Friend:
I wanted to work through a few thoughts and decided that perhaps I could just try a more direct discussion with you over email, if you’re up for it.
You know me, I’ve shot guns in Scouts and such. I’m not opposed, just trying to academically figure out this big issue we struggle with.
[Another friend] asked a fair question… why do you need a gun like this? I heard several answers about why *this* gun (as in, why is this one better than a different gun) but much less focus on why a gun is needed in the first place. The fact that it is easy to use, modify, etc. doesn’t really address why you need one at all.
When people answered in the form of “It’s fun” or “because the second amendment says I can” I can only assume that the question was misunderstood. Not why *this* gun, specifically, but why *any* gun which would serve this general purpose.
I see four reasons for a civilian to own a gun:
1.) In case of a total failure of government, in a very strict response to the Second Amendment
2.) Personal safety
3.) Hunting
4.) Shooting sports
Am I missing anything? Are those the answers for a reasonable person to have a gun?
I said I was basically in agreement those were the reasons a civilian right to own guns was considered important.
Friend:
Okay, cool, so let's go with these options:
1.) In case of a total failure of government, in a very strict response to the Second Amendment
This, to me is the most important item on the list for obvious reasons that it was created in the first place. I mean... it's also a joke, in that if it were the Federal armed forces against the whole US citizenry with their guns, the citizens would still be terribly outmatched in a variety of ways. Even so, the founders were absolutely right on this.
2.) Personal safety
This, to me is the hardest to work with. There's a lot of contradicting information here. I'll use italics and underline to identify opposing views. For example, on the one hand is the quip When seconds count, police are only minutes away" Well, that's true, however there are easily twice as many accidental deaths from guns at home as their are justified homicides. But what about gun ownership a deterrent, those number aren't easily quantified, but must help! Besides the logical response that anecdotes aren't don't equal "data" this could be replied to that in order to be ready for these moments, you must have a gun in easy access at all times, which study's show is the most dangerous place / way to keep a gun. There are lots of similar examples, but my point is that this one has a lot of data on both sides of the question.
3.) Hunting
Let's scope this down. For this you need a rifle with one shot at a time. Rapid firing isn't needed or appropriate here. Or a shotgun, again one or two shells at a time. It doesn't need to be small, it doesn't need to break down into something easy to hide... for example.
4.) Shooting sports
Not only can this, but it almost has to, be accomplished at some sort of proper range.
I had two responses on this section which I'll show, since I think they would come up from most gun advocates:
1) I agree that the idea of some sort of crazy situation in which people are resisting the US Army is pretty much impossible to imagine in our current world (unlike in 1790) but I'd put under this header the rather more likely set of scenarios where government temporarily ceases to be a source for order and people need to impose their own. Examples that come to mind would include the two rounds of LA riots when I was young, disaster scenarios such as New Orleans post Katrina, and more recent massive riots in places like Baltimore and St. Louis. I think it's totally legit for someone to want to have a weapon applicable to that kind of situation and we know that those situations actually occur. I'd also throw in situations that haven't happened much in the US but have happened more in other countries, where government for some reason fails to intervene in an intentionally mass killing or political terror event carried out by some part of the population against another. Examples would include white supremacist terror against blacks in the Reconstruction through Civil Rights Era South and more extensive breakdowns such as countries like Somalia, Nigeria, the start of the Spanish Civil War, and various central American countries have seen. This seems less likely in the US than in some other countries, though given the escallating levels of political hatred in the US, maybe not as much so as we'd like to think.
2) I'd propose that justifiable homicides is the wrong metric to use here, in that a lot of defensive gun usage might not involve killing anyone or even firing the gun. Most defensive gun use stories I've read involve the gun owner simply producing the gun and the intruder or assailant high tailing it out at that point. So the frequency with which guns are used in self defense may be orders of magnitude higher than the number of justifiable homicides. We'd also have to look at whether most gun accidents could be avoided by not having guns kept at home as much. If they're mostly accidents that occur through unsafe usage, cleaning, and hunting accidents, then not having guns stored at home wouldn't help much. The classic case that people think of is a little kid finding a loaded gun and shooting someone, but only arounds sixty of the accidental gun deaths per year involve children under 15.
