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dukeofriven · 5 years

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Guns or Children: The Only Choice Left, America

[Note: this post was originally a response to this thread.

Trigger warnings: guns, gun deaths, murder, violence, death, child death, school shootings, racism, anti-semitism, mass shootings, Orlando Pulse Shooting, sports injuries, cursing, swear words, statistics, sourced facts, responsibility, collective responsibility, the necessity of change, moral imperatives]

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There is always a justification for why it’s okay for Americans to own guns.

Tradition. The Cultural Importance of Firearms. Farmers Vs Wild Beasts. The Scary Non-White People Who Are Moving Into The Neighbourhood. The Need For An Unsubtle Penis Metaphor To Show-Off To Your Fellow Men.

And, of course, the worst of them all:

“I Like Them.”

I don’t care.

It has become parodic at this point to try and argue against these points because the people who make them aren’t arguing in good faith anyways: they like guns and they know that you don’t like guns so how can there be any kind of accord when you won’t even meet them on their own turf? You can’t argue with people who don’t like guns because secretly - or not-so-secretly - they just want to take you guns away. We can’t have a real argument about gun control against such an extremist position.

Which is fine because I’m not here to argue. There’s no argument to be made anymore. The time for argument was seventy years ago when America’s culture wasn’t so toxic that the sane, reasonable positions on gun ownership that other countries ended-up with could still be enforced.

That was seventy years ago. That opportunity is gone. There’s no longer any argument to be made.

The Onion makes a habit of running a variation of an article every time a big shooting happens:

The fact that America is irresponsible with guns, cannot be trusted with guns, has lost all ability to live with guns, is fundamentally true, and not in dispute anywhere other than in America itself. America’s mind-boggling gun-death rate is a direct, indivisible result of: [Note: most numbers here are from the last major survey from 2017] 1) The sheer volume of guns. America has about 120 civilian-owned guns for every hundred people in the country. There are more guns than people. If everyone in America had to start killing one-another in a grand old game of nation-wide paintball-with-bullets no one would have to share a gun and there would be spares before the first shot was fired. The next region with an entry on the guns per-people per-region list? The Falkland Islands with 60 guns for every 100 people. The Falkland Islands has a total population of some 3000 people. Its murder rate? Does’t seem to have one. Leaving aside the Falklands War I don’t think anyone’s been murdered there since 1981. Next country down? Yemen. Population: 28 million, with 50-odd guns per 100 people. Yemen a region that hasn’t known peace since... ever. Yemen has existed in some form since 1918 and not once has it ever had what you’d call a lasting and nation-wide peace.

The farthest down the list you have to go to find a country that comes close to America in terms of population size is Pakistan - population 200 million, and only 22 guns for every hundred people. Should they start that nation one -kill-paintball game most people would have to share until they’d wiped-out some eighty percent of the country.

So the three biggest gun-owning regions in the world by guns per person is a tiny British tourist trap where nobody but governments commit crimes, and civil-war ravaged Yemen. And America. Neither of those first places comes close to America in terms of either size or number of guns. America has more guns for civilian use than anywhere else on Earth. This number is not in dispute. America has more than twice the number of guns per citizen than anywhere else on Earth. This number is also not in dispute. America has a death-by-firearm rate far and beyond any other nation of its size, population, wealth, and stability. Of the six countries that make up half the world’s gun deaths, America is one of them - the other five are Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala, all nations with significantly more serious gang-related and stability-related issues than America. This number is also not is dispute.

