Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Constitution, Depression, General Musings, Government, Guns, Iraq, RKBA, Society, Violence, Writing stuff
I’m adapting this from a comment I made during a discussion on UTI, now that I’ve had a chance to digest things a bit. It is a follow up to this post of last Tuesday.
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When a tragedy like this (well, any violence directed against innocents is a tragedy, really) occurs, people naturally want to look for ways to curtail the threat in the future. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
In 1994 something like 800,000 Hutus were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and almost all of that was done with machetes. Almost 200 people were killed yesterday in Iraq, by someone using car bombs. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 with fertilizer and deisel fuel on this day a dozen years ago.
Guns do kill – something like 12,000 homicides and an additional 6,000 accidents/suicides each year here in the US. My father was one of those people in 1969, and my step-brother a little more than a decade ago. You never really get over that kind of personal tragedy, as I mention here.
But cars also kill. About 30,000 Americans a year, if memory serves. And about 18 months after my dad was killed, my mom was one of those people. But because it wasn’t an act of violence, it is somehow easier to accept that. Which is curious, because we do seem to accept that level of death in our country (and others) relatively easily.
People are violent. It is part of who we are. Now in the UK guns are almost completely outlawed – yet gun violence is once again becoming a problem in some areas. In an effort to control the results of violent behaviour, the UK is now increasingly becoming a nanny-state, outlawing the carrying of pointed knives, limiting their sale even for home use, forcing pubs to shift from glass bottles and drinking vessels to plastic ones because the others were being used to bash and cut others in pub brawls…you get the idea.
As I mention in that blog post cited above, I hate the facile arguments on both sides: that getting rid of all guns would solve the problem; and that if only someone with a legal CCW had been there they could have stopped Cho earlier. The best you can say is that it is possible that stricter gun control (even to extending to effective bans) *might* have stopped Cho from being able to murder so many so easily…or that someone legally armed on campus *might* have been able to stop Cho once he started shooting. No, there is a lot of slop there on both sides – no one knows the answer to ‘what if?’
For me it comes down to a couple of different deciding factors. We have over 200 million guns in this country, something like 80 million handguns. So, getting rid of them isn’t a practical answer for at least a generation. And prohibiting them will basically mean that you are telling criminals that they can count on law-abiding citzens being disarmed. Which means you either accept the increased power advantage of criminals, or you move towards an increasingly police-heavy state, with all of the implications that carries.
Further, the 2nd Amendment was put there for a reason: to control the worst instincts of wanna-be tyrants. The founders understood that humans being what we are, you needed to control the worst instincts of those who would rule rather than govern. They built checks & balances into the Constitution between the different branches of government – but knew that the real check and balance had to go further – had to go all the way down to the individual citizen. In preserving the right to keep and bear arms, they made sure that there was a final option available to curb dictatorship. Granted, my pistols and rifles will not stand up in a full-fledged firefight to modern military weapons – but that isn’t the point. You only have to look at Iraq to see the effectiveness of small arms and improvised explosives to see what a population can do in resisting a military force. That alone changes the calculus of anyone – foreign or domestic – who thinks that they would like to impose their will on the American public by arms.
Lastly, having the *option* of carrying a concealed weapon legally means that you have more possible courses of action open to you when things go south. No, I would not claim that I would have been able to draw my weapon and stop Cho before he killed anyone. That’s just macho posturing. But I carry a 9mm pistol – the same calibre weapon he used to kill most of the 32 he murdered. I *might* have had a chance, if everything had gone just right. Maybe only a small chance – but that would have been more of a chance than the poor bastards who didn’t have that option open to them had.
Yeah, there are no easy or simple answers. I am willing to consider possible solutions – but we have to consider the entire issue completely and make a rational decision, not one based on the immediate emotions following such a horror.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Heinlein, James Burke, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Got an email from someone last evening about the book (he had just finished chapter one), and he made the following observation:
One page 1, you speak of “he – he – he,” but don’t initially give us Jon Thompson’s name or description. I can live with learning his name on page 2, but I wonder if you might consider sliding in some sort of physical description of him in this chapter?
My reply was this:
Um, that was a very conscious decision. Nowhere in the book will you find any real description of him. Tied with a fairly “close” perspective with him, it makes it easier for the reader to subconsciously identify with the character, thereby becoming engaged with what happens that much quicker. And congrats – of all the people who have read it and commented to me so far, you are the first to notice this application of my literary theory. If an editor convinces me otherwise somewhere down the road, I might change it.
And I thought I would elaborate somewhat on this.
There has been a lot of scholarship into how a reader interacts with a text. 20 years ago I studied that as part of my graduate work at the University of Iowa. And while I can no longer cite authors off the top of my head, I do know that I drew several practical conclusions from those studies. This was one of them – that allowing the reader the ability to imagine themselves as a character (in this case, the main character) will help transition the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for a work of fiction, particularly Science Fiction.
Different authors do this in different ways. But for me, the most powerful books were always the ones which allowed me to step into the role of the main character – to imagine myself as Muad’dib or Valentine Michael Smith, learning about a strange world and my place in it. With Jon Thompson in Communion of Dreams, I wanted the reader to do the same thing: speculate upon their own understanding of themselves in a world that is changing around them, not through technology, but through revelation. It is James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed applied to fiction, and hints somewhat at some of the deeper layers of what the novel is really all about.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 