Re-visiting Guns
I posted previously about how I believe America needs a type of gun registry. I want to post a few comments from myself and others on a chat thread to further elaborate upon it.
I said, as my screen name evilgenius,
The biggest deal with mass shootings is their place in the public consciousness. I was just reading in some news story that there is a 13 day period within which one shooting can lead to another. But the idea doesn’t go away after that period. When alienated people consider what comes into their heads sometimes the idea sticks. The angle that will eventually work will have to deal with that. It will have to make entertaining the idea something that a person in that position would refuse as it came to them. A conveyance of expectation from society that even a person in that kind of despair would listen to. This kind of thing happens all the time. People make decisions based upon how society views a thing. Kids are especially vulnerable to it. That’s why schools, which are our primary means of socializing people, won’t change, even if that is what is required. This is the area people are afraid to do science on. And even more afraid to apply science. They would much rather go on about how they have free will. Whether people do or not is actually up for debate. One place where it may exist, however, may be with the originators of conspiracy theory who know that the victims of these tragedies are not actors, but spread that message anyway because they calculate that doing so will bring them something.
Another person, #1, said,
The contagion affect is real and this comes from being tribal and social animals. Think about how a socially isolated and angry individual who lacks any kind of healthy organic tribal affiliation can be drawn by the contagion affect to copy his Columbine heroes!
By the way, this is very much related to political polarity. Americans, often fragmented and isolated from community, tend to be affected by the contagion affect in their addiction to social media and the internet. Lacking organic connections, they become easily manipulated.
The Russians figured this out. So have I.
Then, in reference to the idea of the registry, I said this,
I’ll say it again, there should be a registry. The registry shouldn’t contain the names of anyone owning a standard hunting rifle or pistol. It should contain the names of people who own semi-auto rifles, bump stocks, silencers, large capacity magazines and all other over the top gun related items. Organizations like schools or businesses that employ people, or individuals who are doing something like checking out a neighborhood where they are thinking about buying a house could look up the situation. If a school knows that a student, or ex-student owns such a weapon they could mount a more extensive campaign to keep them off of their premises. If a business deems that a person who owns such things is a threat they could escort them from their premises, and hire guards for a period of time to keep them from coming back or install a security system that might keep them out. If a couple sees that someone down the street from where they are considering buying is on the list they could choose to overlook that property and buy elsewhere. People on the list could be denied loans, or required to pay higher interest rates.
This pertains to what makes the contagion, a social acceptance of these things. Not even a social acceptance, but a remorseless embracing of them in the face of death, a cheering squad for guns that encourages bent people to believe in their own use of them. Yes, eventually the people who own these things would fight back, in the courts. That’s the way it should be. The resultant battles would also go a long way in recognizing the rights of other marginalized groups in society. If gun owners win, then maybe homosexuals could use that precedent to ensure they can’t be fired from their jobs for being homosexual. If gun owners win, then maybe black people could gain some ground against being pulled over for being black.
The registry itself can be fashioned so that it does not constitute an infringement. It can come with no costs to the purchasers. The actions taken as a result of it would be those of private entities, not the government.
Another person, #2, said,
EG, semi-auto guns, both handguns, rifles, and shotguns, are NOT “over the top”, anymore than are automatic transmissions in cars. It is a matter of user preference alone. The ultimate long range sniper rifles, some of the deadliest small arms, capable of anonymous killing from a mile away, are bolt-action.
As for large capacity magazines, it sounds like you have never shot paper targets. Every time one has to break stance, eject an empty and load a full magazine, your score suffers as you reacquire the sight picture and squeeze off another round.
YES, marketing BOTH “real guns” and plastic toy guns benefit from building such to resemble the small arms used by the military. So what? That would be what people prefer to buy. Just the mere RUMOR that Obama was gonna ban the sale of such weapons sold 6.5 million AR-15 variants, it had far more impact than marketing.
One of the things that MIGHT POSSIBLY HELP is mandatory gun safety classes. I attended a Junior High School with a rifle range in the basement where .22 Short top-break single shot rifles were used. About a decade before I attended in the mid-1960’s, they quit using it, and they stopped firearms safety training. The rate of firearms accidents has been increasing since.
In the absence of 100% firearms safety training, what was left was TV. Every night, we saw cowboys and cops and private detectives kill people with guns. A kid who gets NO TRAINING from his parents gets all of it from TV. TV teaches you that you put a gun in your hand, point it at another person, pull the trigger, and live happily ever after.
