Guns and the military are two things that can’t be pulled apart. Something can have guns and not be a military, but nothing is going to be a military for very long if it has no guns. If we saw the secret service standing around the president, waiting to defend him with the most spirited pillow fight money can buy, we’d know that the guy they were protecting probably wasn’t actually calling the shots. Intuitively we’d understand that whoever was actually in power would have to be surrounded by a much more military set of truths. We could call Captain Pillow Fight the president if we wanted to, but the title would just be one more thing we’d have to look past to trace out where the proverbial little red dot on our foreheads that we call power was actually coming from.
Looking for the ballot box?
So if we put it another way, we might say that guns are a military truth. Not everything the military does involves guns. They have a core of engineers, intelligence operations and so on. But wherever guns show up, a military truth appears, in the sense that each gun is a little fact about how far and how fast it’s possible for things to escalate in that location. That scale of escalation is a part of every situation we’re in already, there just aren’t many things that can change the conversations it creates quite as dramatically as guns can. If I could push a button that made people instantly crap their pants for example, that would be a military device I had my hands on, and any conversation we’d have as a people about who gets to have one of these pants crapping devices and when it’s legal to use them on someone would be right in there with gun control as a conversation. It would be a conversation about which organizations are criminal and which ones are military, about what’s self defense and what’s battery. Which is to say that it’d be part of conversations that we’re already having, just organized around a new set of military gadgets. We use those gadgets to access a certain part of life, but that part of life is there no matter how we travel to it.
So then, when we talk about gun control, what we’re talking about is where the military is going to be in our lives, where we’re talking about “the military” the way we’d talk about “the romantic”. We changed laws around gay marriage and when we did, we changed the way the romantic could show up in our society. We can’t take the romantic out of society of course, but lots of things we can do will change the conversation around how it appears. The military is a part of our lives every bit as much as the romantic is, because it’s as possible to make love as it is to make war. The fact that we have a lot more sex than murders seems to say something critical about which one of these things we really prefer to make, but quantity is not quality. Getting laid a thousand times won’t stop a charging military, even if they only charge at us once. So we need the military, but we want to have it in the corner. If society is working right, we’re making love and raising our families with the romantic front and center, while the military stands ready, off to the side, ready to kick it all the way up for anyone who will only accept the military as the truth. That readiness and its ability to stretch into the sky is what encapsulates us as a nation of people. It’s the boundary that marks where the rest of our definition can begin.
I think you heard me just fine.
Just like the romantic, no small part of what we mean is decided by how the military threads through our lives and just like our romantic passions, the military is something we need to be in control of. If psychology has anything meaningful to contribute, it’s the very common sense idea that the romantic is something we can never really be in control of unless we talk about how it’s going to fit into our daily lives, and it seems fair to say the same thing about the military. Gun control is that conversation, in that it’s a conversation about how military the average man on the street is allowed to be. The arguments we have about gun control are basically organized around this kind of understanding. An argument for more gun control is an argument for fewer military opportunities in our lives. On its face that seems very difficult to argue with. A military wouldn’t be a very good military if you didn’t want it to get away from you, so any argument that’s about backing the military off is going to start off sounding right to any peace loving person. And there’s a pretty basic mathematical truth inside it that seems like it analytically has to be true, which is that the fewer opportunities there are for things to get military, the less often they will.
Of course, we’d never try to solve a problem with people screwing each other in the street by outlawing the romantic, because it’s much more familiar emotional presence in our lives makes that idea feel ridiculous. We know people have to do what they have to do, and while our different religions and holes in bathroom stalls provide us with romance control strategies, no one is so ridiculous as to suggest that all people everywhere should be made to do without it. So the term “gun control” is a little misleading, because it suggests some opposite opinion where no control of any kind is advocated for. That is to say, “gun control” seems to be sending the brand message: “Say goodbye to the military part of life”. Their opponents advocate a universal standing military, perpetual open war, while they advocate for a world where the military conversation has been closed.
And again, the counter argument is basically a military one, but dressed in the wigs and kickers of its colonial heritage. It’s against “tyranny” in the abstract. But squared up against the mathematical dimensions of the gun control argument, the tyranny argument makes a more contemporarily valid point. Fewer opportunities for military behavior means less military behavior, but we can never get the military to zero, even hypothetically, as Captain Pillow Fight the pretend president makes abundantly clear. So then as we reduce the presence of the military, we also concentrate it, and as the military becomes concentrated it becomes better at refusing to get out of people’s faces. Which means we’ve got a trade off on our hands. If everyone knows that everyone else is packing, people will probably be a little less trigger happy, but with that many triggers floating around someone is bound to pop off on someone else. On the other hand, if we put everything that’s military in one place, that place might not be close to everyone, but it has absolutely no reason not to squeeze the trigger any time it wants something. In between the two is a kind of bell curve solution about the military, from guns to pants crapping machines, that spells out how it can fit into our lives, where the sweet spot in the middle is a distribution truth. The X axis is an amount of firepower, and the Y axis is an amount of people.
