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-Land of the Free
Roanoke and the Value of Guns
2015-09-01
A newly minted naturalized citizen notes on why he should have stayed Canadian:
[NewYorker] Away from the world for August, in a house without Internet or television and only spotty, the-satellite-must-be-passing-over phone reception, I was, until Wednesday, thinking more or less benign thoughts about gun owners, if not guns. As I chronicled last year, I have only just learned how to drive, and, license in hand, or in glove compartment, I’ve been driving for the first time on the little winding roads of the beach town where we’ve spent vacations for the past thirty years. Despite having been anti-car and ostentatiously pro-bike for all those years,
...in other words, you have long been an obnoxious git who lived in a community where driving was not an absolute necessity. But do go on...
I have to admit that I love being in the driver’s seat. The overwhelming rush of freedom and possibility, the sense of autonomy—no need to request a lift, no UBER app to press—is overwhelming. You get in, and you go.
Yes, that's the other reason why even Germans prefer to drive rather than take their omnipresent public transportation. I was shocked to discover empty trains when visiting in 2010, a significant change from when we lived there fifteen years earlier, not to mention the traffic jams on the Autobahn.
This in turn made me realize, a little more empathetically, what I had only intuited before—that guns, for many Americans, are a sort of secondary, symbolic car: another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence.
Actually, guns came first, automobiles having been invented only in the last century. History does matter, when trying to make a rhetorical point. As for symbolism, cars represent autonomy and independence, yes. But guns represent protection from predators, whether animal, human, or governmental, and freedom from hunger. You know, hunting, which you anti-gun types supposedly approve of, sorta.
The attachment to them that so many Americans show—unique among the civilized peoples of the world, and at a cost so grave that the rest of that world often turns away, appalled—
... as if we cared about the opinion of the rest of the world in such matters, any more than we care that the rest of the world objects to our freedom of speech...
is nonetheless understandable to anyone who comes late to driving: to have potentially lethal power within your grasp is an immensely empowering drug. Cars are obviously in a different category, because their benign use is so much greater than their lethal one. But they are tools of the same country, of which I am now a citizen.
Someday, my dear, you may realize you were as obnoxiously wrong about guns as you now realize you were about cars. At which point, no doubt, we will be treated to an equally long-winded piece about the next object of your ire. It might be interesting to see if that piece contains a single original thought. This one certainly does not.
In the midst of this reflection, word filtered through of one more mini-massacre, this one in Virginia. Two reporters had died, hideously, on camera, and their deaths were followed by a disturbing social-media aftershock. Though we will doubtlessly learn more of the psychological details of this horror, it already seems clear that this is one more case where the gun provided a quick means to settle scores—a way for the emotionally damaged to relieve the feeling of being shamed, achieving instant karma through killing.
Much more important is the fact that were the reporter conducting her business with a Glock or an AR strapped to her hip, she still would have been killed since she was not paying attention. The guy could have attacked using a machete and she still would have been killed because of her trust in her fellow man.
James Gilligan, the American psychiatrist specializing in violence, credibly argues that most personal violence is a response to such feelings of shame and humiliation, and the violent act is a horrendous way of equalling the score.
Only a shrink would say that rather than the most obvious: That the killer was a prick.
This case seems to belong to that variety of massacre, with the added fact that the killer seems to have imagined that his violence would be an equalizer to the Charleston killings.
Seemed to imagine? He evened it up, whether anyone likes to admit it or not.
A similar illusion of getting even appears to have been at work in the shooting of two New York City cops last winter (a killing that has already receded in memory, though not, surely, for the families of the victims).