I only had one kid, and she was not at all interested in guns. However I insisted that she know and understand basic firearm safety. As a young kid, there are two rules:
1) If you or one of your friends finds a gun, do not touch it. Find an adult and tell them.
2) If one of your friends has a gun, do not touch it, do not say anything about it, do not confront them. Leave immediately, find an adult, and tell them.
There are other things to learn if the kid is interested in guns. Mine was not.
We had words with both her school and the local Girl Scout Council over this topic. Amazingly, both felt it was better to never mention the topic of firearms at all. As far as I am concerned, that is a tragedy waiting to happen. Pardon me for pointing this out, but if you never recieved basic gun safety training, you remain ignorant of an important topic. Your opinion of guns in the absence of such training is worthless.
If you want to learn more about this topic, sign up for a gun safety course in your community. Note that most such are free and don’t even require you to own a gun, they will furnish a loaner. I have completed two such courses over the decades, in addition to some really intensive safety training in USCG Boot Camp in the early 1970s, involving the “big bad” M1911 .45 caliber pistol, and the M-16A1, a selectable fire weapon that had options for semi-automatic and fully automatic fire (yep a REAL “Assault Weapon”, which we called an “Infantry Rifle”).
This in spite of the fact that I have never had more than a brief interest in firing guns. I do own a 12g pump shotgun, plus my Father’s M1911 service pistol (he was a career military officer), plus his first guns, a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun, plus a muzzle-loading .45 caliber rifle that I used to fire (black powder guns are FUN but a lot of work). Maybe my grandkids will get those, if either shows any interest. But you can bet that they will both get safety training to go with the guns, and before they touch them.
Another person, #3, sort of agreed with me,
Evil has the right idea. It is RIDICULOUS at this juncture to either do nothing OR advocate that teachers carry guns. Pure ridiculousness as are most of the arguments put forth by the NRA and politicians in it’s pay.
Owners of particular classes of guns need to be registered AND the number of their guns registered as well. Nobody is going to come breaking down doors, BUT as with drug offenses, for instance, they already break down doors and this should be handled no differently.
This is a step in the right direction. A state like Florida should not allow anyone under 21 to own an assault rifle. If they lived in Montana or Wyoming or Alaska, it is very different, of course.
The problem is that the NRA doesn’t want ANY CHANGE AT ALL and that is the nub of the issue right now.
Then, I posted this , in response to something user #4 said,
#4 wrote:For those who believe only muskets are protected by the 2nd Amendment, SCOTUS believes other wise.
DC V Heller
“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 849 (1997), and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 35-36 (2001), the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding”.
This was my response:
It makes no difference if the Supreme Court decides that machine guns are protected, if a registry along the lines I’ve suggested were implemented. I’m not suggesting an infringement. What I’m suggesting is a public resource, which the public can use as they see fit. What I’m talking about would inform the public about who owns what which is pertinent to the discussion of mass killing. Since merely getting onto the registry is not an infringement of ownership, the registry can include things that hover on the borderline, erring on the side of caution. The only way it could be construed as an infringement might be that it was required. To make certain, however, that it not meet more legal definitions I propose it not cost purchasers or sellers any money. I’m not suggesting banning anything. To put teeth into it the law merely has to say that should a seller not report a buyer and the buyer then commit any crime involving what was sold, then the seller would face some stiff penalty. What I am suggesting is placing this argument into the public sphere, where people’s reactions reign. If gun owners feel disenfranchised or discriminated against, they can file a lawsuit. I’ve no doubt they would win many such suits.
Suffice it to say that the US is rife with various inequalities which go unaddressed by the legal system. I’ve cited the position of homosexuals in the workforce in a previous post. There are others, up to and including the place of corporations in relation to the people. These things nag at the rest of us, but there are no precedents which can be cited to bring about redress of grievances. Gun owners currently enjoy protection behind the 2nd Amendment, but in doing so they are failing the rest of us in the same way that the school protection officer failed those students. He would probably have been killed by the kid with the gun, but nobody knows for sure. In like manner gun owners defending themselves in court would provide legal precedent for many who seek justice in our system, but cannot find it. Gun owners might lose, but the threat of them trying alone would come with a certain gravitas of its own. The seriousness of it, as well, the realization that gun ownership is not a game or a box to tick off brought about by observing the struggle, might actually bring down the number of accidental gun deaths in a given year. Of course, it might bring it up too. It depends upon how the people react.
