February 21st, 2016
On Gun Rights vs. Other Rights
You can’t equate guns to other regulated products. Alcohol is dangerous, but in moderation it can be a useful social tool and even have health benefits. Guns are designed specifically to do great physical harm with minimal effort. The only healthy way (that is, for everyone involved) to use a gun is to not.*
Defence, Deterrence, and Prevention
Defence is the knee-jerk pro-gun argument: “I should have the right to defend myself against another person with a gun,” which is irrational, as clearly the better option is to avoid being in that situation in the first place.
Deterrence is the idea that the knowledge of other people being armed will keep bad actors from engaging in violence for fear of retaliation. This is certainly a step up, but it only works on people who are actually rational enough to be deterred, and it doesn’t solve the arms race problem (since in this model there is still a market for guns).
The best framework, in my opinion, is prevention, i.e. restricting access to, and manufacture of, guns and ammo across the board so that there is no market for them (and yes, the nature of the gun trade is such that effects on the legal market also affect the illegal market). The idea being that the gang member prepping for a drug deal tomorrow, the guy planning on shooting up a Post Office in a couple months, and the guy who was just treated rudely at a Denny’s and wants immediate revenge are all equally incapable of procuring a gun.
Moving Forward
The first step to getting anywhere near to achieving this is for people on the pro-gun side to stop fetishizing lethal weapons and to be honest and self-critical about what exactly they’re arguing for (which doesn’t necessarily mean immediately changing their position, just redefining that position, if that makes sense), and for people on the anti-gun side to stop approaching this from a moralistic perspective and to actually look at data and statistics and all of the practical issues involved. Also just everyone generally listening to each other and actually engaging in the conversation in good faith instead of talking past one another and being sarcastic.
*Counterargument: Target shooting & Hunting—Well, then you don’t need concealed carry (or any carry, in the case of target shooting), semi-automatics, etc.
June 14th, 2016
Some more thoughts on guns brought up by the conversation after Orlando:
There was a particularly aggressive pro-gun post by a woman advocating concealed carry who said she’d rather die “in a hail of bullets” than “as a snivelling coward.” I don’t go partying much, but I imagine carrying a gun on a dance floor would be at best cumbersome and most likely a safety hazard. More to the point, it seems that “the best nation in the world” or whatever should strive not to arm its citizens against the evil waiting around every corner, but to confine that evil to the remotest corners. All too frequently evil is allowed to travel freely along the path of a bullet; it is those roads that we should seek to close.
“No one gets shot with a Bible [or] a Koran, they get shot with guns.”—Mike Yard
July 8th, 2016
“Once again, it needs stating because it can’t be stated too often: despite the desperate efforts of the National Rifle Association to prevent research on gun violence, the research has gone on, and shows conclusively what common sense already suggests. Guns are not merely the instrument; guns are the issue. The more guns there are, the more gun violence happens. In light of last night’s assassinations, it is also essential to remember that the more guns there are, the greater the danger to police officers themselves. It requires no apology for unjustified police violence to point out that, in a heavily armed country, the police officer who thinks that a suspect is armed is likelier to panic than when he can be fairly confident that the suspect is not. We have come to accept it as natural that ordinary police officers should be armed and ready to use lethal force at all times. They should not be. A black man with a concealed weapon should be no more liable to be killed than a white man with one. But having a nation of men carrying concealed lethal weapons pretty much guarantees that there will be lethal results, an outcome only made worse by our toxic racial history. Last night’s tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. There were nothing but good guys and they had nothing but guns, and five died anyway, as helpless as the rest of us.” —Adam Gopnik, “The Horrific, Predictable Result of a Widely Armed Citizenry”
Feb 24, 2018
Guns Don’t Grow on Trees (Yet)
One of the meme’s that’s been going around during the last couple waves of gun-control social media posts* is (various versions of) “when my kid hits other kids with a stick I take the stick away.” I’m not entirely sure how this meme spread. Guns aren’t found lying around out in nature; guns aren’t used for non-violent games like poohsticks, drawing in the dirt, building things, etc.; sticks don’t tend to accidentally “go off” (the kid might hit someone on accident but presumably he’s already swinging it around at that point); and kids tend to still be alive after hitting someone with a stick, which otherwise would make taking away the stick from the individual kid kind of a moot point. And that’s not even getting into the fact that this inevitably devolves into a debate about parenting tactics as if that’s what we’re talking about. It’s a crappy analogy, and if you use it you’re walking into a trap. People are always less likely to see the faults in arguments that are ostensibly in support of things they believe in; just make sure you’re holding your side of the debate to the same standard to which you hold the other side.
* Which tend to occur in large numbers immediately after mass shootings and at no other time — given that pro-gun people are always going to trot out the “now’s not the time” line it seems like we should make a point of talking about it when there hasn’t recently been a mass shooting (as small as those windows of time may be), if for no other reason than to point out their hypocrisy when they inevitably say “now’s not the time because there hasn’t been a shooting recently.”
Certain of Eventual Failure 