Getting real about guns

Does anyone really care?

Screaming on the internet is different from actually caring. If you actually care, you take the time to know something about the subject, instead of just spouting groupthink. If you actually care, you take a step back from your dreams, and deal with society as it is.

This post is for people who actually care about gun issues in the US: folks who genuinely want to understand the gun issue and improve our situation.

You (probably) know less than you think

Apologies if this section seems pedantic. But there are a lot of people who really don’t know much.

Ignorance has never prevented anyone from spouting off, least of all those whose livelihoods depend on producing copy in time for the morning edition. So let’s take a hypothetical situation where a mass shooting is committed with this gun:

Here’s how the media may describe it:

The shooter used an auto-loading gun with bull barrel and a high-capacity magazine. The gun shoots rifle bullets of the same caliber as an AR-15. People familiar with the firearm have been known to call it “dirty”.

Let’s pick at the highlighted terms. What does auto-loading mean? Sounds like you pull the trigger and it just keeps shooting! Dangerous! But no, it just means that the gun automatically chambers the next round after one fires. It would be more accurate to call the gun semi-automatic, which is an autoloader that only fires one round per trigger pull. But a lot of people don’t know the difference between semi-automatic and full-auto, either!

A related term is “select-fire”, which means… full auto! Confusing.

And the notorious high-capacity magazine! Well, this gun actually only has a 10-round magazine (not a “clip”), which generally wouldn’t be considered “high-capacity”. But there is no official definition of the term, so this use could easily be waved into print.

Now here’s something fun for you: “rifle bullets of the same caliber as an AR-15”. This is a 100% accurate, yet completely misleading statement. Here are the two cartridges side-by-side:

How can those be the same caliber!? Because caliber only describes the diameter of the bullet. The one on the left is the AR-15 standard .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO (which have slight differences but are dimensionally identical) and the one on the right is 22LR, LR for long rifle. Both have .22-caliber bullets, but the 22LR is a much less powerful round.

So the statement, “rifle bullets of the same caliber as an AR-15” is completely accurate. And completely misleading. Which brings us to “bull barrel”. Bulls are dangerous! But it just means the barrel is thick. Here’s the same gun (this time in stainless) from a different angle:

Looks can be deceiving. In fact this is a pistol for low-powered target shooting. The thick barrel helps keep it on target and accurate. Of course even a 22LR pistol can cause serious bodily injury or death and should always be handled in a safe and responsible manner. But 22LR rifles are guns that parents in rural areas give to responsible children to go out in the fields to hunt squirrels and plink at tin cans with.

So why is this a dirty gun? Because this gun, the Ruger Mark II, is a giant pain in the ass to clean, and 22LR, as a rimfire cartridge, tends to leave a lot of residue in the firearm after use. So these guns just tend to be physically dirty. Sorry, I just couldn’t resist: you don’t know what you don’t know, and don’t expect the press to give it to you straight.

Our Sanctified Constitution

Now that we have some sense of how confusing gun jargon and reportage can be, let’s turn to the 2nd Amendment. Here is a picture of the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution:

What do you see? Here it is in text form:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I have no idea why that last comma is there, but this is what the Library of Congress has, so this is, what the damn thing is.

There’s a lot here to say. First, as a civil libertarian, I find it very troubling that so many of my fellow leftists, when it comes to this part of the Bill of Rights, are completely willing to just jettison the thing on pretense. Maybe the 2nd Amendment deserves it, but how then will the 1st or 4th Amendments fare when the shoe is on the other foot?

So let’s try to understand what this amendment actually is.

First and foremost, it is a part of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution soon after its ratification, by overwhelming public demand. No, women, the unpropertied, the enslaved, and the natives were not consulted. But it’s hard to think that they’d have been opposed!

Why is this stuff about “arms” part of the US Bill of Rights? In large part, because the US Bill of Rights is drawn from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and that Bill of Rights enumerates the right (of Protestants) to bear arms.

So from a historical perspective, a lot of the reason we’re saddled with this tragedy of punctuation is pure inertia.