Friend:
Quickly, I'll note, as far as 1 goes, I agree. This is the main and most important need for citizens to have access to weapons. For 2, I was really saying that both sides have many arguments, each of which the other side feels they can refute.Then he laid out his proposal for a third way approach to balance these needs against a desire for more regulation:
Okay, so where I go from here is that is seems like there are only two points of view here. Either TAKE ALL THE GUNS (or as close to that as we can get) or THERE CAN'T BE ANY RESTRICTION ON GUNS AT ALL. This leaves me thinking... can't we talk about something in the middle? Isn't there a way to address this that respects both sides? Perhaps allows for both somehow, or requires each to give a little and meet somewhere in the middle based on these important concerns.
Let's start by admitting that what we have right now is not perfect. Clearly, guns are used inappropriately sometimes and it's in our best interest to address that. The position that any gun ownership is illegal is clearly imperfect (see above for some examples). The position that everyone should be able to get access to any gun whenever they want is also imperfect (again, see above for some examples). So, we currently HAVE an imperfect solution to this. The polar positions right now are also imperfect. So, as a society we accept that imperfect is okay, but really we need to be aiming for the least imperfect solution.
What gets me is, why aren't there new ideas being suggested? I'm not necessarily in favor of all of the following, but have to ask, why aren't new creative solutions being discussed?
- What if, instead of taking away guns, we required every school child to be trained in gun safety?
- What if anyone could buy a gun, but it must be stored at a gun range, not at home?
- What if you needed a license, much like a drivers license, to own a gun, with similar requirements of knowing applicable laws, passing a test, no medical restrictions, etc.
- What if that license were a default, and revoked as needed?
- How about requiring gun manufacturers and sellers to register all guns in to ballistics database before they are sold.
- Tax gun and ammo to help fund these things
What if we took some parts of each of these to make a story that respects all of the concerns here? For example passing a suite of laws that require:
- All public school systems to make available a high school and continuing education level class on gun safety.
- You made a comparison to cars, which got me thinking about that. We license for driving already, so there's something there. As long as the default is "basically, yes, you have access" this might be useful. What if every new DL included an indicator regarding health (physical and mental) for both driving and gun usage (they would be different, as different levels of concern apply to each, but perhaps indicated on the one DL). This way it isn't a government tracked list of who owns a gun, but instead a list of who can't, with the basic assumption that everyone can, more or less.
- You don't need a special background check to buy a gun, you simply need your DL / ID to indicate you are healthy enough to do so, no additional work on the sellers, especially gun show sales, etc., Just check the ID
- Perhaps there are several levels of allowed, i.e.
"Permanently disallowed from gun ownership / usage", I'm thinking serious medical issues like Parkinsons where you don't have muscle control, severe clinical depression, etc.
"OK with oversight" would indicate someone who could use a gun at a range or under the direction of someone else, but not own one themselves (because, for example, one of those classes on gun safety is required first). In this case you could go shoot at a range, take a class, etc. Maybe even buy a gun, but would have to keep it at a gun ran
"OK for hunting" would indicate that you can own a hunting gun, like a rifle that doesn't auto load, but nothing with quick reloading or a handgun
"OK for all" would indicate that any legal guns are allowed to be owned on personal property by this person
"Concealed Carry" obvious
The default, when you get your DL would be that you get "OK with oversight" or "OK for all" if you've taken that class that every public school has to over I mentioned above. Moving up to the others depending on training you've taken. You can lose this access if a doctor or similar mental / physical health professional indicates so, as they would be required by law to do so, either permanently or temporarily.
Since most people would default into "OK with oversight" a new business comes up for gun ranges, both indoor and out, to rent out locker space to you for your guns. These would be owned and operated by citizens, not government. Should there be a need to act on the second amendment as it was designed (defending against your own government) you would have access to your guns if needed, not have to go through the government.
No list goes to the government of who is buying what. As long as you have an "OK with oversight" indication, you are allowed to buy anything, though in some cases you can't keep it at your own home yet without some training.
No waiting period.
Background checks would be done as you get your license.
Medical checks would be enforced before license renewals, both for this and DL health and safety.
The way I see it, this supports citizens having guns available to themselves, not a "take them all away". On the flip side we're pushing to make sure that if you really want a gun in your home, you have to take a class or two to get it, and be cleared of a violent history or medical issues.
At the very least, it's an attempt to put some new ideas out there, instead of the common polarized refrains we tend to see these days.
Thoughts?
