Soul Searching on Gun Control

Over the last few days I’ve begun to get a bit more public with my feelings towards guns and gun control.  It’s been an interesting endeavor. Most of the people I’ve interacted with, including a cousin of mine unfortunately, have proven incapable of carrying on a civil conversation.

One however, an individual who goes by the name of Bob and writes under the moniker 3 Boxes of BS, has been relatively easy to dialog with and has given me a few things to think about.  We exchanged several comments on my short angst filled post about my hatred for the NRA and he eventually wrote a lengthy post on his site answering a question I asked him about his thoughts on background checks.

This exchange has had me thinking quite a bit about the real root of the disagreement between most people on gun control and about my real motivations.

I’m struggling to find the reference but I ran across a post yesterday, from a seemingly uneducated blogger who’s primary method of persuasion was intimidation and name calling. That  post basically called out gun control advocates as liars with ulterior motives to take away all guns.  He basically argued that background checks were just the first in a 3 phased approach to removing all guns from society.  I’ll continue to try and find that post again.

Through this reading and my conversations with Bob I realized something.  I’m not being as genuine as I should be and I should work to fix that. The bully was right and I’m asking Bob to defend concerns that are secondary to the real issue.

So I’m going to stop mincing words.

It is my belief that there should be far fewer guns in this country.  There should be a very limited set of people with access to guns.  For the most part, most guns are unnecessary and extremely dangerous.  They are a cowards weapon meant to intimidate or bully at their best and make it very easy to murder another human being from a safe distance at their worst. I have had the few guns I’ve owned over the years destroyed and I think most every other gun in the country should also be destroyed.

Now, I’m not as patient as I’d like to be when writing yet.  I wanted to write this post with several well thought out references, like Bob’s, and make a reasoned data driven argument for the real issue at hand.  But I honestly don’t have the time today and I’m not sure I’ll find the will right now.

In the past I have tended to have a fair amount of respect for the site politifact.com.  In my reading yesterday I stumbled across an organization called Moms Demand Action that sells a t-shirt that says…

“Americans are 20 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries.”

I put that statement up against the politifact test to find who it was attributed to and whether it was factual.  The original commentator used the word civilized rather than developed but the comment was real and was given a “Mostly True” rating by the site.

So whether straw purchase laws work, whether background checks address the real problem or whether interesting ideas can be gleaned from trying to apply automobile licensing like processes to guns, this is what I want fixed.  I want fewer 2 year olds shot in the chest, I want fewer school rooms riddled with bullets, I want fewer accidental deaths and malicious murders by gun.

If anyone pays any attention to this follow up post I’m sure attempts will be made to debunk the politifact findings on the data.  This is a data based argument I think I’d be willing to entertain at this point.

At a minimum, these efforts to get my thoughts organized on the subject have helped me to hone in on my motivations.  I don’t claim to have all the right answers on how laws can help in this area or have all the data to back up my belief that strict gun control has helped in other countries.

As is often the case with me, what I have is a feeling.  A deeply emotional feeling of love and respect for my fellow humans and a strong belief that our default position should be one of peace. Debating over how we get there is part of the American way and I respect that process but let my motivations be clear.  I want guns to be much more strictly controlled in this country if not virtually eliminated.

I realize the Second Amendment will be the next major discussion piont.

To that I say…. Sigh…

The Second Amendment has been grossly misinterpreted by generations of culturally conditioned mongers of violence and war. In the words of George Washington a year or so before the 2nd Amendment was ratified…

“A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite.”

The debate for diplomacy vs. war not withstanding, and even though guns have at this point been made glamorous and fun for a lot of Americans, guns have a purpose and that purpose is clear, to kill people. These are not the colonial days and they are not the days of the wild west.  If you want to carry a gun on your hip and shoot somebody when they steel your horse or tax your tea move to an underdeveloped country on the continent of Africa where you’ll be fighting for your food and water too.

If you like war and killing, join the military where you can leave the murderous decision to someone else and just happily, mindlessly pull the trigger.

If you walk around daily fearing violent crime, join your local police department and subject yourself to that level of scrutiny.

If you want to keep your guns because you want to rise up in rebellion against this government when they do insane things like attempt to give you health care at a reasonable price by all means, go for it.

Just make sure you have more guns than the other side and for the love of humanity, keep the damn things away from your kids.

Update: It’s been brought to my attention just how offensive and confrontational this post can be.  I can get very emotional on this topic and have since written a post giving a bit more insight into my blogging MO that contains a bit of an apology.  Bottom line: I’m still formulating my feelings/approach on this topic and need a place like this to do so, with feedback.

I Need to Learn to Hate the NRA a Little Less

I need to figure out a way to temper my anger with the NRA. I don’t feel I can write sensibly about gun control, that I can organize my thoughts well, when I have such a deep seeded dislike for this organization.

I need to do more reading and research about gun control laws, I need to ensure I’m as well informed as possible. I want to be a strong advocate for more laws on the books in this area.

My gut feeling, mostly built from observation of both people in the communities I’ve lived in and the media at large, is that a majority of people who own hand guns or assault weapons due so out of fear, ignorance or the shear love of “blowing shit up”.  Some love the sport of target shooting, others consider themselves collectors.  I specifically leave out rifles used for hunting because I think there is a chance they can/should be handled differently.