But that isn’t a reason to throw it out! While the Supreme Court’s decision which held there is a personal right to gun ownership, known as Heller, has been criticized for drawing on a vague notion of “traditional rights”, this is actually similar legal reasoning as the notorious umbras, penumbras, and emanations that gave us the right to abortion. Conservative hypocrites may argue there is no constitutional right to privacy, but there are few rights more traditionally “Anglo-Saxon” than privacy, which the right to abortion relies on.

But as of this writing, Roe may soon be overturned, so let’s imagine a future where Heller meets the same fate. Only members of “the militia” may own guns! Not so fast. In fact, there is a good chance that you are part of your state’s “unorganized militia”. For real! I certainly haven’t surveyed every state constitution, but many of them specify that all able-bodied males between 18 and whatever are members of their state’s “unorganized militia”.

What’s up with that? This oddity brings us to the deep part of the 2nd Amendment. The part that basically nobody understands, but which everyone should. Here’s how it goes:

People suffering from “gun culture” are well-known for the facially stupid claim that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to allow “the people” to protect themselves from “the government”. There may be a kernel of truth to that, but the text clearly links the right to bear arms to the defense of a free state, so it can’t be right.

In fact, the folks who ratified the Bill of Rights were concerned about one particular function of government: the army. There is simply no coherent way to understand the language of the 2nd Amendment without knowing its roots in the debate over a standing army.

And people absolutely considered a standing army a threat! It’s woven throughout the Constitution, not only in the bill of rights, but in the (Article 1 Section 8 Clauses 14 and 15) enumerated powers of calling forth, arming, and setting training standards for the militia, and in the (Clause 12) restriction on funding an army for more than 2 years.

But what was the “Constitutional” solution to this threat? This is what nobody understands, but which I wish leftists would, because it is such a kick in the teeth to the braindead rightwing narrative.

The point of the militia isn’t to protect the people from the government by giving them the power to fight it off. This is a stupid meme reactionary elites have programmed their victims with. The point of the militia is to harmonize the conflicting goals of a powerful government and a free people by combining them. The military function of the government is rendered safe for the people by putting it directly in the people’s hands.

This solution is a whole different way of looking at the world, of looking at political relations, than what our society has devolved towards. But it is so important for understanding the heart of the genius that is America.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us much about how we should interpret the 2nd Amendment for actual gun policy. The 2nd Amendment is, in many ways, a law out of time, an anachronism. That is why it ends up as a vacuous political football. But it deserves to be understood for what it is.

Gun cultures and gun users

To understand the gun issue requires understanding the two gun cultures on either wing of our society, as well as the actual ways guns are used.

First, injuries and deaths associated with firearms are a serious public health concern. These incidents include accidents as well as suicides. Combined with homicides, gun deaths topped 45,000 in 2020, with about 54% of those being suicides. These are numbers on par with automobile accidents, a leading cause of death. Presumably, many of these suicides would have proceeded without guns, but the completion rate would be lower as other methods are less reliable. Likewise, it’s hard to believe the notoriously robust US black market in guns doesn’t contribute meaningfully to the ease with which criminals succeed at murder.

Against this grim backdrop, the neurotic and fantasy-like nature of our gun cultures stands in stark relief. But there are many more people with relatively moderate attitudes shaped by the realities of our world and society. Who are these people?

• Women. One of the rare occasions where I’ve actually carried a gun for defensive purposes was not for self-defense, but because a friend was worried she was being stalked and asked that I escort her out of a public place. In general, I don’t support paranoia about men or male violence, or crime in general, but women who are active on the dating scene, have a notable public presence, or are going through a rough break-up, to name some examples, have good reason to want the “equalizer” of a gun.

• People in high-crime areas. Personally, I stay out of rougher neighborhoods. But some comfortable suburbanite telling people to “just move” is too crass even for me. Similarly, I can’t tell people in a dangerous situation to just sit defenseless because “guns are bad”. They are human beings with a right to defend themselves.

• People in rural areas. Similarly, folks in rural areas often don’t have meaningful access to law enforcement. In remote areas, your first responder may be the nearest neighbor, who lives miles away. People in the country look after each other, and they look after themselves. In this isolated context, a gun is a reasonable precaution against both wild animals and wild humans, even if the overall risk is low.

• People in high-risk professions. This includes not only law enforcement and military, many of whom are strongly habituated to being constantly armed, but professions like armored car driver, jeweler, other shopkeepers, and convenience store clerks.

