Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
I'm afraid we have to differ here.
That's nothing to be afraid of. 
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It would be unthinkable that, if something alone the lines of Columbine or Aurora happened here, nothing would be done about it.
I never said nothing would be done.
In fact, a major problem is precisely that something will always be done.
Something that is palatable, not too expensive and ultimately futile, as a general rule. It is important to be seen "doing something" about a problem, which relieves us all- and politicians in particular- of the need to stop and think about what actually works and makes sense. By and large, this problem is visible because all the tragedy happens in a pile. If all the traffic accidents in a year were to happen on a single day, you'd see everyone scurrying to find something to do that did not involve analyzing the problem and did not involve banning cars. Heads would roll if they didn't come up with something. Whether it works is another matter, and not really relevant to the process.
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The last time something like that happened here, far stricter gun control was instituted, including a ban on all automatic rifles. That seems to have put a stop to it.
You've shown elsewhere adequate sensitivity to the finer points of statistics to know that it's far too early to tell, so I won't dive into that.
Incidentally, we have had such a ban since forever up here, if you're talking about full auto. Access to full auto fire is arguably one of the least problematic restrictions, and probably the most effective. Semi can still do a lot of damage, but not quite as much. It's adequate for everything else civilian in terms of utility, though. Personally, I think utility isn't the only think we should be allowed to be concerned with, but I can swallow that pill without difficulty. There's bigger fish to fry for an individual liberty person than that, and probably always will be. Besides, a compromise is to allow it on a licenced range.
I saw a claim being made here that gun related deaths had been unaffected.
Can you substantiate or refute that for me, as an AU resident?
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Last time I checked we are still a free society here.
Last time I checked, free is a matter of degrees in all modern societies.
Perhaps it is better to state explicitly which concern you're addressing and in what way you feel the concern is unwarranted?
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The murder rate in the US is a multiple of murder rates in comparable countries.
Such is not surprising for a number of reasons, few of which have anything to do with guns.
Not "none", but "few".
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There are 2 million Americans behind bars and some 6 million under "correctional supervision".
Ever look at the demographics behind bars?
I won't delve into it right now, but I believe you will find the demographics hint very convincingly at the causes of crime disparity between the USA and other countries (including murder). To say nothing of the established self reinforcing social structures and systems set up around the law there. It's an extreme experiment in eugenics, far beyond anything the Nazis ever attempted, and with a substantial risk of a backlash. I sometimes refer to the inmates as the designated survivor population in reference to the worst case for how bad it can go, for several reasons. If it works, it'll be a modern implementation of the "aryan" dream, though. Meshes fine with the political undercurrents there, don't you think?
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The levels of personal and State violence far exceed those elsewhere. So do the levels of gun ownership.
In all fairness, if you count unregistered firearms not owned by criminals, Norway probably approaches the level of legitimate gun ownership in the USA. Granted, we're more about hunting and sports weapons, as self defense with a gun isn't a legal reason to own one here unless you're a licenced bodyguard or famous. Which underlines the point about correlation and causation. Having more legally owned guns isn't necessarily a direct cause of violence, although having no guns at all (legal or otherwise) is obviously going to stop causing gun related violence once they've been all pried from the dead hands of their current owners. That sort of encapsulates what the debate is usually all about on some levels: ambiguous causality, an unwillingness to examine in depth, two camps that have no interest in meeting in the middle, and the staunch (if often entirely selfish) defense of tangible liberties along the lines of "you can't take my way of life away".
Here's the starting point:
- If no guns are in private hands, private hands will not cause gun related deaths.
- Private hands will never give up all the guns currently owned without a civil war.
Two perfectly reasonable and factual states of affairs. The status quo is guns. Lots of them. If one wishes to change anything, one must bear in mind that what the gun control advocates often fail to realize, is that their ideal scenario isn't even on the table. They will have to acquire their own guns and use them for mass murder of the sort we call a "civil war" to put it on the table. Debate on the topic must proceed from that reality. At which point I would introduce a real firebrand (to some): most, but not all, gun owners are reasonable people. Therein lies the potential for a solution. A way out of the conundrum to realize a compromise both parties can live with so the tension between them can dissipate and the country can move forward on that point. I see many voices failing to both show a sensitivity to the validity of the pro gun camp's preferences and appeal to that reason we should be able to agree exists in the majority of the pro gun camp, and that is an obstacle to progress for either side.
I want to see happy faces on both sides of the issue. Fewer gun related deaths. Rehabilitation of gun ownership in the eyes of non-owners. All of it. The cake and have some, too- yes, please. How close can we get to that? If we nicely factor the issues, specifically the problems that motivate a restriction of liberty (which I hold to be the default in the absence of an issue), I think that's a good starting point for finding a compromise, but it belongs in another thread so I've yanked it.
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The level of State support for those at the margins is far lower than elsewhere.
Yes. While I am not going to defend her, I would point out that Ulrike Meinhof had an interesting- if incomplete- take on the Holocaust.
