Naughty, Naughty; You Guns, You

Perhaps you've already read the most recent New York Times hit piece on guns.

It came out yesterday, and is full of sweeping presumptions and rapid-fire conclusions about the evils of guns based on an arsenal of gun statistics from around the world.  At one point, its authors, Max Fisher and Josh Keller, actually claim that "the guns themselves cause the violence."

Wow.  And this from none other than the auspicious, venerable New York Times, which seriously expects us to believe that all of these guns - America has far more of them than any other country - actually get up, load themselves, pull their own triggers, and spray bullets from their barrels.

Kinda like a freaky form of automatic weaponry - the real "automatic" guns that work without anybody touching them.

Now, to be clear, I am not a pro-gun type of person.  I don't own a gun, have never owned a gun, don't plan on ever owning a gun, or even want to own a gun.  Of any kind!  But I have friends who own guns - lots of guns - and I'm not afraid of them, or their guns, or to be around them and their guns.  I have friends that always pack heat, and I'm never uneasy in their presence.

Why?  Because I'm not afraid of any gun.  The gun is just sitting in a holster, minding its own business, like any inanimate object tends to do.  You see, it's one of the basic laws of physics:  an object at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.  It's technically known as Newton's First Law of Motion, or the Law of Inertia.  (One would think as prestigious a newspaper as the Times would hire reporters who'd attended a school where Newton's Laws were taught.  Most ordinary, poorly-funded public schools have taught Newton's Laws for generations.)

Perhaps it's ironic that in the Law of Inertia, it takes an "unbalanced force" to change an object at rest.  And when we're talking about gun-involved violence, that's precisely what happens.  An unbalanced force takes a gun and uses it to commit some sort of crime.

So that makes it the gun's fault that it was used in a crime?

Apparently so, at least according to the New York Times' First Law of Gun Control.

"A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner," Fisher and Keller report, "but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process," and "the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, [comes] down to guns."

Well, that's assuming a mugger isn't using a knife, but yes, the presumption that most muggers use guns is probably accurate.  Wouldn't you agree?  But still, does that mean the gun is at fault?

What is it about guns that makes them more likely to be used in a Gotham mugging, instead of a London mugging?  According to Fisher and Keller, it's our easy access to guns here in America.

Our intrepid Times reporters go on to explain how the more a government reduces their citizenry's access to guns, there tends to be a corresponding drop in gun-involved violence.  So I clicked on the link they provide in their article, which is to study entitled What Do We Know About the Association Between Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Injuries?  It was published last year and is a surprisingly easy-to-read synopsis of various other published reports on various types of gun-involved violence.  However, it includes things like suicides, which don't directly impact the general safety of the population at large.  Besides, wouldn't one suspect that a person contemplating suicide is probably going to simply use whatever gun is available, regardless of whether their selection choices have been limited by the government?

In other words, it's still gonna happen.  Is a person going to decide life must be worth living after all, 'cause they can't find the perfect gun to kill themself with?

Another type of gun-involved violence included in these studies are accidental shootings, which of course, would also probably be lowered if access to guns is reduced.

Indeed, these statistics may show a reduction in various types of gun-involved violence, but I can't see where they show a decline in mass killings.  Which is what most Americans are concerned about when they talk about gun control.  Besides, the authors of this particular study list a number of other studies that don't show much of a correlation one way or another between gun control laws and some types of gun-involved violence.  The fact of the matter remains that while law-abiding people may comply with government rules for gun ownership, that doesn't necessarily mean that people who are intent on committing a crime won't still find a way to procure a gun.

And another thing these studies fail to prove is that people who are intent on committing a crime, and discover that their access to guns has been limited, don't go and find some other lethal way to commit their crime.

Undaunted, the Times, smugly confident that it's proven that guns are the problem, regales us with a few more statistics in which they compare our broadly heterogeneous society, comprised of many people from all over the planet and all of its various cultures, with sharply homogeneous countries, like Japan, and Finland, where gun ownership rates are minuscule compared to those in our country.

I mean, at some point, how is comparing apples to oranges helpful in trying to prove anything?

But then, towards the end of their article, Fisher and Keller inexplicably unravel much of their previous work.

"An American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s.  That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different."

Bingo!

The light is beginning to dawn.

"Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns, and for the types of guns that can be owned.  Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions.  They imply a different way of thinking about guns."

Okay, they're almost there, in terms of comprehending the fallacy of their "misbehaving guns" argument.  But then they miss it again.  They deduce that the problem is that Americans believe "people have an inherent right to own guns."

The way Fisher and Keller word what they consider to be a stunning realization, however, is misleading.  Perhaps in Texas, and in other states where gun ownership is particularly a hallowed concept, the idea of guns as practically a human right runs mighty strong.  Yet across America, gun ownership is a valued right because of how our Constitution has been interpreted for decades.

America, after all, began as a rebellion, and that rebellion involved guns owned by the folks who sought to overthrow the British.  And ever since 1776, part of our national ethos has been our country's relatively unique ability to successfully reinvent itself through an uprising of the populace, not a conventional top-down insurrection led by a disgruntled government or military figure.  In other words, the "militia" language in our Constitution means that ordinary citizens have the right to protect ourselves from a government or military takeover.  It's a fairly unique aspect of America's pre-Revolutionary War history, as well as its history as an independent nation.

And it's not the National Rifle Association that's responsible for making sure that ethos remains robust in our national consciousness.  It's the many individual Americans who remain, to this day, fundamentally skeptical of over-reliance on concentrations of authority from places like Washington DC, and even their respective state capitals.

The fact that a small - minuscule, in fact - number of gun owners exploit this history and commit mass murder isn't because guns are just laying around the house, and shucks, somebody might as well put them to good use.  It's not because a gun just happened to be laying on the ground outside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, and inexplicably mowed down a sanctuary full of worshippers.

No, the atrocity in Texas this past Sunday happened the same exact way every other mass shooting happens:  Somebody decided to kill as many human beings as they could, and a gun was the easiest way to do it.

There is no law that can stop that kind of behavior.  Murder is already against the law.  There is something else, something other than guns, or knives, or explosives, or poison gas, or any other mechanism of achieving mass murder, that's the problem.

And I've already told y'all what that problem almost certainly is.  An "unbalanced force," remember?

A guy who cracked the skull of his wife's child, physically and sexually abused several women throughout his life, beat his dog with his own fists, was a prisoner in the Air Force... violence was more of a hallmark in his life than anything else.  I mean, if you don't cringe after reading each of the ways Sunday's shooter acted on his violent temperament, you're likely as accepting of violence as the culture is that nurtured his behavior.

For some reason, the Times prefers instead to blame inanimate objects.