• Hunters. Many people find hunting to be an abhorrent sport. But they still eat meat. Please consult your nearest vegan to get your ear chewed off about how our society treats animals; suffice it to say most folks don’t have much basis for judging hunters, even if they do. And if you’re concerned about hunters “humanely” taking animals, then you should know that guns are significantly more humane than a bow-and-arrow.

Despite the real concerns driving gun ownership, many on the left hold an extremist stance that considers the 2nd Amendment a dead letter and wants to ban any and all guns, confiscating those already in circulation. I’ll be blunt: the fact that so many people on the left are like this gives right-wing gun paranoia an unfortunate basis in reality, and makes the politics of gun control that much harder.

Where does this view come from? I’m sure cultural historians could go into the deep roots in Quaker culture and whatnot, but my understanding begins with the counterculture of the 60s. Being anti-gun was a direct outgrowth of being anti-war, anti-nuke, and anti-violence. The condemnation of the counterculture by square assholes who wanted to ship them off to Vietnam, and the trauma of returning veterans, certainly contributed to this ethos.

But so have other, less organic forces. Remember that part about the DIY nature of the 2nd Amendment? Professional-class individuals whose income depends on the bureaucratization of our society are economically threatened by the belief that people can handle serious matters for themselves. They will literally tell you to “leave it to the professionals”.

And let’s not forget the fact that this is a wedge issue, and as our society has grown more polarized, and guns have been politicized, political partisans, even us oh-so-enlightened leftists, will irrationally cling to more extreme views.

Which brings us to the big ugly. Right-wing gun culture. To be clear: there are plenty of right-wing folks who are perfectly reasonable when it comes to guns. They may like memes like “shall not be infringed”, but they haven’t gone to the deeply stupid place many other righties have. A good example would be this guy.

Right-wing gun-stupid is a different beast, and it has many, deep roots in our culture. I’ve heard people blame video games or the myth of the cowboy, but really, a huge amount of all our entertainment is profoundly violent. Basically all our “blockbuster” movies are centered around violence. Movie violence isn’t just glamorous, it is simple and cathartic. All the complexity of life, the shades of gray and confusing ambiguity, are removed. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the solution is dead simple.

Little wonder so many people who genuinely care about our depressingly dysfunctional political situation end up transposing it into an action movie-like plot of patriots versus… communists? Globalists? Whatever, they’re the BAD GUYS, and the solution is simple.

And let’s not forget the ongoing coarsening process at the heart of the Conservatism’s war on America’s philosophical tradition. Demonizing, polarizing, and dehumanizing are core parts of Conservatism’s strategy for undoing America, and the gun issue has been a great wedge issue. As this process of strategic moral decay has proceeded, as folks on the right have become more and more mind-wormed, more and more emotional, irrational, and eager to murder their opponents, they’ve become ever more extreme in their gun enthusiasm, to the point that basic precautions like licensing and universal background checks are anathema.

Blood, blood everywhere

Which leads us to our current situation, another school shooting. This is going to be harsh; this is life-or-death. And I confess to a peculiar moral sense. About many things, I experience a certain detachment. But there’s just something about disrespect or callousness toward the dead that deeply upsets me. Maybe because they are gone, and depend on us to speak truthfully about them. No one is more defenseless, and what we say about them is all they have left.

So I am upset by the way leftists react to school shootings. Partially, this is me being a contrarian. Honestly, I was surprised at how we responded to 9/11. Yes, it was a horribly spectacular terrorist attack, but it was still terrorism. Terrorism, motivated by politics, religion, or sheer insanity, is an endemic problem. I believe we will one day achieve world peace, but there will still be psychos who want to blow something up, or even shoot up an elementary school.

Freaking out gives these people what they want. In this sense, I believe my contrarian nature serves me well when confronted with these horrific events. The perpetrators want to feel big. They want to feel powerful. The want to make us react. Especially those who go after children. And yes, they are often troubled, sick, insane souls. But captivating the nation, working themselves into our minds, is the desire their sickness has birthed.

That is why these attacks appear to be more common. The availability of guns doesn’t help, but our era of shootings began during the Assault Weapons Ban, in Springfield and Columbine. All the high-capacity semiautomatic rifles with detachable box magazines that were circulating prior to the ban were still in circulation, and in the nearly two decades since then ban ended the availability of these firearms has not meaningfully changed for motivated buyers, yet these shootings seem to be becoming more frequent.

