[Culture]
[culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns
Gunman opens fire at Oregon mall; Suspect, 2 dead.
This happened last night a mile or so from my house, at the mall where I normally go to the movies, and where my family occasionally goes to restaurants or stores which are easiest found in shopping malls. In this case, no one in my circle of family and close friends, and so far as I know, no one in my circle of acquaintances, was involved. My personal degree of involvement consisted only of hearing sirens from time to time while the through street down the block from my house became badly snarled up with diverted traffic.
Guns.
Now we’re going to have the same, tiresome, never ending discussion we always have about our national obsession with firearms. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” “Guns are only a tool.” “Spoons don’t make people fat any more than guns kill people.” “Cars kill more people than guns do.” “Guns make me safer.” “Guns prevent far more unreported crimes than they cause.” And my personal favorite, “It’s not right to politicize such a tragedy by bringing up these larger social issues.”
You know what? Shut the fuck up. People died. Because of guns. People who wouldn’t have died if the shooter couldn’t have acquired his firepower and accessories. It’s that fucking simple.
I’ve never yet met a gun enthusiast who will admit to the simple proposition that if there were fewer guns in our society, there would be fewer deaths. Not a single Second Amendment enthusiast with the moral and intellectual honesty to agree that yes, their ownership of firearms is more important to them than the tens of thousands of people killed every year by suicide, homicide and other gun-related causes.
My life is worth more to me than your guns are. My life is not made safer by your guns. If you can’t own that simple fact with its moral and social implications, you are a dishonest coward.
If you can own that simple fact, then you are a very different person than me. Because guess what? I value your life more than you value mine.
There’s a lot of conservative “scholarship” about how firearms keep people safe and prevent crime. That work is only slightly more credible than Young Earth creationist “scholarship”, a great deal of it being simply made up by a man working as a janitor at Yale who’s still cited in NRA circles as an Ivy League researcher.
There’s a lot of personal anecdote about how firearms have saved people’s lives. I’ll stipulate that even if each and every one of those is passionately true, it’s still on a par with people who tell stories about not wearing seatbelts saved their lives when they were thrown clear of a fiery wreck. The objective data says otherwise, and I’ll take data over anecdote every time. Especially when you’re laying my life on the line.
No one comes to gun advocacy as a reasoned position based on careful examination of the evidence, any more than anyone comes to evolution denial, climate change denial or supply side economics based on the evidence. Gun advocacy is an emotional and ideological position desperately in search of an objective basis, just like its conservative kissing cousins. Like all of those fixations, advocacy of widespread private gun ownership is a patently absurd position when viewed from any perspective other than the purely internal.
Some people feel safer with guns. You scare the rest of us spitless. Yesterday afternoon, your sense of safety was bought and paid for by someone who dressed up, went to the mall in my neighborhood, and killed people to celebrate the Christmas spirit and his theoretical defense of essential liberties as protected by the NRA and the Republican party.
It’s as simple as that. If the shooter didn’t have access to a weapon, a tool whose sole purpose is killing other human beings, he wouldn’t have killed and wounded nearly as many people.
Every day people die by firearms. Every day people die for your guns. I don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want anyone I love or care about to be one of those people. I don’t want total strangers to be one of those people. I don’t want you to be one of those people. (There are more gun suicides than homicides in the United States every year.)
We have social experiments running in countries all over the globe, from the UK to Australia, that show reduced firearms availability and increased firearms control reduces gun violence and death rates. This isn’t even a remotely questionable proposition. Yet the gun lobby as a whole and gun enthusiasts in general go through intellectual and moral contortions that would shame a pedophile Jesuit crackhead in order to maintain that their beloved firearms are a right which cannot possibly be tainted by any whiff of sane social policy or moral considerations.
So, guns? Yeah. If I could, I’d mail every gun owner in the United States postcards every single day, showing a photo of that day’s dead, their bio, listing their surviving family members, and the make of firearm that killed them. They’d be like baseball cards. Maybe then it would be real to you guys polishing your guns and feeling afraid of the wicked world, feeling safer with your home defense.
