Our love for gun play grows as our trust in ourself wanes. Logical, mad, sad.

Larry Kummer, Editor

11 years ago

Summary: Polls are our mirrors in which we see who we are and how we’re changing. The new Pew Poll showing our increased trust in gun-play reflects several obvious but grim trends in America. Let’s examine them. Always stare at the news; never ask for the blindfold. {This is the second of today’s posts}

“Well in the first place, an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.”

— From Beyond this Horizon, a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein (1942). Fun fiction, although quite false.

As you see in this graph, each year we have less confidence in ourselves, collectively. So, quite logically, we have less confidence in the officials we elect to run America. That makes us weak (we have power only when acting together), and strengthens those people with the resources and confidence to rule America. Worse, we are losing our ability to clearly see the world — and become more credulous in accepting things told to us by people we trust. This makes us easy to manipulate.

Nowhere is this clearer than with gun rights. We have gone from several generations of moderate regulation to allowing widespread concealed carry to increasing agitation for open carry (something forbidden in most towns in the Wild West). It’s logical, in a mad way, that we’d turn to personal weapons for a sense of control and security (unraveling several centuries of social progress).

The reason we tell ourselves for this confidence in guns range from false to delusional, while the astonishing toll in blood astonishes people in other developed nations (subscribe to Robert Waldman on Twitter for horrific real time reports: @KagroX).

The latest Pew Poll about Americans attitudes about guns makes grim reading. Support for gun regulation has dropped significantly among most groups during the past ten years. Among Black Americans, the group suffering the most from gun violence, belief that guns protect them from crime almost doubled in two years (29% to 54%). It’s “the hair of the dog that bites” them; massive evidence proves this false. See the posts at the end for detailed debunking of the major myths about guns.

This reaching for guns oddly accompanies a long-term decline in the crime rate. The hysteria about 9-11 and Benghazi matches contrasts with our far larger annual death toll from mass shootings.

As Brennan justifies CIA actions in re Torture Report with references to the 3,000 killed on 9/11, recall gun deaths = a 9/11 every 5 weeks year round.

— Col. Morris Davis (@ColMorrisDavis) December 11, 2014

On the other hand, our increasing love of guns matches our militarized foreign policy (DoD dwarfs the State Department; the number of our active “battlefields” grows steadily) and militarized police. Perhaps we have become a barbaric violent people, evolving in the opposite direction of other developed nations.

It’s too soon for the consequences of more guns publicly carried to appear. We can only guess from history; it won’t be pretty. Also, this will create a demand for paramilitary groups. The arrival of the Oath Keepers as vigilante snipers on the rooftops of Ferguson is a harbinger of violence to come. That they were applauded by many people shows that we’ve gone quite mad (no surprise for a people that learns about life and history from Hollywood).

Our esteem for easily carried killing machines is one effect of our falling social cohesion; others will emerge slowly, probably many, varied, and painful.

Two articles with news about guns

(a) “Did Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law Increase Firearm Homicides?“, Eric Voeten (Assoc Prof Justice, Georgetown U), The Monkey Cage, 17 July 2013 — Conclusion:

So, compared to a group of states that had similar homicide rates prior to 2005 {when the law was signed}, Florida’s homicide rate shot up unusually after 2005 (and in a way that cannot easily be accounted for by observed variables).

(b) “On the Decriminalization of Private Violence“, Andrew Kydd (Assoc Prof U WI-Madison), 18 July 2013 — Excerpt:

The United States is now embarked on an unprecedented experiment, in that it is a strong state, fully capable of suppressing private violence, but it is increasingly choosing not to. Freely elected state legislatures are enacting laws to encourage people to own and carry guns. New ‘stand your ground’ and self-defense provisions are being passed and interpreted to make it much easier to kill someone without legal penalty. It is now possible to arm oneself, pursue a stranger in a public place, engage in a confrontation with that person, and then if they throw a punch, possibly in response to one’s own, to shoot them dead with impunity as far as the state is concerned.

By encouraging private armament and weakening the penalties for private violence, the US is entering new territory, as a strong state that no longer chooses to prevent private bloodshed.

An implication of this process that has so far been underappreciated is that as private violence becomes more widespread, it will become increasingly organized, if still on private lines. Fantasists of the libertarian right and the anarchist left alike are prey to the same delusion, that is, that the absence of the state will lead to a paradise for individuals. In fact the absence of the state leads to the tyranny of smaller scale private organizations and the disempowerment of the individual.