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| -Land of the Free |
| Economist: Superstition helps explain how people think about gun laws |
| 2017-10-14 |
| THE Onion put it best: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” An accurate summary of gun-control opponents’ response to America’s periodic gun massacres, the headline was also familiar. The satirical website has run it, with few alterations to an accompanying spoof article, five times: after six people were murdered in California in 2014; after nine were murdered in South Carolina, nine in Oregon and 14 in California in 2015; and after the killing of 58 and maiming of 489 people by a lone gunman in Las Vegas on October 1st. Satire thrives where the usual checks on human folly fail. In this case it points to the fact that America, despite having a gun-murder rate 25 times higher than that of other developed countries, has no serious debate on how to reduce the killing, because Republican lawmakers refuse to countenance the only thing that easily would. By making it even a bit harder for killers to get guns—as action taken in Australia, Britain and Canada shows—America would have fewer gun deaths. Yet only a quarter of Republican voters accept that demonstrable truth. Most say America would have less crime if only more Americans were armed. "Most say?" Where are you getting your data? I haven't said that, and no one I know has sad it. Maybe you are talking to the people who think that theft and murder are the acceptable part of the drive to disarm civilians in America, The usual explanation for this delusion is brilliantly effective lobbying by gun clubs. Since the 1970s the National Rifle Association, supported by gun makers, has recast what was once a public- safety issue into an argument about liberty: if you believe gun ownership is a thin red line against government tyranny, as the NRA claims, it scarcely matters whether it also leads to more killing. At the same time, the lobbyists have bullied Republican lawmakers so thoroughly that none dares speak against them. Asked for his position on gun control this week, Paul Ryan said he’d rather talk about cutting taxes. The Onion could not improve on that. Yet though Republican voters have moved markedly against gun control over the course of the NRA’s lobbying, it alone cannot explain that shift. Many Republican voters are more selective in their support for guns than the ideologues; they tend to be momentarily keener on gun controls after a massacre, for example. It also seems notable that the same people who believe guns make America safer are also likely to hold a number of other irrational views. Around half of Republicans do not believe in evolution or anthropogenic climate change. They have also just elected as president a man who has suggested vaccines cause autism. Donald Trump’s insurgency in itself suggests that any explanation of Republican attitudes rooted in conservative ideology should be treated with caution. The 2nd Amendment is about Liberty, and always has been about Liberty. That the NRA has been pressing this view, all the while helping to reduce that Liberty, says more about them than it does about the idea of the Blessing of Liberty. Also, the idea that guns make us safer is a dodge written into the currrent climate by lawyers who neither appreciate Liberty, nor do they appreciate what their rulemaking, either in federal regulation or in lawmaking, does to the concept. It eventually will destroy the legal community's very credibility. A forthcoming book by the political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, “Enchanted America”, offers an alternative explanation. It argues that people who believe guns make America safer, among other fallacies, display a strain of superstition that has always existed in American politics, on the right and the left, but which in recent decades has concentrated on the right, and now threatens to subsume it. Its proponents, who the authors call “intuitionists”, understand the world on the basis of feelings and gut instinct, not doctrine or empirical facts, even when confronted with them. “Much of what looks like an ideological gap in this country”, the authors write, “is due more to the power of these innate intuitions than abstract principles or values.” The problem with doctrine and empirical facts is that they are tools, used by other "institutionalists" including government officials, to destroy Liberty, and not just in the right to keep and bear arms. Don't think empirical data can't be manipulated? Try having a conversation about Liberty with an individual who refuses to accept the base concept of Liberty, but who would rather sacrifice their political opponents' rights using the legislative process, all on the alter of Public Safety. The Economist, in this entire missive, fails to address how, whenever government takes away rights from a selected group, its own power increases over other groups as well. And it never returns those rights, and never will without armed insurrection or by regime change. Understand that, they argue, and it becomes easier to comprehend that the judgments such voters reach in times of economic and cultural change, like the present, will be governed by fear. This is both an instinctive response to uncertainty and a self-validating one, as Mr Oliver illustrates by quoting his five-year-old son: “If there’s no monster in the closet, then why am I scared?” The refusal of millions of people to accept some limits on gun ownership, even though this would make their families safer, reflects the same white-knuckled logic. The only way civilians can be disarmed is through institutionalized and legalized theft and murder, all through the power of government. If the government was moving to take away your right to assemble peaceably, you'd be "white knuckled" too. How has such a rich, well-governed place come to this? Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in America Politics”, offers another clue. Written in 1964, it locates the anger and paranoia that had characterised the Goldwater insurgency—in effect, an extreme case of intuitionism—in a long history of populist resentment and apocalyptic rhetoric. For Hofstadter, the paranoid style was a persistent but marginal “psychic phenomenon”, with a potential to take off in certain circumstances. The most propitious, he mused, would be “a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable”. It is possible to read America’s subsequent political history, dominated by the civil-rights struggle, the culture wars and the intractable partisanship they spawned, as proof of that conjecture. Freefalling There has since been plenty of irrational behaviour on the left, too, including hostility to genetically modified food and the current tendency of left-wing bloggers to see a Russian under every rock. Yet the fact that the losers in America’s cultural struggles—including fundamentalist Christians, rural whites and other traditional folk—were on the right has made it the domain of unreason. The election of Mr Trump sealed that. As an irreligious sometime pro-choice proponent of gun control, he was an implausible Republican champion. Still, his supporters backed him because, in their guts, where intuitive choices are made, they felt he was on their side, so none of that mattered. On guns and much else, this suggests, Republican leaders have been directing the views of their supporters much less than they thought. They, and their NRA auxiliaries, could not have turned Republican voters on to gun ownership so dramatically had the issue not spoken to their pre-existing fears and fantasies. And much good has such pandering done the leaders. It has given them Mr Trump for a boss and a civil war, between populists and true conservatives, upon which their party could founder. It has also left them, in the wake of America’s worst civilian massacre in a century, with nothing to say. One important point: Republican leaders and not leaders; they are public servants and representatives, duly elected. Another point: A civil war has been brewing ever since the first of the modern gun control acts was passed and signed into law in 1968. I am not impressed by elections, but I do vote to keep the fascist left at bay, and to help preserve, as much as humanly possible, the Blessings of Liberty. That idea is lost on the editors at The Economist. More's the pity. This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The power of magical thinking" |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #5 Switzerland has more guns per capita, yet less crime. Maybe it's the culture not the tools? |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2017-10-14 12:38 |
| #4 ..just another form of welfare, three hots and a cot, that's before the aristocracy starts piling on perks because....cruel and unusual (which really meant things like drawing and quartering not deprivation of TV). |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-10-14 11:07 |
| #3 I'd be curious to see what happened to gun crime numbers if you went to prison for life if found with an unregistered or stolen gun. I bet they'd drop pretty quick after a short while. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2017-10-14 11:04 |
| #2 NRA lobbying is only successful because they have so many members giving them marching orders. That is the way a democracy works, remind the politicians who put them in power and what is important. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2017-10-14 11:03 |
| #1 that America, despite having a gun-murder rate 25 times higher than that of other developed countries That would be certain 'communities' of America. Drop out those numbers from the overall count, and, golly gee wiz, the numbers start to align with other developed countries. However, pointing that out, makes this a racist but factual comment. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-10-14 08:17 |