I had a number of practical quibbles with whether this would successfully deal with the main issues and how it could be carried out. However, why wrap up was essentially: The concept of a two tier system in which nearly everyone can access guns in restricted circumstances such as club use, but you need to jump through a few hoops in order to be able to have a full range of types and be able to keep them at home is perhaps interesting at some level. Lots of gun owners have no problems with the legal process of extra scrutiny for getting a concealed carry permit. But I don't think anyone would have a reason to advocate for this kind of system because it would just make it easier for the anti-gun side to drop their promises and use the mechanisms to try to confiscate or regulate guns further.
Interestingly, he told me that the number one when response he got when sharing the same idea with a few acquaintances who were strongly anti-gun was: This might be a reasonable compromise, but I don't trust the pro-gun people to work with us on it.
So regardless of the merits of this particular approach, one clear issue with any attempt at changing the status quo is that the two groups that care most about the issue trust each other so little (arguably with good reason) that any attempt at a third way solution gets looked at primarily through the lens of: How with the other side use this to hurt me?
12 comments:
For point #4 about shooting sports, out here in the boondocks, you can hear someone taking target practice pretty frequently. Many an afternoon is punctuated by the pop, pop, pop, pop of shooting. The range is a more urban phenomenon.
Thanks for posting more about this -- I am very interested on your take and reasoning on it, and I apologize if I contributed to hard feeling in the Facebook thread on the topic. It wasn't my intent to do so.
I think the most obvious points of difference between my stance and yours are
1 - it is not clear to me that people having guns is going to improve the situation, in a case of total breakdown of civic order. My read, for instance, is that the state of affairs in Ferguson was made very, very much worse by having overly armed police; having additionally armed civilians would not have been a positive contribution.
2 - we've talked a bit already about the issue of guns for self-defense, and the challenges of interpreting the data, which is fair enough. As elsewhere, though, I wonder how this compares with a situation where (pretty much) no one has guns and therefore violence-by-gun is simply not an available form of escalation.
In both cases, I can understand the pro-gun argument if I look at the situation as an isolated phenomenon. E.g. "If someone were in the act of threatening (say) your family member, would you prefer to a) have a gun or b) not have a gun?" I have additional reasons to be uncomfortable with (a), but I absolutely understand why someone might choose (b).
If we look at it rather as a question of "would you prefer to have randomly selected persons in any given scenario have guns, and would you prefer to deal with the types of scenarios that are more likely to arise if guns are around", then... well, obviously, then we're dealing with more hypotheticals, but I think it also inclines the argument more in the other direction.
. I mean... it's also a joke, in that if it were the Federal armed forces against the whole US citizenry with their guns, the citizens would still be terribly outmatched in a variety of ways.
...I hung up hard on that assumption.
Even if we look only at the number of known concealed carry licenses (which constitutional carry states don't even HAVE, and many very serious people don't get), there's a roughly ten to one numbers issue before defections, that not all military members are even trained with firearms, etc.
Former military are sort of famous for having guns, and they also know how to break that equipment. Again, assuming the active duty guys don't do it for them.
Mary-
You might be interested in some of the testimony from an Army guy who now does radio, named Bryan Suits. He was on the ground during the LA riots. (He became an officer, but don't hold that against him. ;) )
He observed that it was amazing how the knowledge that targets could offer armed resistance caused violent mobs to dissolve. A group of ten people can mob three or fewer people-- but a group of forty, or a hundred, can't get through a door held by two people with shotguns.
The places with the famous "Roof Koreans" survived largely intact. Those businesses without armed, civilian defenders? Did not.
This, to me is the most important item on the list for obvious reasons that it was created in the first place. I mean... it's also a joke, in that if it were the Federal armed forces against the whole US citizenry with their guns, the citizens would still be terribly outmatched in a variety of ways. Even so, the founders were absolutely right on this.
I'm not so sure about this. I mean, yes, a regular army is going to outmatch an improvised militia, but the mere fact that the government would have to deploy the army would check their actions somewhat. Solzhenitsyn (I think it was him) said something like, "Would the Soviets have been so easily able to send their opponents to the gulags, if every officer sent to arrest them knew he might never come back?" Deploying the army to crush resistance is a much bigger commitment than sending round a few police officers, and one which governments are correspondingly less likely to take.
Also, if there ever arises a situation where you need to raise troops in a hurry -- whether due to civil war, foreign invasion, or whatever -- having a population which already knows how to use a gun is going to be a plus, even if you still need to give them extra training before they become battle-worthy.