I know a lot more gun owners than I do criminals, and it’s your culture of guns that enables those criminals to be armed in the first place.
If you’re a gun enthusiast, you own those deaths as surely as the sun rises in the east. And I’ll be amazed to see any of you ever admit that to yourselves. Congratulations, you’ve sufficiently controlled the social and political discourse such that none of the rest of us get a say in our own safety.
Meanwhile, people died in my neighborhood yesterday, paying with their lives for your gun rights. Just as people die in neighborhoods all across the United States every day.
Feel safer now?
I sure don’t.
[1] Be aware, in the comments section on this post I am unlikely to be my generally polite self to the usual specious arguments about why guns are harmless and wonderful. The social utility argument (“cars kill more people…”) or the home defense argument (“my gun in my nightstand is more accessible to my sleepy self who just woke up than that wired-up burglar’s is in his hand…”) for example. Feel free to engage me where you disagree, but don’t be stupid about it. I’m not willing to be moderate on this topic. Not today.
[2] I shouldn’t even have to go into this, but some people will doubtless think it, or bring it up, telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m a stupid liberal hippie who’s never touched a weapon. Yes, I’m quite familiar with firearms. I lettered in both riflery and archery in high school. I know range safety, and believe me, if I shot at you, I’d hit you. That makes me all the less interested in ever doing such a thing, or having such a thing done to me. In short, I’m afraid of guns precisely because I do understand them, not because I am ignorant of them.
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Posted: 6:59 am Wed December 12 2012 |
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@jay_lake That? Is why you rock. Thanks!
Jay Lake: [culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns: Gunman opens fire at Oregon mall; Su… http://t.co/hAK8g1ez
[culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns http://t.co/GWqL102X (via @jay_lake)
[culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns: Gunman opens fire at Oregon mall; Suspect, 2 d… http://t.co/vMcPxDrF
Jay Lake: [culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns http://t.co/cLP118s0
“Some people feel safer with guns. You scare the rest of us spitless.” http://t.co/vS48rKfr
I’m very sorry but not surprised to hear this and glad that you, your family and friends are okay.
I really, really don’t get those “But I need guns to defend myself and my family” arguments. In 39 years as a woman (i.e. more vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks) on this planet, I’ve never once been in a situation where I would have felt safer with a gun. I grew up in the country, so I could have learned target shooting and gotten a license via the target shooting club or a hunting license (because sport shooters and hunters still have guns even in countries with strict gun controls). I didn’t because I never saw the point.
Besides – and that’s something that most gun rights activists in the US forget – routine petty crimes like robberies or housebreaking so often turn violent in the US, simply because criminals carry guns just in case some homeowner decides to protect his family from having his TV stolen. Whereas here in Germany, very few people die during house break-ins or robberies, because these situations don’t escalate as often. We did have some amok attacks in schools and the like, probably encouraged by the media reactions to other amok attacks in the US and elsewhere. But the reaction to those amok attacks was more gun control, not less.
To be honest, I don’t see what can be done in the US with so many guns already on the streets and so many nutcases who won’t hand them over, even if they were to become illegal. And rightwing propaganda like Red Dawn egging them on to defend themselves against imaginary communists or zombies or whatever.
It’s different when it happens in your neighborhood, isn’t it? Rage instead of irritation. I finished law school in Tucson in 2010–about seven months before the Gabby Giffords shooting. I had voted for her, and many of my friends had worked on her campaign. I knew Judge Roll, though not well–he had helped critique my moot court team. I kept thinking, this isn’t my Tucson, I love Tucson, yes it’s Arizona but people like aren’t like that there, not in Tucson.
But they are. Crazy violent people are everywhere, and in most places, so are guns.
Actually, if you look back over my long term blogging history, I’ve always been outraged about this kind of thing. That it’s close to home is…tougher. Kind of like I’ve always felt very strongly about healthcare issues in this country, but once I became a cancer patient, it was suddenly a lot more personal.
