[today’s run: 3.4 miles]
There’s a lot in the media these days in response to the college student in Oregon shooting up his creative writing class.
One side of the political spectrum calls for “gun control”, which the other side reads as a code word for registration and confiscation. Most of my facebook acquaintances are on that other side.
And I don’t say that I blame them. I don’t doubt at all that the current administration would like nothing better than to go full-tilt Australia and outlaw most private gun ownership.
I grew up with guns in the house, a couple of rifles and shotguns, not handguns. And I was taught that they were tools and dangerous, maybe a bit like chainsaws and lawnmowers, the kind of thing that could cause a lot of damage so you’d better pay attention.
One of the objections of the anti-gun crowd is that they are only good for killing. And that is true, but not the whole story. Somehow this reminds me of those city people that think meat comes from the Safeway. I’m not a farmer but I’m a little closer to the land than that. And if I grew up in a city like that, where the only purpose for a gun is to shoot at other people, I’d probably think the same way they do. But I know that eating a hamburger means that something died. I paid someone to kill this cow so that I could eat it at McDonald’s. And I’ve shot a deer and put the meat on my dinner plate.
We have two killing machines on the wall here. One is a WW-2 era M1 Garand rifle, called by General George Patton, “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” And that means it was made for shooting people. It’s heavy, and shoots rapidly, really not the best for lugging around in the woods although it can be used that way. I bought it from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, an organization formed by the US Government which makes these things available to citizens. Mine came by mail, regular old US Mail. (But I hear they use Federal Express now.)
The other one is my wife’s grandfather’s cavalry sword, an “old wristbreaker” model, Civil War era. Not good for slicing bread or whittling, pretty much only for hacking at people from horseback.
But these are old retired warriors. We only take them out to admire their workmanship, not to slash the neighbors or lay down suppressive fire.
For someone like this Oregon guy to go so completely off the rails, there has to be more than just access to firearms. Guns are the means, but first there has to be some serious erosion of empathy. I read a book, “On Killing” by David Grossman. It is about how the military has to train people and prepare them to shoot at the enemy. They use various methods to get people to overcome their aversion. One method is simulation, similar in some ways to video games and violent movies. Abortion and assisted suicide are also in the cultural mix, devaluing the lives of others.
So, there has to be means, an overcoming of aversion, and motive. This guy in Oregon knew that most people who go off in this way end up dead. It wasn’t going to end nicely, he knew that. Either he would be dead or be a football for the lawyers and jailers for the rest of his life. There must have been a powerful motive involved somehow.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind more “gun control” if it were well intentioned and not just a power grab. I’m not sure what that would look like. The current system doesn’t seem to work very well. (But the murder rate over my lifetime has dropped tremendously, so maybe the current system is actually OK.) It seems like it would be good to have some way of instilling in gun owners a bit of respect and care in handling. That would at least stop the celebratory shoot-in-the-air kind of nonsense.
For instance, I could imagine a state law which would require all firearms dealers to offer 1 hour of free instruction with each sale.
But a significant population on one side is afraid of guns, as some kind of totem of evil. So the idea of gun education to those folks is similar to the sex education issue in other circles.
I’m more sympathetic to the people who know they are responsible and who resent the implication that they can’t be trusted with the same tools allowed to every rent-a-cop, National Guardsman and bodyguard. I can see their point. If there is some 0.01% of the population which is inclined to start shooting, using the 20%, 40%, 60% of the population which is trustworthy to head the shooters off before they do much damage… But the mathematical logic of “more guns, less crime” drives the current liberal intelligentsia nuts. That’s sort of an inversion since it’s supposed to be the conservatives who hold to original sin.
There are some people who aren’t responsible and can’t be trusted with that kind of power. It would be convenient to have a way to spot such people and keep them away from tools of power. But we don’t seem to have that. Maybe we should start everyone out first with a chainsaw.