One of the last redoubts of the gun lovers—those who, despite the evidence, allow the pleasure of expressing autonomy to overwhelm all other, more reasonable evaluations—was that, even though evidence showed an overwhelming correlation between the availability of guns and the number of gun killings, there was still no evidence that American non-domestic gun massacres were directly tied to wide gun distribution.
TW woulda strung me up for writing a sentence like that. That said, there are zero doubts that the increased presence of guns means that gun violence will increase. Government statistics of killings by guns are entirely beside the point. The point is freedom to keep and bear arms, and to bear all the consequences and responsibilities of your use of guns.
Darn right on both counts. But clear thinking is necessary for good writing, neither of which is in evidence in this New Yorker piece.
In fact, as a piece in Fusion
Who?
(which generously cites this writer) details, that redoubt has now fallen to empirical investigation. A new study by Adam Lankford, of the University of Alabama, which will be presented next week at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association, shows a strong correlation between the availability of guns and the prevalence of gun massacres. With the same certainty that David Hemenway’s work established the link between the number of guns in a society and the number of gun killings, we now know that there is a correlation between the availability of guns and the major public assaults that have been a part of American life since Columbine.
The 'correlation' between the availability of people and massacres not examined? What about deaths due to automobile accidents each year, or suicide ?
And so, for all that we should still strive for an empathetic grasp of other people’s cultural symbols, the simple, unemotional, inarguable truth remains: when Richard Martinez—the father of Christopher Michael-Martinez, a twenty-year-old who was killed at the University of California Santa Barbara last year—called the N.R.A., and its fellow-travelers, complicit in the murder of his child, he stated the facts.
"Facts", actually. Known to those who use non-Orwellian language as opinions.
Those who, in the face of all the evidence, still insist that guns are not the cause of the American epidemic of gun violence have decided that the deaths of Wednesday’s victims, Alison Parker and Adam Ward—like those of the children at Newtown—are the cost, to be blithely endured, of the symbolic pleasures that guns provide. Since the cure is known for certain, those who refuse it can only have decided that they enjoy the disease.
Gopnik conflates gun rights to pleasures, which they are not. Those are Gawd given, and not at the sufferance of leftists like him or the governmental Mandarins who would love to make CWII go hot and nationwide. Only a leftist would believe that linking the right to keep and bear arms and murder committed by people who care nothing about those rights.
For the deeper truth is that cars are not, or not only, symbols of autonomy. They are, in every sense, vehicles of it. Guns, however, have an almost entirely symbolic function. No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled;
A lie. We regularly run stories of both those activities here at Rantburg.
the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again. (The incident last week on the French train is good evidence of this point: unarmed defenders disarmed a terrorist with a military-style weapon.
Gopnik thinks, in the face of all evidence of massacres that were committed in a nation that disallows the right to keep and bear arms, that the luck that the passengers had during that train ride would hold out for the rest of eternity in the rest of the nation. It most emphatically will not. With Jihadi's main source and program of chemical, biological and radiological weapons becoming unavailable, the small arms attack is their next best chance for a mass casualty event.
A huge proportion of luck and an inestimable supply of courage aided them. But the possession of guns played no role at all.) The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada. Cars have to be, and are, controlled: we license their users and insist (or should) that they regularly prove their skills; we look out for and punish drunken or reckless users. If we only achieved, in the next few years, a regulation of guns equal to that of cars,
Legal gun use is more tightly regulated than driving on public roadways. (There is no requirement for a license to own a car, nor to drive it in private property.)
we would be moving toward the real purpose of autonomy, which is to secure the freedom from fear as much as the freedom to act. Symbols matter. Lives matter more.
Please free yourself from this carnage and return to the civilized far North.
Posted by:badanov

#8  This person would have failed both my English and Logic/Critical Thinking classes.

Seriously, this is a paid professional wordsmither raht here:

The incident last week on the French train is good evidence of this point: unarmed defenders disarmed a terrorist with a military-style weapon

If I knew nothing about it, I would not know from this sentence who had the military-style weapon. So s/he sucks at his job.

we look out for and punish drunken or reckless users. If we only achieved, in the next few years, a regulation of guns equal to that of cars,

Drunk drivers are punished after using a tool irresponsibly. S/he is suggesting we do the same with firearms....we already do, unless s/he is suggesting we ban cars in order to prevent drunk driving. S/he sucks at thinking.

So Bickerus learned to drive, and discovered there is a world outside of the pithy shelter life. This person has some serious issues, as failures often do.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2015-09-01 15:15  

#7  Many First World countries have sub-populations considerably more violent and criminal than the rest. Procopius2k. In Britain the same problems are seen in the economic underclass, regardless of genetic origin.

Separately, The Daily Mail has more on the Roanoke killer. It seems he had more going on than just imagining racism all around:

TV gunman complained about his lack of sex and lamented how age had ended his 'glory days' as a $2,000-a-night gay prostitute in suicide letter
Posted by: trailing wife   2015-09-01 14:48  

#6  ...and if you further divide by self identified communities, you'll find the predominate community to have an even lower level. However, that is racist, given that truth is now racist.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2015-09-01 13:29  

#5  Of interest is Wikipedia's list of countries by intentional homicide rate here. It should be noted that the US, at 4.7, is below the world average of 6.2 and the Americas average of 16.3.
Posted by: trailing wife   2015-09-01 13:14  

#4  ...guns, for many Americans, are a sort of secondary, symbolic car: another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence.

I thought guns = pinus substitute?
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2015-09-01 13:00  

#3  Another lefty journo who should join the following list of Don Lemon, Piers Morgan and such: List.
Posted by: JohnQC   2015-09-01 11:05  

#2  There's a corollary of more cars and multi-car accidents. BTW autos kill more people than guns. I blame the auto obsessed American public who insist on living in the burbs and rural areas who refuse to pack themselves into the urban utopian paradises that preclude the necessity of owning this dangerous instrument. (Do I need to put a /sarc on that?)
Posted by: Procopius2k   2015-09-01 09:46  

#1  Sanctimonious drivel from the ignorant.
Posted by: BrerRabbit   2015-09-01 01:12