Anyway, I point these things out to ensure folks I understand gun control is a tricky subject. Laws in this area need to be very specific and the arguments are often very binary. It is not an all or nothing situation and both sides of the debate need to quit treating it that way.

This week the NRA sued Philadelphia and many other cities over the fact that they have gun laws that are more strict than their state. What irks me about this is the fact that the law they want makes perfect sense. It simply says people should be required to report a lost or stolen gun within 3 days. They’ve asked for this because people who sell guns to criminals often simply say the gun was lost and nothing can be done about it.

The NRA is effectively supporting gun crime here.

I can’t help but think there are millions of sensible gun owners, even members of the NRA, that would have no problem with this law.

As I struggle to write more on this topic I get lost in a sea of reading material about all the arguments for and against gun control in general. There is a serious lack of pragmatism in most of those discussions. I guess the only thing a guy like me can do is support laws and legislators that seem to put public safety ahead of the profits of people who benefit from the sale of guns.

To stay focused, to stay un-emotional, I’m going to need to learn to have less contempt for the average member of the NRA and work to understand how the average gun sport oriented member is being manipulated. The rest of the fear-filled, ignorant membership of the NRA? Well, that’s another story.

Is terrorism a sign that religions are dying?

I often wonder if the terrorism we see in this day and age wouldn’t be best symbolized as the final grasping, clawing actions of a dying breed of man, one that’s breathing his last breath and wants to take his enemies with him to his grave.

If one were to only look over the past few hundred years it would be hard to see my point.  It would be hard to imagine today being much different than a few hundred years ago, in terms of the violence of man or the religions man often hides behind when committing atrocities.

But if you were to look back thousands of years, you’d see a different picture.  If you look at the bigger picture, the overall trajectory of man, its hard to argue against the fact that we are getting a great deal more peaceful and lot less religious.

Social media means we are aware of a larger number of these terrorism style violent acts and also acts as a very public spotlight on them but they generally kill a relatively small number of people. Conflicts like the Iraq Wars still kill 10s if not 100s of thousands of people, but the probability of very large scale violent conflicts, world wars that kill millions of people is on the decline and hard to imagine. The lifespan of the average human is higher, in part, because fewer people are killed in wars.

If you look at the history of religion over thousands of years you’ll also see a trajectory that’s hard to visualize if you only look at the ebb and flow of religious conservatism over the past few hundred years. As a species we slowly evolved from the sun and nature based deities of hunter-­gatherer tribes, to those of the gold and textile loving chiefdoms and nations. We then moved on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, written about in the New Testament and the Koran. Many of these early “gods” were violent insecure entities that had glimpses of enlightenment but urged a great deal of violence as well.

Today we seem to have coalesced around a modern multinational God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  For the most part this god seems to be more concerned with our sex lives and gluttonous or hedonistic ways more than anything else.

I’m no expert in international affairs or on the issues that cause terrorists to do what they do.  I know many of them use religion as an excuse but are more than likely just as worried about resources, feeding their children, proliferating their own culture and growing their family trees.

I don’t claim to have any real good answers.   I do wonder if the world would be in a bit better place if the “evolved” among us treated the death of religion with a little bit more respect. Religions are necessary things in the early days of a culture that’s still maturing.  Humans are inherently scared and believing in something larger than yourself helps to quell those fears. We should have respect for the good things that religion achieves, have a reverence for the truly spiritual and humanity loving among us, and help the demagoguery around us slowly fade into that good night.

If we do those things and do our best to ensure everyone on the planet is provided with the information, skills and resources they need, perhaps we can help the religions that still believe in a relatively insecure, violent, omnipresent, omnipotent god peacefully pass on to a better place.

Frequently Asked Questions: Toddler Kills Mother

I have no good words to describe the horror I felt when I read about the toddler who shot and killed his mother in an Idaho Walmart yesterday. Only questions.

Note: I’ll update the post as I think of more.

• Will the toddler remember what happened?
• Will the toddler’s family try its hardest to hide the fact that he killed his Mother from him?
• Will the toddler’s family move in an effort to shield him from learning what happened?
• Will the family’s stance on gun control change?
• Will Idaho’s stance on gun control change?
• What will Walmart do?
• How long will this stay in the news?
• Will the NRA be silent?
• Will this get enough press for presidential remarks?
• What will Idaho’s governor say?
• Is this really Darwin’s theory of natural selection at work as some suggest?
• Will further tragedy manifest in this family in the way of suicides?
• Was this handgun modified, legally or illegally, to allow for a “hair” trigger? How did a toddler fire it?
• What is the toddler’s 11 year old cousin thinking right now?
• What will happen to the weapon?
• How will this change the Father’s life?
• How will this change the toddler’s life?
• Did the toddler have siblings old enough to understand what happened?
• How do concealed handgun advocates feel when they read stories like this?
• Does the press work to get a statement from the NRA with each tragedy like this?
• Will the family of the Montana toddler who killed his mother last month reach out to this family?
• Why do many of the 931 news articles Google found about this tragedy include the following line? “There do not appear to be reliable national statistics about the number of accidental fatalities involving children handling guns.”