After the Newtown massacre Slate magazine decided to keep a running toll of Americans killed by firearms. It’s been a little over nine months. Adding the victims from Washington on Monday the latest tally is more than 8,180 killed, by far the worst of all developed nation.
Of course, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So we know that guns are extraneous to any discussion about how to curb violence in our nation. We can talk about doing many things as long as it doesn’t include limiting the sale and ownership of guns of all kinds. Any law that would do that is a violation of our constitutional right to bear arms. Of course, we can place reasonable limits on speech, the practice of religion, freedom of the press, but absolutely not when it comes to guns. Uninhibited selling and buying of guns is exactly what our founders intended when they wrote the Second Amendment. No one should ever suggest otherwise.
That was the perspective of a nurse I had in the hospital. I was too groggy to remember how the subject came up, but I do remember that she was adamantly opposed to any form of gun control because she believed guns might one day be our only defense against a government takeover of our lives. I also remember saying something to the effect that we would have to agree to disagree on that.
What else can you say to someone who thinks this way? A reasoned argument to the contrary is not going to change their minds because what they believe is not based in reason. The idea of fighting an armed rebellion against your country is ludicrous, not least because we’ve been down that road once before and it didn’t turn out so well. The rebels lost, we killed each other in record numbers, destroyed a large portion of our country, and have now spent the last 150 years trying to come to understand what it all actually meant. I cannot see how that sounds like something anyone would ever want to go through again.
But, then, it’s not about ownership of guns, is it? It’s about an attitude toward government that has taken on a life of its own. Government is the enemy, at least in theory. It is trying to destroy freedom, limit individual rights, and keep us in de facto servitude. At the same time, when there is a disaster government is supposed to be there to help. When there is a mass killing, government is supposed to be there to help. When we want bridges safe to pass over, planes safe to fly in, nuclear power plants safe to live near, flood plains controlled to limit damage from raging rivers, the government is suppose to be there to help.
So that means government is the problem and government is the solution, all at the same time. Makes sense to me, at least as much as the mantra that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. If I believe that, then I also have to believe cars don’t kill people, people kill people. Derailing trains don’t kill people, people kill people. Cable cars dumping skiers out a thousand feet above ground don’t kill people, people kill people. Poisoned meat doesn’t kill people, people kill people. According to this point of view, safety is all about people being ready and equipped to take care of themselves no matter what. If something happens and you get injured or killed, don’t go whining about the need for government to provide reasonable safeguards to lessen the chance of something bad happening. Keeping the government out of your life and mine is all that matters.
It’s all in the way you think, I suppose. So never mind that another 8180 might be killed with guns before another nine months pass by. Guns are innocent victims of people using them for bad things. What’s important is making sure the government doesn’t infringe on the right to bear arms. Armed and ready is the only way to live…or die, as the case may be, indeed, as the case is.
linnposts.com 
Jan,
Thank you for another helpful reflection. Just shared a post on your FB.
May I suggest every time you write an article you link it on your FB. It would boost your readership. I was able to share “paste” your link on my page.
Love,
John
PS
Hope your shoulder continues to improve and you are able to flirt with the “gun love’n” nurses!
My advise is when the nurse has a point of view, agree with her esp if she is giving you an enema.
Love the cynical way you make a very strong distinction between insanity and reason. Gun violence is one of my seminar classes with my students… Wish your nurse was more enlightened about these public health issues.
Hope that shoulder recovers perfectly so you can keep writing TRUTH.
Great analogies, Jan. I have a theory that gun-toting people are in reality very fearful folks. Interesting that so many call themselves Christians when they seem to have so little faith. Hope the shoulder mends quickly.
It appears to me that any attempt at rational dialogue about guns quickly turns into incoherent babble. Here in Phoenix, police recently worked overtime to destroy about 2000 guns that were bought in a recent buyback, before a new law went into effect last Friday that says that any guns bought in buybacks or acquired any other way, must be sold back to the public rather than destroyed. To me that is incoherent thinking.
Anyone that thinks they are going to defend themselves with a handgun, shotgun, rifle, or even an assault rifle, against a government which spends about $800B/year on its military is delusional, at best.
I think America has gone beyond a “gun problem” to a culture of violence which has used guns as one means of expressing that violence. One can debate how or why that happened, but I think it is quite clear that it has happened. The big question is how to reverse that. I don’t have many ideas, much less good answers.
And we have a Congress that can’t even act to limit magazine sizes, ban assault rifles, and expand background checks. To me that is beyond incoherence and is in the realm of sheer stupidity, caused at least in part, by NRA type threats to take away politician’s tickets for rides on the gravy train.
Good post Jan, I wish that a sensible dialogue could be had but when you are dealing with people who think, as you said guns don’t kill…, Obama wants to confiscate your guns, the poor are a drain on our society, women should not have control over their own bodies, and unbelievably that a blind person should not be prohibited from owning a gun, no sensible solutions to gun violence will come about.
We often make the mistake of talking logical in an emotional argument. This is about feeling, not about rationality. In his book The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt argues that moral judgment is mostly based on automatic processes – moral intuitions – rather than on conscious reasoning. People engage in reasoning largely to find evidence to support their initial intuitions.
Well that’s nice Luke, so what?
We need to make arguments more on relational basis amplified by similarity. Connect to the sense of shared fate. So for guns, that’s tricky. I have gotten some traction with the idea that guns are the idol for our sense of unease about our climate. Talk 10 minutes to your neighbor to cure this. Keep it out of government (that’s a trigger word) and more in community, municipality sort of talk.
I’ve gotten traction, but not enough. Bleh.
I can understand how you have not gotten much traction with the idea that guns are connected to our sense of unease about our climate. In my most far out imagination I would not make that connection.
Cultural and political climate, not actual climate. Sorry for not being clear enough Wally, does that make any more sense?