Too many and too few guns are different kinds of unsafe, which means there’s a sweet spot in the middle somewhere.
What the second amendment really accomplishes in the modern world, is a culturally foundational pronunciation of the fact this bell curve has two axes. It’s so easy to shoo guns away like so many rats scampering across our domestic peace. And the fact that zero guns would mean zero shootings tempts us skip past the very non-linear jump in shootings that clearly happens when we go from zero guns to one. Even this very intuitive bell curve approach tempts us to oversimplify the problems of gun violence. Because if there’s a bell curve and if each side of it is attached to some quantifiable set of ideas, then surely we could use it to empirically establish which gun control laws are most effective right? I mean if guns per capita and gun deaths per capita are knowable, then why not just track which areas have higher and lower levels of guns and use that information to understand how safe we’re making each other?
But this is where the military dimensions of the truth we’re dealing with really start to show up. For one thing, data related to actual gun use is notoriously difficult to collect. Think about it; if you brandish a gun in self defense, are you running off to report that to the police station as soon as you can? Conversely, think of all the people who have drunkenly pretended to be hot shots about something around you and ask yourself how many of them would say they’ve shot someone just to get their rocks off. In research these are called false negatives and false positives and their likelihood related to gun data, which for the most part must be gathered by interview, is huge. That’s the thing about the military. It never really wants you to know what it’s doing until it’s right on top of you. There are some truths in our lives that are so immediate that we can never cleanly snap them off and put them on the plate to be measured. That’s how the military works, not by being nowhere, but by being within striking distance of everywhere. We can’t make it go away by not wanting to think about why it has to be there. Our second amendment culture is a heritage of hard nosed epiphany, the kind that happens when someone holds a gun to your head. Nobody wants to be in that head space all the time, but once you’ve been put in it, the very real arena of possibility it presents never fades totally into the background. Freedom is the acknowledgement that people can do anything to each other. It’s a truth that’s as dark as it is beautiful, and by making it a way of life we make an incredibly brave bet that we’ll make more love than war. And while I plan to give my life to making that a smart bet, no one is so reckless a gambler that they’d push all their chips onto only one side of the wager. There are bad people in the world, people who are bad to the bone, and we need to be able to take things all the way up when they try to take us all the way down. We don’t get to pick the good stuff about freedom and act like the rest of it isn’t happening. Put another way, we don’t get to deny the military truths in every day of our lives.
We can all agree that there are wolves. When and where they come around is a different story.
Each side of the gun control debate sees itself as standing in the blind spot of the other side. Gun control advocates make a flagrantly correct point about the right to bear arms having no explicit ceiling. Does everyone have a right to a nuclear bomb? Of course not. Only a state can make that kind of choice. We expect the state to be operated by the people, but the state won’t be able to operate at all if it doesn’t have some kind of exclusive ability to be violent. Second amendment advocates are just as quick to point out that we can expect the state to be operated by the people all we want, but shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first. Power organically concentrates, and as it does it gets less and less able to understand why it should get out of your face. Guns are a bunch of reminders about what people might reach for if they get shoved around too much, and that military truth is a nation wide understanding about how far it’s possible for power to go.
The right to defend yourself completely and the right to govern yourself actually are two things that can’t really be pulled apart. That’s how we use the second amendment, as a practical commitment to the political equality that democratic citizenship needs to work. To say that we can use lethal force to defend ourselves but not lethal weapons, is to say that the strong can kill the weak. At the same time there’s a clear ceiling on the bell curve where the individual right to bear arms becomes distinguished from the state’s ability to operate national violence. It’s at the point where either the arms, or the circumstance they can be operated in, enable one person to kill a state sized portion of people. You can have a gun, but not an atom bomb, because the state is made of people and our right to operate it is an extension of our right to operate ourselves, but there is no individual right to self operation that can give one person a legitimate reason to drop an atom bomb. That’s a state sized decision that only a nation of people can make, and whoever the decision is actually made by, must only be in a position to make it because of the decisions of many people. By the same token you’ve got a right to a gun, but not to a sniper’s nest. The right to use force when necessary, and the ability to use force with impunity are radically different things with tremendous consequences for the lives of state sized portions of the population. These are questions related to automatic weapons and police accountability, and they’re gun control questions that shape the appearance of the military in our daily lives.
Being the government is about getting in front of stuff.
