to drive these vehicles? I won’t get into it here as any comprehensive discussion would have to go pretty deep, but I do want to briefly point out that there are myriad social side-effects of relying too heavily on government to manage our exposure to risk, and in my opinion these are mostly negative side-effects.

There is a troubling tie-in here for police militarization. (Note: I have been lamenting said militarization since 2010, long before the recent media craze, and I will probably still be decrying it long after the media moves on to the next craze.) As the various and sundry municipal, state, and federal authorities become increasingly enamored with sending tactical teams* unannounced into private residences to serve low-level drug warrants and the like, frequently resulting in lethal exchanges between criminals and officers (and sometimes between innocents and officers: raiding the correct house in the middle of the night has proven to be a real challenge for these "elite" units) I can only imagine that less gun ownership will embolden them. Perhaps fewer officers and suspects and innocents will be shot outright, but would that outcome be preferable if it comes at the price of greatly eroded civil rights? By the way, if the DEA and their ilk were emboldened by such a situation to batter down more doors serving "no-knock" warrants, the actual dangerous criminals are still going to shoot back at them.

 

So this boils down to a very different question than gun ownership. The real question is this: would you give up your right to own firearms, and also your protection from unreasonable search and seizure and due legal process in the hopes of making guns moderately more difficult to obtain by the individuals who are at-risk for mental illness related mass shootings? Because even the most liberal-minded person must accept that guns will be available to criminals in this country regardless of any conceivable restrictive legislation.  I would also point out that thoroughly-planned mass shootings do not require easy accessibility to guns in order to be perpetrated.  Crimes of passion, yes.  Don't commit the fallacy of correlation as causation here; yes, legally owned guns have been used in many mass shootings.  This does not mean that these same shootings would not have taken place had gun ownership been outlawed.  America has a robust illicit substances network, and firearms are only slightly more difficult to transport than drugs, and they're also durable goods (unlike drugs, which are typically consumed by the end purchaser).  And let's please not push these mass murderers to take up bomb-building instead of shooting.  This would not be a positive outcome.  I can probably out-shoot most psychopaths, and we can all flee or hide from a rampage, but there's not much we can do if they bomb the building we're in.

I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. Can we please just have a civil conversation about it though? We have a choice: either continue shouting past one another and preserving the status quo, or else cooperating to find a solution that makes sense. Frankly, the anti-gun crowd have proved themselves largely ignorant on function and capabilities of firearm hardware, so the legislative "successes" that they claim have restricted firearms in ways that are bizarre, arbitrary, and superstitious. We gun experts have a better knowledge of which guns, ammunition, magazines, and accessories represent a greater capacity for risk to society. Ask us these questions; most of us love talking about guns.

* These teams are largely composed of men who, if we’re being honest, enjoy their job, their public image, and the power and thrill of small unit tactical operations. Believe me, I know the type. I used to be that type, only I opted to perpetrate violence against the enemies of our country, not against her citizens. As long as we’re being real, I’ll bet money that the vast majority of these officers have a deep affinity for firearms, and don’t view them as a necessary evil. Of course you’re unlikely to get them to say that on the record.

Touch of Gold

I had a new type of dream experience this past Sunday morning. It will be difficult to describe (as are most dream concepts), so in the interest of clarity I will describe it chronologically, or as I experienced it. Here is the narrative of my recollection:

SETTING: An unremarkable diner. Slightly greasy, but acceptable. I’ve just finished a meal with my school-age daughter and we are on our way out the door.

We head out the door, but my daughter (we’ll refer to her as Alice, an homage to Carroll) asks a busboy for a quarter. He is caught off-guard, and fishes a coin out of his pocket to give to her. I pull some change out of my own pocket to reimburse the busboy, and a dime slips through my fingers and clatters on the dirty floor. The busboy deftly picks a quarter out of the change in my palm and Alice and I walk out into the car park. Approaching my car, I notice that the front wheels consist of a pair of wheel trucks on struts- each side has a truck with a pair of wheels, not unlike aircraft landing gear. The driver’s side truck seems badly out of alignment. Next I notice someone is snooping around my car.

I confront the snoop, he is a middle-aged man in a cheap but honest-looking suit. He apologizes, and by way of excuse explains that he is looking for a lost young woman. He fills me in on the sparse details surrounding the woman’s disappearance, and I come to a startling realization: I’ve been in this man’s position before. The whole scenario was an elaborate setup, a kind of suspended-reality game, a mystery novel performed in the flesh. I confirm this when I ask the man, "did Tommy Lee Jones ask you to look for this woman?" The man answers in the affirmative. Of course he did. Mr. Jones also asked me, years ago, to help solve the mystery of the missing woman. Something else comes back to me- the villain. The villain in this fiction is none other than Carl Weathers.

I help the snoop to look around the parking lot for a few minutes, remembering how much I enjoyed investigating the mystery when I went through it. Next thing I remember I’m driving at high speed down a dirt runway in the dark. There is a pyrotechnic display in the distance, and an ATV dragging a mattress passes me on the right side. The ATV operator is dressed up like a rodeo clown, and there is a young woman gagged and bound to the mattress.

This is all that I remember from the dream itself, but the experience doesn’t end here. When I awoke, I was certain that my dream "memory" was something more than mere ad hoc fabrication by my subconscious. In the first few moments of wakefulness, I thought of the memory as something which actually occurred in my past. Shortly afterward, of course, I realized that this was unlikely; I’ve never met Tommy Lee Jones nor Carl Weathers, and neither have I solved any missing persons mysteries. My next thought was that it must have been a movie I’d seen. I started thinking about that possibility, and the title "Touch of Gold" came to mind. I searched Google and came up dry. It turned out to be a fabrication after all.

This experience was very different from any other dream experience I’ve had, and makes me even more curious about the workings of my mind. It’s worth noting that the mystery in my dream bears conceptual similarity to "The Magus" by John Fowles and the movie "The Game" starring Michael Douglas. Then on Monday night (after the dream) I saw the movie "Ex Machina" for the first time, which is also thematically similar to these stories. Here’s to the ever changing, ever bizarre world of dreams and the subconscious!