It is interesting because it provides a model of what is happening in the USA. Unlike her, I don't blame capitalism. I blame people. Just as I don't blame guns, but rather the people pulling the trigger. Accumulating wealth isn't a problem in itself. Yet at some point one leaves behind society, becomes seperate from it. And once that separation occurs, the tension takes on a different character. The right wing develops, the rhetoric becomes increasingly aggressive and the common man starts to drift, culminating in a huge backlash against those that have what the rest do not, and everyone associated with them. Like now, the major financial players at the time of WW2 in Germany were the Jewish institutions. Nothing wrong with that. But they ended up apart. And societies are apt to lash out at a whole group when the collective anger of a people reaches the breaking point. In a sense, it was a revolution. It just had a larger scope and poorer outcome than many revolutions we regard in a better light.
This comes down to something Atatürk realized with regard to women's rights: because of our inherent interconnectedness, humanity as a whole cannot soar while a large segment of the population is shackled to the ground. It held true for women's position relative to men, and it holds true for the margins. I can't push you up indefinitely. I'm only this tall. You have to grab the ledge and pull me after you so I can boost you to the next ledge. Or we get nowhere. And if I'm the only one not going anywhere, eventually I will say fuck it, club you to death and stand on your corpse in the hope that I can find a foothold to climb up to the ledge myself. That's capitalism, too, at its heart. A self balancing system, with all the unpleasantness self balancing entails, and all the tragedy of being a species capable of grasping its own situation and persistently refusing to do so, as well as a tendency in the USA for one of the parties trying to game the system this time, which just makes the process even more unpleasant in the end.
We're well rid of Meinhof, but if you take enough shots in the dark, you'll hit someone. Tragically apropos, that.
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Violence and crime, and the fear of violence and crime, (which can be just as debilitating) seems far higher in the US than elsewhere.
I would tend to think they're correlated, if not outright interrelated through a series of feedback loops.
I've also got an idea that dog eat dog is a game where kibble changes everything.
A few decades ago, we used to look to the USA up here for the gold standard of material wealth. These days, the middle class in the USA wouldn't live up to our idea of poverty. A function of an inflationary economy and distribution of wealth, where a narrow curve like the USA diminishes the economic growth of the middle class at an accelerating rate that eventually turns to economic shrinkage, while a broad curve like Norway increases the economic growth of the middle class at a rate that eventually diffuses the concentration required for the hierarchial organization that is foundational to industrial efficiency. The middle ground is a difficult balance to strike, but one would be hard pressed to ignore the difference in crime, violence and discontent. Economics are a complex subject in an inflationary economy, yet it is not difficult to grasp that a want for kibble makes the fat dogs look tastier than the converse.
Or that any dog will do if the fat dog has a decent bit of muscle, too.
Therein lies part of the atmosphere of fear.
When the killer up here came out to the island, armed to the teeth in a country where police don't normally carry guns, right after a major bombing in the capital, not a single person responded with fear until the shooting started, and most didn't respond with fear until they were in the midst of the chaos. People's initial response to seeing others gunned down nearby was "Are they playing, or is it a drill?". The fear only started when they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone was trying to kill them.
Fear and distrust doesn't come natural to us at all anymore.
If you see a mentally disturbed individual openly loading a handgun in plain sight on a bench in the middle of the city, you just shrug and go on about your business, despite the well known fact that taking one out of the mandatory armored briefcase anywhere but a firing range is a felony. After all, what could possibly go wrong? It's probably just a crazy person, nothing to worry about. Who here would want to kill anyone, and why? Might as well be concerned with car theft when parked in some poor part of town, or something equally silly.
This, I think, comes down to a fundamental material contentedness. People don't worry about layoffs or job prospects or injuries. They don't really give a shit if they get robbed, unless there were pictures or something in the wallet. If robbers are that desperate, let the poor things have it. After all, it's only money, and even begging in the streets will net you about $500 a day in the capital. A bit lower where I live, maybe $300 a day or so. Health care is taken care of, so that's not an issue. A job advancement is status, not a difference in standard of living. Maybe you'll bring some extra pocket money to one of the vacations this year. Big deal.
We're more concerned with things like the question of whether women should be artificially advanced in pay grade the year they are away from work in connection with pregnancy, so as to address the disparity biology causes in the cumulative pay over the course of a full career, meaning the 45 years of your life where you're working. Seems a year without advancing, twice in life, is enough cumulative loss in income growth to account for the net lifetime income disparity to the point where women are otherwise paid slightly more than men for equivalent work.
That sort of thing is an important issue to fight over, right up there with whether or not we should ban elective circumcision prior to the age of majority. Not that anything is really that important. Not important enough to really care about. Just enough to have an opinion and to watch the news or read the papers, maybe even vote. More important is where the main vacation should be this year, and whether to swap the second car for a newer model this year or to wait until next year. Dubai sounds nice, but Ibiza has more parties. Any preferences?