Any one who invaded the United States would hardly have to wait for our uniformed army to show up to meet a military level of response, and that would be an organic consequence of our individual right to completely defend ourselves coalescing into militias, which is very much the kind of thing the neighborhood revolutionaries who demanded the second amendment had in mind. The common sense point that gun control advocates need to see acknowledged is the very real, practical and modern ceiling there is on that kind of thing that shows up where things like tanks and atom bombs show up. The modern historical saga of the war in Ukraine is replete with illustrations from both sides of this debate. Large portions of it are being fought by Jo Schmo militias who picked up guns and got to work, and at the same time it’s very reasonable to say that without a steady supply of war machines and training from the US military industrial complex, the Ukrainians would probably have lost the war by now. So the right to bear arms remains a military truth vested in individual people, while not being the whole military truth by any stretch of the imagination. Military work is specialized work, a profession too important to be held as a collective side project. It’s got to be taken as seriously as anything in the world can possibly be taken, by the people who we collectively decide deserve that responsibility. There are military jobs we can’t individually do, just as much as there are military truths we individually can’t escape. It’s why we have a right to keep our own weapons, and to elect the commander in chief of the military. Instead of using one of these facts to deny the other, we need to accept that our bell curve has two axes, and have a meaningful discussion about how we’re going to find the sweet spot between the two.
“Ukrainian civilians practice throwing Molotov cocktails to defend the city of Zhytomyr as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued on March 1, 2022.” – From Time magazine
The problem with “gun control” as a political football is that it’s actually two very different conversations. One of them is about arriving at a practical set of ideas that manage the military realities any reasonable, adult person accepts as facts of life, things like self defense and yes, oncoming tyrants. The other one though is a much more cultural conversation, one that’s less about where guns can fit in any free society, and more about where they fit in our society specifically, what clans we want to have them and why. It’s no secret that the first gun control laws in California were launched by that progressive powerhouse Ronald Regan in response to the “by any means necessary” themed protests of the black panthers. And as a whole our gun control debate happens very reliably across a cultural divide. Saying, “I’m pro gun control” and then saying “I have a subscription to the New Yorker” is almost a waste of breath. I knew the second one when you said the first one, thanks. The opposite feels just as true, like we could rename the NRA “Seeing Charleton Heston’s Balls On Accident” and communicate about the same amount of cultural information. The line in the sand here is fairly clear, it’s a classic east coast intellectual snobbery sneering at an equally contemptuous rural southern autonomy. The problem here is that we’re pretending cultural tug of war is an intellectual discussion. We say things like: “I don’t like guns.” but nobody likes a gun that’s pointed at them. Nobody would suggest graduating that distaste into a pillow fight secret service. What we’re really saying is: “I don’t like guns in the hands of my opponents.”
Taking guns away from people is a military thing to do. It’s not something you have to do to someone who’s consent you have firmly in hand. Instead it’s an act of arrogance that can only be carried out by someone who’s so smugly secure that they can’t see why anyone would even bother to second guess them. By the same token, this use of guns to represent the military part of life is too often just that, a representation, a little fantasy that the military might appear in the neutered chamber of suburban boredom, stashed under the pillow like a wish to some homicidal tooth fairy. It’s adolescent fantasies like this that cut down children like Treyvon Martin. This discussion about the sweet spot on the bell curve is a common sense approach to thinking practically about what the most peaceful society can look like. But we don’t have this discussion when we talk about gun control, because what we’re actually talking about is which part of society is going to dominate the other. We’re unconsciously reiterating the emotional substance of Grant and Lee, all surly and resentful at the negotiating table as we menace the other guy by shaping our permissions about who is going to do what with their guns. If we really want to get somewhere in the gun control conversation, we need to outgrow that posture, more than we need to secure a negotiation inside it. We continue yanking at each other from either side of this debate because we’ve never really accepted that the civil war is over. I put it to you that changing the conversation around gun control into a cooperative practical discussion about finding the sweet spot on this bell curve is how we finally end the civil war and that’ll be a much more progressive outcome than either side of the debate winning.
“Gun control” and “blacks control” kind of used to be the same thing.
“a large majority of the effects for which we sought scientific evidence have not been investigated with sufficient rigor to be included in our review. Indeed, we found no studies examining the effects of any of the 18 policy types on police shootings or on hunting and recreation outcomes, just three studies examining how the policies affect defensive gun use, and relatively few studies evaluating effects of the policies on gun industry outcomes. These are all outcomes that are frequently raised as concerns in gun policy debates. Because there is little empirical research examining these outcomes, policymakers have limited ability to use evidence to comprehensively consider how laws are likely to affect different interests.”
-From a 2022 study by the Rand Corporation on the available evidence for gun control policies.
How is that possible except that we don’t actually give a fuck what’s true and what’s not and we’re just prodding each other because of some internal need we have to caricature other people?
Princess Fantastic 