Aside from making the problem worse, the collective liberal freakout over school shootings is ugly. Not just ugly in feeding a destructive paranoia and over-estimation of this ultimately rare kind of violence, but ugly in baldly ignoring the proportionately huge number of kids from poor neighborhoods, children our society labels as “black”, whose deaths we mostly ignore.

But their blood is human blood, their lives are human lives, and they are lost an order of magnitude more frequently, with barely a note. I don’t understand it. I guess everyone’s numb to the violence in impoverished communities? I certainly don’t obsess about it. But I also don’t have a double-standard in which lives I become upset over. They all get alike, a small piece of my concern in this world teeming with woe.

Moving forward

I don’t think it’s just that we care more when it’s unusual. I can’t help but see the freakout, the grandstanding, the hyperventilating, as performative. Politicians feed at the eyeball trough. The media pours it on. Calls for action ring out. To quote a phrase: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing of substance, anyway. Nothing practical.

First and foremost, the deep work of breaking out of our toxic polarization must be taken up. Arguably this is me being impractical, but this polarization is a core part of the conservative strategy, and when we Democrats take up our side of wedge issues, when we fall into the polarization trap, we are giving the forces of entropy what they want and sabotaging our ability to effect changes.

So let’s be grounded. You may not like guns, but let others have their own feelings, without judgment. Agreeing to disagree about some things is the beginning of political settlement.

Get real about who’s dying. Don’t pretend that a lot of gun deaths aren’t suicides. We want people to have mental health care. And if it’s more normal for people to get help, and we make help more accessible, we may well reduce the number of terror shootings, too.

Don’t blame everything on guns. We throw around the term “gun violence” like guns are the only meaningful context, but the leftism I know doesn’t shy away from looking at the root causes of problems. Are we giving up on our depressed urban communities? Is the only solution to disarm the whole society so the criminal symptoms of our long history of racism and economic exploitation become benign, even as they exist forever? Have we lost our commitment to actually improving society?

As far as direct gun policy, as mentioned above, universal background checks are absolutely common sense. But these checks can take time, and supporters can increase support among gun owners by also supporting proper funding and record-keeping to make sure the checks are quick and accurate.

Licensing is also a great policy. This is basically getting a card for passing a background check, and can allow private sellers an easy way to make sure they’re not selling guns to someone who shouldn’t have them.

As a civil libertarian, I have serious misgivings about “red flag laws”. Danger is no excuse to abridge due process. After all, protests sometimes turn violent. By creating a precedent that “risk” justifies denying someone’s 2nd Amendment rights, opponents of political demonstrations could, for example, create a “red flag” law that applies to people who attend a protest that devolves into a riot, making it illegal for them to exercise core 1st Amendment rights.

Maybe this is far-fetched, but I dislike laws and procedures that encourage profiling and persecuting individuals because they seem “weird” or give someone a “bad vibe”. And I am not convinced that such laws are, or ought to be, constitutional. But if we really want to have this kind of preventative examination of gun buyers, Congress has clear authority to set standards for training “the militia”. How this authority stands against current precedent I don’t know, but making these sorts of screening a part of congressionally-mandated firearms training is probably the least-bad way to achieve it.

And education will certainly help. Countries like Switzerland and Israel have astronomical rates of gun ownership and very low rates of gun violence, because their people are armed and trained as a part of universal military service. Honestly, we are getting to the point in the US where such a program might be desirable for improving our social cohesion; evidence of the world suggests it would help with our gun problems as well.

But ultimately, there are no simple solutions. Demanding radical policies may feel good, but such demands are frequently masturbatory and counterproductive. This piece does a good job discussing policy aspects of this dynamic, and does so more succinctly and with more authority than I could hope to muster.

What I’m trying to contribute here is means and motivation to depolarize the discussion. If we want better policies, we’d do well to have some respect and knowledge of guns, of the 2nd Amendment, and gun owners themselves. If we can demonstrate some knowledge and decency, we can be effective at bridging divides. After all, with polarization and general political insanity preventing us from getting anything done, there’s nothing to lose in growing some humanity.