#4 then said,
@ evilgenius I would like to come over to your house and look for things you don’t “Need”. Obviously if you don’t need it, you should not have it. Let me know when its a convenient time to swing by. Thanks
So I said,
What it means, actually, is that such overstepping would add to the definition of what constitutes privacy. If someone were fired for being on the registry for owning something that they could argue successfully shouldn’t have landed them on the registry, then it would set a precedent which others could use to argue for setting the boundaries of the notion of privacy. It would no longer have to be teased out of some clause in the Constitution. There would be a much harder definition, and a means to argue for further definition. Now, in man’s relation to technology, is that needed or not?
To which #4 replied,
You wish to explore the right to privacy by invading people’s right to privacy?
Are you feeling well?
To which I said,
I never said anything about telling people they have to reveal what they own prior to the implementation of the registry. I’m talking about the result of all sales or other such things which involve the transfer of anything which the registry involves. I figure that if a person is a particular type of person their character will show through and they won’t be able to resist getting that one new thing here and there. They might stockpile ammunition which might also put them on the registry, but at some point they will want more. There would, of course, be a proviso for those who might land on the registry through inheritance. They could chose to forfeit such a thing, maybe even for a compensatory payment, or be able to turn such things over for destruction, should they receive them in such a manner. Eventually, all ownership would be included. The right to privacy lies on the boundaries, what should and should not be included in the registry. That sort of thing is decided by the public’s right to know versus the individual’s right to privacy. That’s an issue for the courts, both as gun owners feel offended and as the public encounter new threats, and for those who initially write the law.
Then #2 interjected,
Most of the above posts are nonsense.
Spoons do not make people obese, people eating too many calories do that.
Pencils do not cause mis-spelled words, the pencil operator does that.
Guns do not cause mass shootings, sick people do that.
You are not going to fix sick people by restricting their access to firearms. That puts them into an internet search for ways of killing independant of firearms. You really, really don’t want to go there, as there are some astonishing things to be found. Having such sick people fixated on small arms IMHO keeps the casualties minimal.
To which I said,
Exactly, but while you are afraid of them I suggest we should engage them. And the way to do that is by entering into the public sphere. It’s like this, where did the older generation’s disdain for all pain killers come from, such that they would refuse even palliative care when faced with a life ending illness? Their reticence was the foundation for the policies that the current reaction the other way with pain killers has come from. All such things are ideas circulating around in the public consciousness. They need definition, or they go about like hungry lions, seeking whom they may devour.
I believe this string of posts get at what I am suggesting, that it will take peer pressure to bring about change. Unlike other countries, the United States has enshrined gun ownership in its Constitution. I think it may be dangerous to address this problem Constitutionally. But, as with my reference to pain killing drugs, there are other answers. Peer pressure was effective in causing an entire generation, several really, to be drug averse when those types of drugs were just as pleasant to take as ever. I believe it can be just as effective at causing an entire generation to be gun averse while guns remain as powerful as ever.
It’s worth noting something in the wake of Billy Graham’s death the other day, and that is the impact upon religion that Billy Graham had through peer pressure. You see, his particular take on Christianity was one that did not separate nationalism from religion. He was a forerunner for the current mindset in evangelical Christianity that doesn’t separate politics from religion and conflates things like gun ownership with religion. These days Christians world wide are under that same influence. They aren’t all, of course. I think the church should understand this, and address it. There is nothing like drifting away from the Holy Spirit and inventing your own doctrines to keep a person separated from the power of God.
It could be that next up would be the subject of peer pressure itself. Anecdotally, that is how the past is reflected in my own memory, I can place many of the school shootings I have heard about in some kind of relationship to bullying. Bullying takes place in an environment where victims can’t fight back, or where they have so much less power than the bully that it seems like they can’t. There has always been a lot of bullying in schools. In many ways we stand back and allow it, as ineffectively as any law officer who stands by idly while terror goes on feet away. Additionally, there is terrible bullying throughout society, as we tolerate injustice every day. These things only serve to create more bullies, as they reverberate through the lives of victims who act out how they’ve been treated upon the rest of us. You can see that my concept of a registry seeks to address this, by not disenfranchising gun owners. I propose that they can seek redress in the courts. I want them to participate in defining the lines. I expect, even hope for, as it pertains to some issues, many of them to win.
growsomeart 