“I’ve never yet met a gun enthusiast who will admit to the simple proposition that if there were fewer guns in our society, there would be fewer deaths.”
We had pizza in Denver, Colorado last year, so now you can say you’ve met one.
Or was that earlier this year? Hmmm, my memory fails me.
Damn if I remember when, thanks to chemo brain, but I remember *you*. So all good.
Well, I have no excuse except bad memory. In any case, the point is that I readily acknowledge that firearms are a superior force multiplier as opposed to knives or brass knuckles, etc, and that European countries that have been able to effectively reduce the prevalence of firearms in their societies have reduced levels of homicides. So sure, if I had an ideal world, firearms wouldn’t exist there.
The disconnect for me isn’t whether firearms are ideal or not, but whether there is a realistic way to create my ideal world in America. When you account for factors like the 2nd amendment, the strength of the firearms lobby, the number of firearms manufacturers in the US, the number of firearms in private hands, the well established smuggling network that already transports illegal materials into the US from neighboring countries, I don’t see how West European-style gun control could realistically be enacted in the US.
But don’t you see that’s a cop-out answer? “We already have too many guns, so there’s no point in trying” is a surrender to violence, and acknowledgement that tens of thousands of lives lost every year aren’t worth the trouble of attempting to solve the problem.
As I said elsewhere, it certainly could be solved. Australia put the genie back in the bottle after the Port Arthur massacre. Or my nonserious comment on the other side of my blog about criminalizing the manufacture, distribution and sale of ammunition, and/or taxing it impossibly high.
Not that I think that is or should be the solution. My point is it can be solved. Instead we choose to be a society that glorifies firearms and accepts gun deaths as a sad and inaddressable inevitability.
That’s not a society that makes me proud, frankly.
Is it a cop-out, or just acknowledging that there’s a catch-22? Trying to convince the average citizen to surrender their right to firearms so that hopefully at some point in the future the cost of illegal firearms will be high enough that criminals (or people with criminal intent) won’t be able to afford them is a political hard-sell.
Australia has done a good job with their country, but there’s quite a few factors that don’t make it analogous to the situation in the US. Also, for example, Hawaii has gun law that are much more strict than in most of the US, and it has one of the lowest homicide rates in the US. On the other hand, it’s an island state with no major firearms manufacturer, and thousands of miles from any large supplier of firearms, so their gun laws are easily enforceable.
So sure, I think the problem can be solved, but because of unique circumstances that exist in the US, I think the solution will be an extremely difficult. I’m not trying to glorify guns here, I’m just being pragmatic about the situation.
It’s cold outside. And until the government can control the weather, I prefer to wear a coat.
I’m certainly not going to try to beat our heads together until one of us gives in. Thank you for engaging. I guess my final thought for you is that our society’s relationship with guns isn’t worth the price we pay for that relationship. I don’t want to live in a country where this is just an accepted part of life. We’re better than this, and we can do better than this.
Sure, I don’t have much more to add to the discussion myself and I think we both agree on what the ideal is anyway.
We have plenty of firearms manufacturers in Europe, too (Glock is Austrian, Sig Sauer is German/Swiss, Heckler + Koch is German, etc…), and yet still manage to keep them out of the hands of the general population. Though those companies are more than happy to sell their wares in the US.
Just about every European nation has firearms manufacturers, but relatively speaking they don’t have political clout anything like the arms manufacturers in America. And not only do the European companies sell their wares in America, they can also influence our politics by providing money to our lobbyists, and some foreign firms during this past election also tried to use a loophole by having their US-based subsidiaries donate to super-PACs.
There are three classes of targets:
Inanimate objects (e.g., what there is on a firing range)
Moving objects (e.g., the mechanical duck thingy at a carnival)
Living things that can self-dirrect their motion (e.g., Bambi… or The Great Bambino)
Anyone who makes any claim whatsoever that he/she can wake up, obtain a firearm from the bedside table, acquire a proper (not misidentified) target in the third grouping, and disable that target through gunfire is… probably a resident of the state immediately north of Jay and has been sampling the newly legale product for far too long. And that’s leaving aside the “before that target shoots you” criterion.
