Sultan Knish
Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a
plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into
the shape of a gun or a finger gun hits the panic button. Supensions
and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone,
usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and
lectured to within an inch of his life.
Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools
where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of
the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes
that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless
those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like
real guns.
It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun
violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror,
that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school
imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.
The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an
irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry.
And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. In a
country where law enforcement is heavily armed and gunmen are stopped by
gunmen in uniforms, a strange Swedenization had set in. The problem was
not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the
killing.
Schools across the country are banning not the gun, but the idea of the
gun. It is a conceptual prohibition that is meant to push away the
threat of gun violence by eliminating any mention of the G word.
Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or
even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm
will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.
This isn’t a precautionary attitude, but a pacifist one. Gun horror is
not a productive emotion, but learned helplessness disguised as moral
superiority. Rather than teaching children to hate killers, schools are
instead teaching them to hate guns. And reducing murders to instruments
rather than morals, children are left with no sense of right and wrong,
only an instinctive horror of violence.
Pacifists have always demonized armies rather than invaders. During WWI
they obsessed over gas. During WW2, it was the bomber and the tank.
During the Cold War they demonized nuclear weapons. In the War on
Terror, they target the drone. By dealing with the object rather than
the subject, they are able to avoid the question of moral
responsibility. Rather than hold the Nazis, Communists or Islamists
accountable for their actions, they extended a blanket condemnation over
the weapons-wielders.
The American GI was just as bad as the SS man or the Kamikaze pilot or
the Political Commissar. The only difference was in who had the bigger
guns. And the one with the bigger guns, was also the most to blame.
That same attitude can be seen today when Israel is blamed for every
battle with Islamic terrorists because it has the bigger guns. Rather
than evaluating the nature of a conflict and the values of both sides,
the pacifists score every war based on firepower.
While the left likes to indulge in stereotypes of gun-toting rednecks
and bomb-brandishing generals, the only people who judge the worth of a
man by his weapon are the pacifists, the gun-fearers and gun-hiders who
mythologize weapons as black agents of evil.
To believe that there is no such thing as constructive violence is to
reject free will. Without accepting the necessity of constructive
violence, there is no good and evil, only armed men and unarmed men.
Without constructive violence, two boys playing cops and robbers in the
schoolyard are not acting out a childish morality play, they are
becoming desensitized to murder, and without it a child with a pop tart
chewed into the shape of a gun is on the way to being a school shooter.
If there is no such thing as constructive violence, then the police
officer is not the solution to crime, he is part of the cycle of
violence. And if that cycle of violence does not begin with a man
choosing to use a gun for good or evil, then it must begin with the gun.
The man becomes the object and the gun becomes the subject. American
ICBMs become just as bad as Russian ballistic missiles. An Israeli
soldier killing a suicide bomber is just as bad as the terrorist. There
are no good guys with guns. To have a gun is to be the bad guy.
For decades the gun-control lobby has brandished assault rifles at press
conferences and spent more time describing their killing power than
their manufacturers have. The rifle has been upgraded to the assault
rifle and now, in the latest Orwellian vernacular used by the White
House and the entire media pyramid beneath it, weapons of war.
The dreaded assault rifle or weapon of war or killing machine of mass
death actually kills rather few Americans. The average shooter doesn’t
bring an AR-15 to a Chicago gangland dispute. Despite the number of
these weapons in private hands, most of the killing takes place with
handguns in the same parts of the country where large amounts of illegal
drugs are sold, women trafficked and stores robbed.
Shootings in America are not caused by guns, they are caused by crime.
Guns really do not walk off store shelves and go on killing sprees.
That’s what criminals are for.
But the trouble with that discussion is that it takes us into moral
territory. Talking about guns is easy, talking about souls is not. If
guns don’t kill people, then we have to ask the difficult question of
what does kill people.
It’s a bigger question than just Adam Lanza pulling the trigger in a
classroom full of children. It is a big question that encompasses the
Nazi gas chambers and the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking and
September 11. It is a question as big as all of human history.
Pacifists once used to be able to address such questions, but they have
become obsessed with the technology of violence, rather than the
spiritual origin of violence. And the technology of violence is largely
beside the point. Guns do not motivate people to kill. Nor do they
represent that much of a quantum increase in death.
Some of history’s worst massacres happened long before firearms became
useful for more than scaring off peasants. The heavily armed Americans
of the 50s had lower per capita murder rates than medieval London. It
isn’t the gun that makes the killer. It’s not the hand that kills, but
the mind.
The gun-free society has little interest in individuals. Its
technocratic philosopher-kings want big and comprehensive solutions.
Their answer to gun violence is to feed a horror of guns. Their answer
to obesity is to ban sodas. Their solutions invariably miss the point by
treating people like objects and objects like people.
In the Middle Ages, rats were put on trial for eating crops. Today we
put guns on trial for killing people. The left has tried to reduce
people to economics, to class and then race, gender and sexual
orientation. It has done its best to reduce people to the sum of their
parts and then to tinker with those parts and it has failed badly. The
best testimony of its profound spiritual failure is that the worst
pockets of gun violence are in urban areas that have been under the
influence of their sociologists, urban planners, psychologists, social
justice activists, community organizers and political rope-pullers for
generations. And what have those areas brought forth except malaise,
despair, blight and murder?
Banning guns will do as much for those areas as banning drugs did. It is
not the shadow of the gun that has fallen over Chicago, but an
occlusion of the spirit. Social services have had generations to save
the city and they have failed because the technocracy can reach the
body, but it cannot reach the soul.
The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from Newtown as they
drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that
weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas
are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their
disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun
and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the
tool that matters. It’s the man.
Unwishing the gun brings us back to the sword. Unwishing the sword
brings us back to the spear. Unwishing the spear brings us back to the
stone club. And what then? When every weapon that ever existed or will
exist is undone, all that remains is the deadliest weapon of all. The
mind of man.
The gun, the sword, the spear and the club took countless lives and
saved countless lives. Civilization has always balanced on a future made
possible by little boys playing cops and robbers and playing with
little green army men. They can either grow up to be the protectors of
the future or the frightened men who will stand aside and do nothing
when they hear the screams begin to come because they have been told
that all violence is evil.
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