talkpolitics | Focus On The Wielder, Not the Wielded

peristaltor.livejournal.com posting in

Every time a shooter pulls a gun nowadays and uses it with lethal force, donations to political organizations dedicated to restricting firearms in some way skyrocket. No one can blame the donors; they see an out-of-control situation and seek a means to staunch the bloodshed.

Here's the kicker, though: after each of these incidents, donations to the NRA and other pro-Second Amendment organizations also spikes. The reason is fairly simple. If the gun restriction crowd gets its way, the lifestyle of the gun rights crowd might well go away, no matter what positive benefit to society the restriction on guns might have. Which leads to the real split, as author Dan Baum puts it:

Data bout the effects of gun-control measures could be compared and contrasted. When it came to whether restrictive gun laws did good or did harm, reasonable people could disagree.

Finding reasonable people was the problem.

(Dan Baum, Gun Guys, Borzoi Books, 2013, p. 205.)

My point here is not to debate the rise or fall in gun-related violence, though, but to note that any rise in violence should be noted with equal focus. Which leads me to my Monday commute home.

Last Monday, I had to divert my normal commute. After work, I heard of a car fire on the bridge that gets me that last mile. It was a bad one, it seemed, and the bridge was simply closed. It was the interstate bridge, too, so this was no small fire.

Ah, but it wasn't closed simply because of a fire, but how it started.

Two State Patrol troopers shot and fatally wounded a knife-wielding man Monday evening on the Interstate 5 Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle. . . .

Shortly before 7 p.m., the troopers responded to a report that a man had parked his truck across two lanes of the freeway and set it on fire, a Seattle police spokesman said in a statement.

“The guy looks insane,” one caller said in a 911 call tape released Tuesday. . . .

Arriving on the span, one of the troopers and a Department of Transportation crew went to work extinguishing the burning truck while the other trooper contacted the driver, the spokesman continued.

Seattle Police Department investigators reviewing the incident at the State Patrol’s request contend the driver then pulled a knife and advanced on the trooper.

The trooper used his Taser stun gun on the man, but it failed to subdue him, the Seattle Police spokesman said. Still armed with a knife, the man continued his advance until both troopers shot him.

The man was rush to Harborview Medical Center, where he died.

Ah, but as weird as it is, it gets weirder: "Investigators later found an incendiary device in his truck. They are still investigating why." (I emboldened.)

So some guy comes unglued, cobbles together an incendiary device, parks sideways across two lanes of freeway traffic, sets his car on fire, and acts the loony, nutty enough—and knifey enough—to get shot when he advanced on the officers trying to subdue him.

Had he carried a gun in his last moments, all eyes would be on this scene. As it was, only a few of the outlets reporting the incident bother to mention the fiery death machine that failed to launch.

Let's get back to Baum for a moment:

Americans, whether armed or not, were still looking everywhere but at social class when parsing the texture of their lives. It wasn't so much that stressed-out blue-collar folks were clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama had posited while running for president. It was more that guns and religion were keeping them from feeling bitter about the indignities inflicted on the middle class.

(Baum, idid, p. 148.)

"Everywhere but at social class." Which brings us to Pickett & Wilkinson.

Robert Reich ably introduces Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger:

During the 1950s and '60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. After the 1970s, the two pay scales diverged. In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times; by 1990, it was 100 times. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned. Recent [reports] suggest that the upward trajectory of executive pay, temporarily stopped by the economic meltdown, is on the verge of continuing. To make the comparison especially vivid, in 1968 the CEO of General Motors -- then the largest company in the United States -- took home around 66 times the pay and benefits of the typical GM worker at the time. In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart -- by then the largest U.S. company -- took home 900 times the pay and benefits of the typical Wal-Mart worker.

(Reich's introduction to Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, p. vi.)

It turns out that unequal societies experience greater bad stuff. Lots and lots of greater bad stuff, everything from greater infant mortality to greater random violence to shorter lives to greater incidents of mental illness. Worse, everyone in the unequal societies suffers, be they rich or poor, at least statistically.

But hey, you don't have to wade through their book to get a taste of the theory. I'll let one of the authors–wearing an obviously new shirt that he failed to press–give that taste.

Why this happens is less well understood that the fact that the data is pretty damned well supported that it does happen. Maybe Baum is right. Maybe the growing inequity is noticed by all, but this inequity is denied so vehemently, so strongly by our for-profit press—that, of course, needs to sell in its ads the very trappings of wealth that mark growing inequality. Because they would have to point to every ad they run as yet another reason for the problem's continuation, they simply don't bother looking at the problem.

And since the news whores cannot look at the real problem without damning their own profit source, they zoom in on the guns and ignore the other stuff, like boring incendiaries that failed to boom.

That said, you'll understand why I bow out of the high-caliber finger pointing every time a shooting occurs. The more the left pushes against the Second Amendment, the more it threatens the lifestyle of those enamored with the firearms protected thereunder, and therefore the more that subset of our society will resist with ever increasing thunder and might any move from the left. Dan Baum, a liberal gun loving guy, finds himself increasingly isolated as this happens more and more. Worse, he sees this as inevitably self-defeating:

If liberals thought they were weakening the enemy by smashing its idols, they had it exactly wrong. It was hard to think of a better organizing tool for the right than the left's tribal antipathy to guns. . . . America was full of working people who wouldn't listen to the donkey party—about anything—because of the Democrats' identification with gun control.

(Baum, ibid, p. 270.)

And since the left cannot get a toe hold politically thanks to the demonization of liberal political thinkers and doers this demonization of guns creates, the source problem behind the shootings and attempted freeway bombings and other stuff—income inequality—gets completely ignored.

Which is exactly what the right wants. Which is why the Republican Party identifies so strongly with the NRA.

Perhaps we should follow Oscar Wilde's advice on this issue: "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them as much." Embrace guns, liberals, don't restrict them. Maybe then we can make some real progress.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

fizzyland.livejournal.com

I've always embraced guns. These days I think the best place to focus is the development of smaller and smarter drones that can target individuals without collateral damage so shooters can be quickly identified and terminated.

From:

peristaltor.livejournal.com

Or we can raise taxes on the super-wealthy and reduce income inequality. That would save a lot of money on drone research, and would have the same outcome (reducing gun incidents).

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