#715 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday July 27)
Good morning,
GUNS, REDUX
The left is losing the battle to limit the proliferation of guns, in part because of the language they employ and partly because controlling proliferation is now a game of catch-up. When people say “gun control,” those who believe the Second Amendment is under siege stop listening and tune out the reasoning. Because guns are ubiquitous, the real question is gun safety.
The whole gun safety debate revolves around three questions:
1. Who can own guns?
2. What weapons is one permitted to own?
3. Where is one able to carry these guns?
Having sat in on a discussion of gun control/safety at the Aspen Ideas Festival, there appeared to be more agreement among the participants on all of this than there exists among current politicians. My cynical view is that resolving these open issues doesn’t serve the purpose of the politicians. If there were meaningful gun legislation, it would lower the temperature and detract from the political power of maintaining existing hostilities.
That said, who doesn’t believe in the following?:
1. There are certain people who ought not be allowed access to weapons. Mental illness, prior history of violence, record of hate speech—all these suggest limits. There should be background checks and red-flag laws on all purchasers and administrative means to challenge the conclusions.
2. There are weapons that should be off-limits. Who needs to own an AR-15? Who needs multiple weapons and limits on the amounts of ammunition? Applying the extreme Second Amendment rhetoric of the NRA and others, people should have unlimited access to grenades and shoulder launched missiles. It’s absurd.
3. And weapons should not be allowed to be carried in public places—by anyone who isn’t a peace officer or someone with a special justification for self-defense (like a witness in a murder trial). If the general rule is that carrying weapons in public is prohibited, we will be safer. The wild west wasn’t so wild because public displays of weapons generally were prohibited. Why not the same limits today?
And while we’re on limiting weapons, I think the government should be clamping down on civilian ownership and deployment of drones. It is only a couple of steps from cute little fly-overs to people arming these. The skies are a common area that must be monitored and kept safe.
WHO IS DOING THE SHOOTING?
Bob Lameres claims that it’s education that is most important to reducing gun violence: “Mostly young males are committing the most senseless shootings, which is understandable for anyone who has ever been a young male. BUT rarely are these boys B+ students.
Failing public schools if given the resources needed to reverse the current state of education would do more to mitigate gun violence then any well meaning law, which we know will be ignored or circumvented.”
We also know that people over age 40 are not involved in many shootings. Yet, there are countless men held in prison well past that age because of minimum sentencing requirements.
DATING ON THE JOB
I think our modern version of puritanism has gone too far. Where do people date and mate? First, at school. Later, when one is working for a living, on the job. It seems like the strictures on dating workmates are too severe and the punishments too great. Why fly in the face of human nature? Certainly, unwanted advances are not acceptable. But when two grown adults find meaning together, why must society’s mores stand in the way? Consenting adults have agency for themselves and the consequences of their own actions.
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES AND THE COMING CATASTROPHE OF GERMANY
A few weeks ago, I compared our embrace (or lack thereof) of Russia after the fall of the USSR to resemble the defeat of the Axis at the end of World War I, rather than the magnanimity of the Marshall Plan and treatment of the Axis at the end of World War II. A couple of people noted that the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations exacted from Germany were not a proximate cause of Hitler’s rise, nor, in fact, was the economic effect of these payments that significant.
My point was not that the reparations necessarily gave rise to fascist Germany. Whether they actually did or didn’t isn’t material to their real effect. They provided a demagogue with the “talking points” of Germany’s victimization. This sort of victimization narrative allows for an “us versus them” mentality of nationalism in the face of “the other.”
Have a great day,
Glenn