Mary,
No, I certainly didn't think you were at fault on the Facebook thread. A big part of the problem was just that I set off a "ask me anything" and then was only around for twelve hours. Another was that other people than me wanted to answer on the pro side and it got kind of noisy.
I understand the approach of thinking that dangerous situations would overall go better if no one had guns. I guess I'd have two basic reactions.
On the practical side, with estimates of over 300 million guns in civilian hands in the US (plus who knows how many in official hands) there simply isn't a likely situation in which there aren't guns around. I think Megan McArdle wrote about this as the "gun disappearance fairy" scenario: If all guns disappeared it's a no brainer that fewer people would be killed with guns (duh) and indeed fewer people would doubtless be killed or kill themselves overall. Yes, some homicides or suicides would move other means, but because guns are so efficient at killing when they're used to that end, it stands to reason that without guns deaths would go down. However, that fairy is not in fact in operation, so any reasonable situation is going to involve a fair number of guns around. Even if the number of guns in the US was cut down by 90%, we'd still have 30 million, which is a thousand times the number of gun deaths per year.
On the more theoretical side, taking guns out of potentially violent situations basically just means moving things to where the person with the most ability to inflict bodily force wins, and where the larger group wins. As the old quip goes: God made man, but Sam Colt made them equal. While I understand the overall desire to avoid gun violence specifically, I'm not sure that I prefer a world in which the physically larger can always inflict violence with impunity on the smaller, the larger group on the smaller group, etc. Now, on the one hand, sometimes putting that kind of power in the hands of one person means that one crazy person can terrorize and whole crowd. On the other hand, denying that kind of power to all persons means that any crowd can inflict whatever rough justice it wants on any one person or small group of persons.
I do realize that there are reasons why one might choose either way.
Foxfier & Gaius,
Certainly, one has to look no further than some of our more difficult situations in the Middle East to see that even the world's most powerful military can have a hard time fully putting down resistance by rag tag groups of people with guns. At a tactical level, I agree with that point.
That said, however, I have to admit that I don't find a scenario in which the US government so completely becomes the "bad guy" that thousands of people are willing to put their lives on the line by going out into the hills and become guerillas all that believable. The two examples one could point to would be the Revolutionary War (successful) and the Civil War (unsuccessful -- unless your count the failure of Reconstruction as meaning it actually was kind of successful after all.)
Maybe I'm unimaginative, but I don't really see that as being a situation likely enough to be worth thinking about a whole lot in our current world. What I could more more easily imagine would be the government failing to enforce order when other forces either of chaos (riots) or factional violence broke loose. I'd see that as reasonable 2nd Amendment concern but not "need to be able to overthrow the government".
I've spent most of the afternoon's free time trying to disprove my impression-- basically, I couldn't think of any case where someone associated with the military could come up with a way the military won.
I found one paper on it, which was highly disagreed with, which argued the Army could take back a city which was held by a force with American civilian training and equipment; I couldn't find one of Suits' podcasts on the second amendment and the LA riots, but I did find articles (which I'm not linking because of the rest of his style) from an officer during the LA riots, which pointed out that with a welcoming community and roughly one tenth of the active duty and reserve Army combat units on hand, they were able to mostly pacify part of one city.
The biggest problem is coming up with an idea that puts the armed civilians on the opposite side from the US military; slightly more rational would be theorizing something to remove the US military (including reserves, and probably any VFW types that aren't disabled from combat or age) from the equation and pitting American civilians against a foreign military.
Then the issue becomes which military, since it does matter, and what their goal is...and it's still a horrible idea, because then they've got a supply tail which is highly vulnerable.
Maybe theorizing some kind of super-cartel doing an invasion, backed by some portion of Mexico's military...that would counter the guerrilla advantage, and might counter the firearm quality one.
(While automatic weapons are good for being scary, there isn't a lot of tactical use for them, and our people with guns are accustomed to the idea that anyone may be armed. Mexico isn't. They have strict gun control, and fewer legal weapons than my mom's favorite gunshop sells each year.)
I'm afraid I don't have much to add that's intelligent, but I do want to chime in with a couple things.
First, regarding the idea that God made some men bigger than others and Colt made them equal: Not so much. It turns out that God also made some men with a greater propensity than others for learning how to use a gun. So now it's not the biggest or the strongest who rule, but those with the best reflexes or eyesight or hand-eye coordination.