If there’s one thing that cops and military personnel learn early, it’s that range prowess and combat prowess have some, but only minimal relationship. The (relatively normal) brain treats a living-being target — and especially a living-human target — differently from a printed circular pattern on cardboard. And the less said about the second time one tries to acquire a human target and fire upon it, the better… unless, that is, the trigger-puller lacks the basic capacity to consider the consequences of his/her own actions.
The “gun nut” argument is based upon a very specific type of dehumanization: The dehumanization of every member of the government who is engaged in “tyranny” (for some value of “tyranny”). That’s far too close to the teahadist point of view for my comfort…
[...] Guns don’t kill people, except when Guns do kill people. [...]
A coworker of mine was killed at the Century 16 in Aurora this year. Another was badly injured and spent months in the hospital recovering. My sister was going to the showing, but went to a different theater at the last minute.
And yet, I still enjoy my shooting hobby. So do people I know. An old classmate who was in the next theater over and was nearly hit by bullets passing through the wall, he still carries a gun.
The problem is lack of help for those with mental health issues.
And given that this was a murder/suicide, I am willing to bet that those 3 people would still be dead, even without guns. Could by from the dirtbag hitting them with a car, or stabbing them, or poisoning them. But he wanted them dead, and he would have found a way.
So stop blaming the tool, and point the blame at the tool using the tool.
It’s a tool with one purpose: killing. All other uses such as target shooting and hunting are just practice at using the killing tool. Keeping that tool out of the hands of potential killers would go a long way toward reducing deaths. To me, that’s pretty basic logic, both in a philosophical and moral sense.
As I said in my comment above, most countries with strict gun control laws still allow target shooters and hunters to keep guns, though they are thoroughly vetted, have to be members of a respective club and can’t own things like submachine guns or assault rifles, which are no use for target shooting or hunting anyway, but excellent for killing.
If we could replace all the guns with Hulk Hands…that would be better. Takes care of the spoon=fat people issue at the same time since a person with Hulk Hands is unlikely to be able to manipulate a spoon. Two problems solved at once!
“@jay_lake [culture] Yesterday people died in my neighborhood for your guns: http://t.co/DLQUbbkL” Portland is blessed w/ writers, so read.
. My perception from living in the UK is that gun control isn’t very effective at controlling this kind of pre-planned massacre. We still have our shooting incidents like this. What gun control was very good at was stopping all the accidental deaths, impulse murders, and suicides. It also made people who intended to commit crimes more vulnerable because the tools of their trade were themselves illegal.
And we still have hunting, and gun ranges too. It’s just that we have licensed facilities where people can indulge their hobby.
All in all, I think the gun bans have been very successful at reducing death rates.
Also, I don’t really understand why some people in the US believe that guns are great for standing up to the federal government. You have to face facts. I don’t care how good the weapons are you buy they aren’t going to do much damage to a military that controls roughly a third of the worlds military funding. Any guns you can buy vs. a dozen tanks and a fighter jet – I know which will win. It’s just crazy talk.
I don’t know many people who believe that owning firearms will protect them from the Federal government. I think that there is an element that likes to romanticize our Revolutionary War and they like the idea that common citizens could fight an oppressive government, but by far the majority of people (gun owners and otherwise) that I know realize that technology has far outpaced the 2nd Amendment.
Hi, Matt, I can certainly get a distorted view of American society on the internet. There are a lot of people arguing just that point online, but every American I’ve met in person comes across as saner than that.
Haha, that doesn’t surprise me. The internet is a great forum for people who want to substitution sanity with volume.
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!!!!!!!?????
?
Was attempting to substitute volume for sanity for humorous effect.
Hahahaha. No, you’d have to get a lot louder than that to convince me you’ve decided to forego sanity.
