Innocent Abroad

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
–Bill of Rights

“I only wish the NRA… would be careful to recite the whole of it, and then tell us how a heavily armed man, woman, or child, recruited by no official, led by no official, given no goals by any official, motivated or restrained only by his or her personality and perceptions of what is going on, can be considered a member of a well regulated militia.”
–Kurt Vonnegut

Tragedy brings debate, and the events at Virginia Tech on April 16 have certainly done that for gun control. It only took about three days for the shock to subside, and then everyone got on their political hobby horse and started riding hard.

The pro-gun agenda loudly decries that in a society where anyone can carry a gun anywhere, tragedies such as this will be avoided. A gunman walks onto a campus and opens fire. Some heroic citizen calmly pulls their own gun and saves the day. Disaster averted. Everything is fine. Right?

Apparently, the people who envision a society of perfect balance through the cunning use of firearms have absolutely no understanding of psychology, mob mentality, or the deeper currents of racial and socioeconomic tension that run through this country.

Maybe the above scenario works if every single man, woman and child is well trained, fair, unbiased, a good shot, has a stationary target, is calm and composed, and knows precisely what the situation is. But what happens when an angry man in a diner makes a scene and reaches into his jacket—how many guns would be pulled, aimed, and possibly fired? (Does that number change if it’s a black man, or if it’s a woman reaching into her purse? You bet your ass it does.) Even if there’s a legitimate threat and good citizens start shooting, how many of their well-intentioned shots miss the mark and hit coffee pots, pantsuits, waitresses, business-owners on their lunch breaks, little girls emerging from the bathroom? Who pays for the damages to property and person? Will Good Samaritan laws in the future stretch to cover people who shoot and kill someone while trying to shoot someone else entirely? Will killing not count as killing if your intent was to kill someone who you think might have been trying to kill someone else? Does anyone else see that as a potentially complicated, as well as exceedingly dangerous, situation?

In a society already on edge and paranoid about terrorism, what would happen if three Muslims in full religious garb walked into an office building in Dallas carrying guns? They may be American citizens, and it may be their ‘god-given right’ to do so, but don’t believe for a fucking second that everyone around would wipe teary eyes and proclaim “Thank GOD everyone in this country is free to carry guns!”

You can theorize all you want that if everyone on VA Tech had a firearm, very few people would have died. But you don’t know that. It’s also possible that once the firing started and panic set in, people would have been firing wildly and when the real police arrived, they would be powerless to help or even identify the actual perpetrator. You can argue that someone will think twice about robbing you at gunpoint if they know you’re probably armed too. But you can also say that the mugger has every reason to shoot first and rob later—desperation is desperation, and someone who needs the money you carry is going to find a way to get it, right? You can neither prove nor disprove the likelihood of any of these scenarios, so using them as fodder for pro-gun rhetoric is pointless.

All these arguments aside, what the pro-gun idea basically boils down to is the old principle of Mutually Assured Destruction—if everyone has the means to kill everyone else, no one will pull the trigger, so to speak. As a theory it isn’t proven, but it does have a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’, don’t you think? It’s a romantic idea, essentially, that we can find peace through preparation for war.

The fatal flaw in this argument has nothing to do with whether or not such an experiment would be successful or not. My problem isn’t even the logic, necessarily, though it’s dodgy as hell and devoid of any scientific backing or historical precedent. My problem is the hypocrisy of the theory’s most ardent supporters. Their inability, or refusal, to extrapolate their own ideology to a global scale leaves them vulnerable and, in a word, hypocritical.

So…

Bad guys will get guns no matter what anyone says or does, right? Fair enough. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and whoever else is currently making the American hit-list are going to get weapons of mass destruction eventually anyway– according to this argument, you can no more stop them from getting nukes than you can stop a mob boss from getting guns (Evil is as Evil does, as Ted Nugent says). If this is the case, and we follow the bouncing ball of MAD logic, then we should be handing out nuclear weapons left and right to Canada, Liberia, Brazil, Botswana, South Korea, and Japan to help safeguard all us “good” countries. If a “bad” person walks into a restaurant and starts shooting, he won’t do much damage if everyone else is armed, right? So, logically, if one of those “bad” countries gets a little crazy and starts using their guns (incendiary bombs, biological agents, nuclear warheads, etc.) then a “good” country will quickly step in and annihilate them. Disaster averted. Everything is fine. Right?

Suddenly the pro-gun camp shuts the fuck up, because they’re the same silly assholes who clamor for an invasion of Iran and North Korea over nuclear technology even though, according to their own argument, it’s absolutely and completely impossible to stop them from getting what they want. The same assholes who think we should all carry guns because you can’t trust the police want to make us the police of the world and not allow anyone else to carry. What the fuck? This is hypocrisy of the deepest and most offensive nature.

The pro-gun lobby is quick to point out that even without guns, plenty of people still kill—with steak knives, plastic bags, bricks, swords, nooses, etc. and that is absolutely true. But when was the last time someone walked into a classroom with brass knuckles and murdered 30 people? Were 29,569 Americans murdered in 2004 by poisoning? That’s how many died from firearms. Yes, sick people are going to do sick things no matter what, but I’ll take my chances with someone brandishing a knife in a crowded room. There’s a simple law of physics involved in this: If I can run faster than someone with a knife, they can’t possibly hurt me, yet a 105-year old man in a wheel chair with an oxygen tank could shoot me dead from across the street. Fuck that.

You’ll never end violence. It just won’t happen. But using that as a reason to keep the handiest tools for perpetrating violence around is a bit like saying “you’ll never end warfare, so why not let everyone have nukes?” So, Ted Nugent, why all this fuss over uranium enrichment? The world is actually safer if we have all the means to kill each other in the blink of an eye, right?

Right?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS