Firearm
Power made tangible, portable, and transferable. The most elegant equalizer ever conceived.
Firearms are often the first thing that authoritarians seek to restrict, regulate or remove. This is unsurprising considering their capacity to instantly transform a helpless citizen into a formidable foe.
Discussions about firearms tend to focus predominantly on the objects themselves and the victims, because it is easy to exploit sympathies through the promise of regulation. The perpetrator and reality itself are rarely examined in any serious manner, because this would compel us to acknowledge individual agency and the recognition of an unpredictable world that belies our desire to prevent harm. These terrify us.
Essentially, this would make the conversation complicated at a time when our appetites demand swiftness and simplicity. Plus, politicians and special interest groups abhor complexity because it demands they possess a mental acuity that transcends shallow leveraging and lobbyist agendas.
The lethality of a firearm is not to be underestimated - all of them are weapons, and most of them are deadly. They cannot be uninvented, and they certainly possess utility, especially if we are to remind ourselves that we are part of a species that regularly seeks to dominate one another. This is generally accepted by most of us. The issue rather, is how we determine who may reasonably or justifiably own one, and this is where most people weigh in quite readily with opposing views.
Attitudes regarding gun ownership are unique relative to other rights and freedoms, if we are to consider that personal property and ownership are correctly categorized as rights, which they seem to be. These attitudes possess a strange ebb and flow across most contexts. The ebb, when the tide drains away from the shore, is characteristic of those without guns who also tend to think others should remain unarmed as well. The flow, the incoming phase when water rises again, is characteristic of gun owners who also tend to think others should have a firearm of their own as well. In many ways, this seems like normal human behaviour, but if we examine this dynamic closely, we can identify its peculiar dissolution.
If I do not possess a firearm, and I demand the same for you, then I am attempting to reduce your capacity to inflict harm. If I possess a firearm, and I demand the same for you, then I am attempting to increase your capacity to inflict harm. The former is a position of perceived safety wherein the integrity of the safety is threatened by outside forces that ought to be neutralized. The latter is a position of perceived risk whereby others are encouraged to take on additional risk as a counterbalance. One removes our teeth; the other provides us with fangs. Standardization appears to be central to both positions, but reality does not weight them equally.
While these may present as fundamentally tribalistic in nature, neither replicate the projected advantages of such schemes with any precision. The strength and protection in numbers assumed present in tribes remain unconveyed with respect to gun ownership. If I cannot protect myself, then pursuing the conformity of a tribe that is collectively incapable of defending itself provides neither strength nor protection in a world where others possess firearms. If I can protect myself, then pursuing the conformity of a tribe consisting of those who are equally capable of defending themselves has the potential to threaten the strength and protection that my firearm provides me. Tribes are not traditionally defined by our individual capacities to protect ourselves while simultaneously representing a threat to one another. This is a curious position of individualism within a broader collective framework.
In many ways, a firearm is an analogue of the human animal, insisting upon our capacity to do great harm while encouraging it remain contained until necessary. Of course, we do not need firearms to engage in malevolence, and so often the argument is then shifted to consider the ease with which someone may access one. Healthy discussions about such things do not exist, because once an exception has been made, more shall be considered in turn. This is not to mean that reasonable limits cannot exist, because many already do, rather it is simply an acknowledgment that freedom begets freedom, and control begets control. Both need to be considered given the contexts of their environments. Evidence that proves useful in guiding through such discussions certainly exists, but it is often maligned because it does not confirm either position as wholly informed. More questions need to be asked and answered.
Beyond the dynamics of gun ownership among ordinary citizens, two additional stakeholders emerge: extrajudicial citizens and governments. Whatever limits may be prescribed by law, there are citizens who refuse to abide by any restrictions that we deem reasonable. While it would be easy to categorize these citizens as criminals, this is not a fair assessment. Some citizens are law abiding and peaceful, while their only transgression is one of deviation from regulation or procedure.
Essentially, some people possess a weapon that is prohibited by law, but it is this possession alone that impugns them, not any specific action or intention. The remaining extrajudicial citizens are criminals, violators of whatever reasonable prescriptions exist with the intention of harming others, or having done so already. Both groups need to be discussed in their own rights, but it is the criminal element that tends to provide the best justifications for personal gun ownership. They fall outside of the ebb and flow; they wield power while preferring we do not, because then we are easier to victimize. The last thing a predatory criminal wants is a target packing heat.
While public servants, representatives and bureaucrats exist as citizens among us in their personal lives, they occupy a distinct position when they are at work. There are no universally-accepted prescriptions for the role of government, but most lists tend to include a monopoly on violence. This is generally understood to mean that it alone is authorized to enforce laws, which would include the application or use of force as a mechanism to carry out its duties. It alone represents the public interest in any official capacity informed by a legal system that is both just and defensible, while vigilantism is prohibited. While there are citizens who believe that only the government should possess firearms, elevated concerns are justified when our government becomes the detractor.
What sort of entity, who already has a monopoly on violence, who possesses any weapon in any amount they desire, would pursue disarming its own citizens? Keeping in mind that criminals do not abide by the law, that humans regularly seek to dominate one another, and that saints are nowhere to be found in governments - what is the argument exactly? The dynamic of ordinary citizens holding one another’s safety in their hands is transgressed in such instances.
Violence does occur though, in our neighbourhoods, schools, and homes. The trauma that families and communities experience whenever a shooting occurs is real and worthy of consideration. After all, humans are capable of the most horrible acts, but governments alone are permitted to create their own conditions under which they may lawfully commit them.
This appears to provide communities and nations with one of two unsavoury options:
1) We can manage the violence that we inflict on one another with a variety of strategies among an armed population, or
2) We can wait for the day when a criminal or government decides to inflict violence on our unarmed population.
This may present as a false dilemma, but recognition of both our nature and history confirms their salience. Strategies are numerous, but they can never eliminate violence entirely. Addressing the mental health crisis would be a good start, and this is consistently brought up by gun advocates, which is then immediately dismissed by the same opposition that professes their concerns for the marginalized while doing nothing to help them.
This does not ease our suffering when children are killed or when an active shooter murders a large number of people. Heartbreaking events such as these compel our conscience to do something, and this is typically a demand for additional restrictions or prohibitions on firearms. Unfortunately, prohibitions on firearms have never prevented criminals from getting them, which is well-known by policy-makers who pretend prohibitions reduce crime for political purposes, and is verifiably false by examining statistical data. Beyond criminals, we have the desperate and sick to contend with, and contending with them is something we ought to do. Child-safety laws are also worthy of consideration.
With respect to an unarmed population, it will be a matter of time before the corrupting nature of power and the ambitious who benefit from wielding it decide to victimize its citizens and justify it as necessary. What else could the motivations be of a government that knows it cannot effectively protect its citizens against imminent threats in a timely fashion? It is a claim that their monopoly on violence is not only absolute, but subject to a standard of efficacy that they deem appropriate. Five minutes is plenty of time to be killed in your own home, while the officer with the firearm who arrives after the fact remains alive and well. It promises an amount of control and protection that no entity can deliver on, and so it is a lie at best.
There may be a reduction in the incidence of sporadic acts of violence between citizens due to the scarcity of firearms among them, but the number of deaths committed by the state will be orders of magnitude greater by comparison when a particularly malicious despot decides it is the right time for a cleansing. Avoiding future events such as this would only be possible if we were fundamentally different animals, and while change-obsessed INTELLECTUALS defined by baseless assumptions about humanity may cause us to consider removing our teeth, fangs remain in the mouths of the vicious.
Do we prefer our violence to occur sporadically on a small scale with some degree of influence over it, or to suffer it on a genocidal scale at some point in the future when we are helpless to withstand it?
A cure for violence does not exist among us, and believing it does is for the naïve and the desperate. The pain we cause one another, and the experience of losing a loved one are certainly adequate reasons to challenge the validity and necessity of firearms in our communities. The trade-off is the introduction of a real threat that postpones the violence to a later date, one where we imagine that maybe, if things were different, we would not have lost someone.
Would we be willing to trade one life today for many in the future? It is difficult to care about the imaginary lives of future strangers, especially when the pain we experience is current and overwhelming.
Are firearms the problem? Or is this yet another symptom of our inability to accept that bad things happen, even to children, and firearms serve as a perpetually attractive alternative to holding individuals accountable for their actions? There is no shortage of threats to the well-being of our children, but we give a pass to most of these. Is this because harm caused by firearms tends to be acute and definitive, rather than chronic and provisional?
Are our demands for bans simply grasping at straws in a world that readily reminds us of how little control we have? Is the illusion that comforting?
There are no guarantees of course, only trade-offs, and what we choose may ultimately be a matter of circumstance or preference.
Nevertheless, it is a discussion worth having.
Posted: 13 Feb 2023
