Guns

This post has been inspired by a friend’s question on Facebook, the response to which is simply too long to post on a comments thread.  The question was how to reduce (or stop) gun violence in the United States, in response to the numerous recent shootings.  I am not sure that I have a good, working answer – it is a complicated problem that requires cultural change that will not happen over night.  However, I can add some discussion of the problems and think about what needs to change.

Gun violence will disappear if nobody has guns.  That much is certain, almost by definition.  (As a note, guns are not a tool, and I will not entertain the possibility that they are.  They have no useful purpose beyond maiming, likely to the point of death.  This is not like a knife, hammer, screwdriver, ax, etc. all of which, though weaponizable, have useful purposes beyond hurting another individual – within which I categorize hunted nonhuman animals.)  however, complete eradication of guns in the US is politically and culturally (with the understanding that politics and culture are highly intertwined in a democratic society) infeasible.  What makes people, fairly ordinary people, want to own a gun?  We can gain some insight by looking at the arguments people use for gun ownership.  The number one (well, only) reason why a supposedly law-abiding citizen needs a gun is protection – one needs a gun to defend one’s self, family and property from others who do not respect rights to life, property and ownership.  This reason is indicative of large-scale distrust – not only in one’s fellow humans (though the untrustworthy ones generally belong to a different demographic, to put it as vaguely as possible) who will apparently attack one for no reason, but also in the system (i.e. Government) which fails to protect against such violations.  We end up with much unneeded violence because people see threats everywhere (but especially from people known to be untrustworthy, such as those with a different skin tone or accent) take a shoot-first attitude, backed up by laws supporting such action.  I will note the hypocrisy in a lot of incidents, such as one in Boulder soon after I moved here, or the recent incident in Montana, where people did not take the most basic precaution of locking their doors, and instead turned to guns for protection.  Violence should be a last resort, not the initial line of defense, yet we have societal attitudes that say differently.  These attitudes stem from the belief that you can trust a very limited number of people yet you need to interact with a much larger number of people on a regular basis.

Part of the problem is that we in the US still have beliefs that are holdovers from 19th century frontier times.  Back then, at the edge of “civilization,” there was no state sponsored police force to help ordinary citizens (or there was, but it was incredibly corrupt, more on that aspect later) and threats from outsiders, bandits, etc were commonplace.  In this environment one needed a gun for survival, and everyone had at least one gun.  It was also an incredibly violent, by today’s standards, place.  Society consisted of small, almost tribal cliques/clans with mutual distrust/distaste (similar to how societies have fragmented throughout history across the globe).  We have moved to a much more urbanized, high-density, pluralistic lifestyle since then, but many of the attitudes from them remain – and for many people, on the “fringes” of society, these attitudes are still necessary.  (Possible a blog post later –  how 19th century homesteading attitudes, apparently still in existence, affect what we do about the unemployed, homeless, and otherwise economically marginalized segments of the population.)

(Mistrust in the government is another subset of this argument for gun ownership – one needs a gun in case the government gets out of control and starts seizing property, taking people to salve camps, etc.  Sometimes it seems people think we in the US are in a near-dictatorship, instead of a very healthy democratic republic.  But I digress.). 

We can see evidence for this in terms of which people support gun control.  By and large, these people are white, middle to upper class, urban to suburban.  These are people who are most protected by the system – people who can afford insurance, who can feel safe calling the police for help, of whom the police will not question citizenship rights.  Many people do not have this level of protection, due to systematic corruption, racism, or location.  Note that the same demographic – the “liberal elite” – call for gun control as well as more government involvement in people’s lives and the economy.  This is because such people have some semblance of faith that the system works how it should, largely because historically, for their demographic, it has.  For people outside of this demographic, distrust of systematic protection still exists.  Many of these people still adhere to the more tribalistic aspects of societal arrangement (think of turf wars) and guns are necessary for protection.  Of course, once “those people” have guns, others need guns to protect themselves, fulfilling the logical circle.

Purging the modern USA of guns and gun violence will therefore require systemic changes, as well as attitude changes.  Full integration in cities will help.  Prosecution of people who shoot first should also alleviate some gun violence.  But mostly, we need to be able to trust our fellow citizens, of all demographics, and especially trust that the government is there to protect and help us if we need it.  Without that basic trust in the system, there is no point in having the system, and our society devolves.