Fear... doesn't really have much of a place here, guns or no guns.
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Some Americans seem to shrug their shoulders and make noises about the price of freedom. I don't see the figures I've just referred to as reflecting freedom at all. If you feel they do reflect freedom, then by all means do nothing. To me, freedom seem diminished by the levels of fear and paranoia I see expressed in many posts here.
I feel they reflect neither freedom, nor the lack thereof. As I said, freedom from fear is comfort, not liberty.
Liberty and comfort are not mutually exclusive, just independent. Different axes.
Fear to the point of expelling the object of fear isn't liberty either. It just seems that way when you don't like the object of fear. When you do like it, you feel the fear of others around you, how it constricts you. Their fear of your liberty. And you realize it won't work to compromise, because their fear is like any other anxiety: every time you give in, it grows. It isn't compromise to give up liberties to soothe the fears of others, but rather appeasement, with no other result than a continued erosion until you're living in a box that most may thrive in but in which you yourself have no life and cannot have one.
That is why I think a real compromise, based on finding a balance between the interests and preferences of free citizens, needs to occur instead of a verbal duel between those that fear guns and those that fear not having them. Because neither of the latter two are reasonable or constructive points of departure for any social process. You end up with a winner takes all outcome that never resolves the issue. Not that this is directly related to the underlying point of the second amendment. I suggest the gun control thing would be best debated in an arena that wasn't chosen by the NRA (i.e. the one where owning whatever guns you like and using them indiscriminately as a God-given right is the premise).
Two topics for two threads. The issue of the compromise between liberty and gun control. The issue of the safeguarding ability of the people to break the state monopoly on violence if the latter should go the historic route. If you like, we can mix them up, but I think they're best addressed seperately. In a complex question where the parties are diametrically opposed, nuancing the matter helps, and breaking it down into orthogonal, smaller issues helps even more. That's my experience, anyway.
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All this suggests to me that there is something very basic out of kilter in American society.
No shit.
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If events such as Aurora are to be avoided in future, this question needs serious examination.
Actually, no. If events such as Aurora are to be avoided, the symptoms need to be shelved for a moment so the disease can be identified and cured. This is a plane crash. Lots of people dead, lots of crying and screaming, and still flying remains something we'll continue to do, and cars remain a greater risk. Unless we don't really give a shit about people dying, we have to prioritize some of our battles. It's like with abortion. The best way to reduce the number isn't to outlaw it, but to advance conditions for women. That's the logical step, the one that realizes progress without getting into a deadlock, and the greatest progress at that.
To reframe it: do you think the people with guns will give them up?
I don't know about you, but I've never massacred anyone. If I had, you would know. And I don't much like the implication of denying me the freedom to live my life in a way that is meaningful to me (e.g. hunting, meditation, bettering myself) in order to stop crime, while at the same time my neighbour is allowed known harmful activities I don't partake of and people are being let go every day in the courts because the presumption of innocence safeguards their right not to be denied liberty in order to stop crime.
That presumption exists as a safeguard against oppression and injustice, by the way, much like the equally paranoid second amendment, and I like both in the same way- and to the same degree- that I like my fire alarm. I don't have a fire alarm because I'm afraid, and it doesn't occasion fear. It is simply a reasonable precaution on statistical grounds, no more, no less. It would arguably be a lot more efficient to both ditch all the guns and let the police have a bit more time to investigate and omit the use of courts entirely. I would not like that kind of a society, however. I simply couldn't live in it.
I can live in one where there's stringent gun controls, though. In fact, I do.
But there's a balance to be struck, and I don't think it is any more legitimate to use a crime I didn't do as the basis for restricting my liberties than for a school to keep everyone in detention because one of the students did something. Delineating obligations for responsible gun ownership and use, sure thing. But don't treat me like a massacre waiting to happen without some evidence to show that I am one.
It's not even about a right to own a firearm, but rather about your right to impose restrictions on me. That right is tenuous and its exercise should be held to a higher standard than the right of courts to convict. The default in the courts is innocence, and the default is I'm allowed to do what isn't criminal, and the catch in both cases is we define what constitutes crime together, moving the bar. Let's move it with parity.
On this day of days, I am not insensitive to the desire to prevent a recurrence of events like Aurora.
The national memorial for our own massacre was yesterday, and the issues that made it necessary for me to defer digesting that particular horror are dealt with for now, leaving me in the acutely painful position of having followed every testimony and forensics reconstruction from the event and now finally letting it start to sink in for the first time, all at once. Presumably that is obvious from my poor coherence and shoddy reasoning. In any case, I do appreciate the gravity of Aurora and probably feel much the same about it as you do. I wish it really were as simple as gun control. It's not. And that issue has an important flip side to it, against which it must be balanced.
The sad fact of the matter is these things happen, and will continue to happen, with or without gun control.
We can't let them dictate our lives. That's neither liberty, nor freedom from fear.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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