In Germany the situation is similar to what Thomas describes for the UK. We get very few accidental gun deaths, suicides, impulse murders using guns, people shot during robberies and burglaries and the like. We still have gun deaths due to organized crime and terrorism and we did have a couple of high profile school shooting and other amok attacks. Two of the school shooters used hunting or target shooting weapons owned by their fathers, until the law was changed and regulations for keeping such weapons locked away tightened, so that avenue was closed. Another school shooter used an antique frontloader pistol, which was exempt from regulations, but luckily neither very accurate nor very effective. There have also been some amok attacks involving swords, axes, knifes, molotov cocktails, etc… So yes, bad things still happen and the sort of people who commit mass killings will still find a way, but with access to guns severely restricted, they are less effective at killing as many people as possible. At any rate, I don’t know of any US amok shooter who had to resort to using an antique frontloader pistol.
I’ve come across the “We need guns to defend ourselves in case the government/UN/phantom Kenyan muslim socialists come to do whatever it is those people are afraid of”, too. It’s probably the insane fringe, but I certainly have come across that sort of thing. And yes, it’s always struck me as silly, too, because even the government of Luxembourg still has more firepower than even the most extreme of gun nuts.
Jay, you complain about conservatives having biases that blind them. While you may well have the right position on this for society as a whole, when you complain about guns enabling suicides, or people killing people with knives as a reason for gun control (as you did a few weeks ago regarding an incident in Wyoming — my backyard where guns are common), you jump the shark and lose credibility. I think we need more gun control and better enforcement of existing laws. Stick to the strong arguments and don’t throw in the weak ones and the silly ones. It weakens your case and makes you seem biased in a way that is easily dismissed. “Jay Lake uses a knife attack to argue for gun control…Liberal stupidity on display again!” was probably on some conservative’s link salad somewhere. So all I am saying is stick to the best arguments. I’m not sure you have done that uniformly above.
thank you for putting this so rationally and thoughtfully. I agree with you 100% but have never been able to put it into words as eloquently as this. I would like to see all privately owned guns banned. Let shooting ranges have them if people must go shoot something, they can blast away at a target. Maybe they can make an exception for single shot rifles used only for hunting…
“If you’re a gun enthusiast, you own those deaths as surely as the sun rises in the east”–@jay_lake http://t.co/RPNRbhiq #clackamasshooting
@eroticawriter @jay_lake what a load of BS. but hey, nice of you to be spreading the hate around
@eroticawriter @jay_lake Then if you write literature, then you own hate speech as well, right?
@Adventurotica We both write genre fiction, not considered literature. Most hate speech isn’t even literate never mind literature @jay_lake
About 15 years ago, someone with a gun lay in wait for another person who happened to be passing down the street on which I live. The shooter didn’t care that there were houses in the line of fire. He (I feel pretty safely non-sexist in assuming the shooter was male) didn’t stop to think that it was 8:00 pm so there were people in the houses. He didn’t care that some of his bullets might not go into his intended victim (as far as we know, none of them went in his victim).
One or possibly two shots entered our house. Fortunately we heard some shots before that didn’t hit the house and we hit the deck, so the only injuries were a scraped elbow and some minor damage to the house. The police showed us where the shooter had fired from and it was clear this individual didn’t know how to handle a gun at all. There were bullet scores on our neighbors tree quite high up, and shell casings all over the ground next to a house occupied by a family with kids.
I definitely feel that more restrictive gun ownership legislation would have prevented this asshole from going out to conduct his petty exercise in such a thoughtless way. I also remember how my first husband, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was able to walk down the street to a neighbor’s house and buy a gun (this was in Texas).
I’d be a lot happier and feel a lot safer if only law enforcement, military, and a few national parks personnel had legal access to firearms of any kind – and even theirs should be carefully monitored so they couldn’t take out their service weapons and use them on other people outside of the conduct of their duties. Think of how many less police shootings there would be if the police didn’t have to assume an object in a suspect’s hand is a gun.
“Shut the fuck up. People died. Because of guns.”
@jay_lake on gun violence: http://t.co/hJ0lFHan