Sultan Knish
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.
If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the
creatures who eat each other's young, and sometimes their own young,
there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is
in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.
But debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pinhead is
largely useless. We are not a particularly violent society. We are a
society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends a great deal of
time wondering what kind of man would murder children. They probably
live next door to him. For that matter, if your neighborhood is diverse
enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to any number
of war criminals, all the way from Eastern Europe to Asia to Africa.
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.
Mass death isn't the issue. After September 11, the same righteous folks
calling for the immediate necessity of gun control were not talking
about banning planes or Saudis, they were quoting statistics about how
many more people die of car accidents each year than are killed by
terrorists. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; three thousand
deaths can always be minimized by comparing them to some even larger
statistic.
The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's
about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns
that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling
the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them
and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.
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 bringing Tylenol and
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.
But evil just can't be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance
policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and
finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn't
authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes
total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school
shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with
another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total
zero control tolerance.
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, not to mention park
rangers, ambulance drivers in the ghetto and any of the other people
who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all 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 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 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.
Anyone who really hankers after a world without guns would do well to
try the 14th Century, the 1400 years ago or the 3400 years ago variety,
which was not a nicer place for lack of guns, and the same firepower
that makes it possible for one homicidal maniac to kill a dozen unarmed
people, also makes it that much harder to recreate a world where one man
in armor can terrify hundreds of peasants in boiled leather armed with
sharp sticks.
The longbow was the first weapon to truly begin to level the playing
field, putting serious firepower in the hands of a single man. In the
Battle of Crecy, a few thousand English and Welsh peasants with longbows
slew thousands of French knights and defeated an army of 30,000. Or as
the French side described it, "It is a shame that so many French
noblemen fell to men of no value." Crecy, incidentally, also saw one of
the first uses of cannon.
Putting miniature cannons in the hands of every peasant made the
American Revolution possible. The ideals of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution would have meant very little without
an army of ordinary men armed with weapons that made them a match for
the superior organization and numbers of a world power.
At the Battle of Bunker Hill, 2,400 American rebels faced down superior
numbers and lost the hill, but inflicted over a 1,000 casualties,
including 100 British commissioned officers killed or wounded, leading
to General Clinton's observation, "A few more such victories would have
shortly put an end to British dominion in America."
This was done with muskets, the weapon that gun control advocates assure
us was responsible for the Second Amendment because the Founders
couldn't imagine all the "truly dangerous" weapons that we have today.
And yet would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic
Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have
shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have
grinned at the playing field being leveled some more?
The question is the old elemental one about government control and
individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us
back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a
better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of
government.
Do we want a society run by the flower of chivalry, who commit
atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with
machine guns? The flower of chivalry can promise us a utopian world
without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can
protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.
It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of, it's a
country where individual agency is still superior to organized control,
where things are unpredictable because the trains don't run on time and
orders don't mean anything. But chivalry is dead. The longbow and the
cannon killed it and no charge of the light brigade can bring it back.
And we're better for it.
Evil may find heavy firepower appealing, but the firepower works both
ways. A world where the peasants have assault rifles is a world where
peasant no longer means a man without any rights. And while it may also
mean the occasional brutal shooting spree, those sprees tend to happen
in the outposts of utopia, the gun-free zones with zero tolerance for
firearms. An occasional peasant may go on a killing spree, but a society
where the peasants are all armed is also far more able to stop such a
thing without waiting for the men-at-arms to be dispatched from the
castle.
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.
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