Besides, with or without guns, it's really those with the most money who can afford to buy the biggest and/or the best shots to work for them.
As far as the people versus the government, while there may be something to the idea that soldiers in a corrupt government would think twice if they knew their victims would put up a fight, there's also PR to contend with: If a corrupt government wants to mow down a bunch of people passively resisting, that's going to look bad. If the victims fight back, the government can always spin things to make it look like their violence was justified. See, we had to use force, because we had to take down this violent militia! (People are remarkably cool with preemptive violence when they believe the targets are violent bad guys that somebody needed to do something about.)
I'm sure Annie Oakley would be happy to learn that she is a man.
Even if I were the bestest superest sniper and the quickest draw in the West, I would know that the other person probably also has a perfectly serviceable gun and could kill me, just as he could probably kill the snakes and other animals that were the primary reason he owned the gun. This is why most gunslingers who survived the Old West were quiet people with good manners.
If the victims fight back, the government can always spin things to make it look like their violence was justified.
We already know from the fact that it happens regularly that they claim the victims were a threat, so the option is actually being a threat or not.
***
First, regarding the idea that God made some men bigger than others and Colt made them equal: Not so much. It turns out that God also made some men with a greater propensity than others for learning how to use a gun. So now it's not the biggest or the strongest who rule, but those with the best reflexes or eyesight or hand-eye coordination.
Except that the advantage difference between "has the strength to lift a firearm and pull the trigger without casing harm to themselves, and has the coordination to reach basic marksmanship" and "is a trick-shot of the first water" is significantly less than that between a man of average physical abilities and a woman of average physical abilities. Similarly, the inherent advantage of having eight average guys breaking into a house vs one person with any makeshift weapons he might have is massively different than eight average guys with a guns trying to break into a house with one person who has a gun.
The availability of firearms, even when they are in the hands of both sides, takes a situation with only one, very obvious ending and makes it much more situation dependent.
Will it mean that I will win if four guys try to break down my door? No. But it does mean I have a chance-- which is more than anything besides huddling behind a protector and praying the predators don't gang up into bigger groups would do.
I'm gonna throw in my own bits.
1 and 2 (Defense in case of social breakdown, and defense against more ordinary criminal behavior) are the main reasons for keeping the Second Amendment. The best survey on how often guns are used defensively is at gunclock.com, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995, which suggested that in the US, as of 1994, there are an estimated 2,500,000 defensive gun uses in a year, and in over 90% of cases, criminals flee without the gun owner firing a shot.
The Clinton Justice Department was not happy to get these results. So they reproduced the reasearch, and the results they got were consistent with Kleck and Gertz. As legal concealed carry has skyrocketed since 1994 (year of the Assault Weapons Ban on Evil Features), I rather strongly doubt that anyone is interested in doing so again, for fear that they'll find even higher rates of defensive gun use.
As for the proposals:
- What if, instead of taking away guns, we required every school child to be trained in gun safety?
I am ALL FOR THIS. You can't really child-proof guns, but you can make kids gun-safe. Children socialized into the legal gun culture tend to be more law-abiding than others, though just barely.
- What if anyone could buy a gun, but it must be stored at a gun range, not at home?
That completely prevents any defensive gun use. In the context of the second amendment, "keep and bear" means own and carry.
- What if you needed a license, much like a drivers license, to own a gun, with similar requirements of knowing applicable laws, passing a test, no medical restrictions, etc.
That describes the sort of requirements most states impose on concealed carry licenses.
- What if that license were a default, and revoked as needed?
That's the point of the NICS system.
- How about requiring gun manufacturers and sellers to register all guns in to ballistics database before they are sold.
Ballistics testing generally finds the differences caused by random wear. New guns (and the bullets and cartridges they eject) are about as distinctive as new tires or new sneakers, which makes this kind of pointless.
Now, as for the hypothetical of "What if the 300,000,000+ private guns in America were suddenly all gone?"
As for me, I suddenly become fearful for the old, the weak, the women, and the outnumbered. See, the average woman has a body weight around 147 lbs, compared to about 200lbs for the average man. Furthermore, the average woman is about 25% skeletal muscle by weight, compared to about 40% for the average man. That makes the average man's 53lb weight advantage over women about 80% muscle.
If we were to see mass armed resistance to the government, I tend to think the model the resistance would take would most likely be the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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