2) Easy access to guns. 390 million guns don’t get distributed by accident. American gun laws are known for their laxity and their ease of use: in America the courts have decided that 1791′s Second Amendment of the US Constitution, by-and-large, grants Americans the largely unrestricted right to own guns, and indeed have something of a moral obligation to do so as a guarantor against tyranny. American law thus goes out of its way to make the process of purchasing a gun as inconvenient as possible. It is easier to buy a guy in many places in America than it is to purchase alcohol. 3) A culture that worships guns. America has a culture that loves guns. A culture that lauds guns. A culture that worships guns. America has a culture that that stands around and not only says ‘shit guns are cool’ but takes the next step and says ‘and people should be able to own cool things.’ This is somewhat odd given the awesome destructive power of a gun and the average citizen’s need to posses destructive power. Tanks are cool, but nobody is handing those out to civilians. Fighter jets are awesome, but we don’t make those for sale to anything other than repressive governments. “But DukeofRiven swords are cool and we let people buy those,” you say. Well, many countries don’t, first of all, or allow much sword-freedom - in my country it is legal to own a sword, but not to wield it or carry it. Secondly, you know how many people were murdered with a sword in 2017? No, you don’t. Nobody does - no one seems to be keeping track as far as I can tell. It’s so few people that the number is statistically insignificant. I can tell you that in 2017 some 1,591 people were murdered with all “knives and other cutting instruments” compared to a full 10,982 gun homicides. This is a list that notes all defenestration murders (4), and all murders via explosion (0) - it doesn’t take a lot to get on the FBI’s “common murder weapon” radar. Swords don’t qualify. “But DukeofRiven” - I hear you cry (’Your Grace’ will do) - “That’s a lot of knife deaths. Knives are a useful tool that would be silly to ban. Guns are an important tool too - farmers who live in dangerous areas find guns useful for warding off wild animals.” Well that’s true, fictional question asker - farmers do find guns useful. There’s about 3.2 million farmers in American - slightly less than 1% of the population - so let’s do the American thing and give them a heaping, generous portion of 10 guns each. That still leaves... uh... about 360 million guns not owned by farmers. Well what if we take all rural-dwelling Americans, who hunt and shoot and kill as part of their very important rural hunting/shooting/killing culture and make sure they all have at least one gun. 57 million rural non-farmer Americans - about 17% of the population - but damn, we’ve still got 303 million guns lying around. Most American gun owners own at least three guns? Can’t deprive the rural folk of their just due so will give them each an extra two guns. That still leaves us with 181 million guns to hand out to civilian urbanites who cannot possible have a good day-to-day use for them - and that’s counting the extra seven guns we gave to each farmer. If those guns were to secede and form an independent nation they’d bump Ethiopia’s spot to become the 12th largest country by-population in the world. That’s more guns than the population of the world’s 109 smallest countries combined. “Guns are still tools used by hunters” - oh sweet boy howdy do I not give a shit about hunters. 7000 of those 2017 deaths were by handguns, a gun that literally has no other purpose other than to shoot people. Handgun deaths top all other gun deaths in America by a significant margin. A handgun is not a tool. It is a weapon. That’s all it is - and Americans own a lot of weapons. You’re drowning in them. You are overrun by guns. Right-wingers should forget curbing immigration to save white people as the dominant ethnic group - the primary demographic of the United States is gun! Y’all lost already! I don’t care that you think guns are cool, because I also think guns are cool - and I own none. I can be impressed by guns without having to own guns, without making sure my friends own guns, and my family owns guns, and that there are enough guns in my country for every single person to personally shoot another person in the head in a suicidal conga line stretching round the entire country and still have spare guns left over. Culture? Tradition? Heritage? Don’t give a flying fuck. Slavery was part of your tradition too, and no that’s not a disingenuous comparison because both practices created death, pain, misery, and suffering for profit. Both practices were morally indefensible. You’ve been a responsible gun owner all your life? Don’t give a fuck. How many gun owners need to be un-responsible before the tipping point is crossed and you would agree that there is culturally a gun problem, that no amount of responsibility by one group os making up for the irresponsibility of the other half? Why is this ‘one good man in ‘Sodom’ argument framed this way? 10000+ people died in 2017 because of a culture that glorifies an item with no functional utility to improve society. Let me be clear about this: given the number of gun deaths compared to that of gun owners that 10000 deaths is statistically insignificant it terms of responsible proportionality. Most gun owners are responsible gun owners. There’s only 118 million gun-owning households in the US - only a third of the population actually owns a gun - so if we fudge the number a bit and just say that there are 118 million individual guns owners the numbers work out to about 0.009% of all gun owners being irresponsible. Guess what: that doesn’t matter. You want to know all the stuff America bans that hasn’t ever killed anybody but someday might? Kinder Eggs. Haggis. Imported brie. Think of all the chemicals banned since the 70s because of fears that they might do something. Think of every product recall that happened because one person was simply injured. Think of the products you’ve banned for nothing more than their dangerous ideology like Cuban cigars. You banned Amy Winehouse and Margaret Thatcher’s son from entering America but you won’t ban the sale of guns? Guns aren’t nearly as dangerous as the late Amy Winehouse? Gun culture and tradition glorifies nothing but instruments of slaughter. Arthur Hoppe killed your stupid arguments about tradition stone-dead 49 year ago:

(Hoppe, Arthur. "Legislation Attempts to Ban the Bomb." Sidelines (Murfreesboro), October 27, 1970. Page 4. For the original source see Hoppe, Arthur. "Ban The Bomb Banners." The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco), October 25, 1970. Page 103. For print, see Hoppe, Arthur. Mr. Nixon and My Other Problems. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1971. Page 78. )

The moral bankruptcy of the tradition argument was demonstrated half a century ago, when a lot less Americans were dying by the gun. When whole classrooms of children and concert goers on the Vegas Strip and students at their lectures and devoted church-goers [and hey, synagogue shooting after I first started writing this: all house-of-worship goers] all have to fear the omnipresent threat of death when does your right to admire the gun cease to be a relevant point of consideration? When does living every day with the constant gnawing fear that it could happen to you finally suffocate ‘most of us are responsible’ in its cradle? When do ‘a few bad apples’ become ‘too many bad apples’? If I’m making apple sauce you’re not going to care that 99% of my apples were perfect - because that 1% of rotten apples I tossed in was enough to ruin the batch. When does ‘most of us are not rotten’ stop sounding quite so reassuring? I’ve been listening a lot lately to Still Buffering, a McElroy extended universe podcast where - in its first year - the-then 15 year-old Rileigh Smirl shared her life with her 15-years-plus older siblings. In the episode recorded immediately after the Orlando shooting, where the adults are literally shaking and you can hear it in their voices, the 15 year-old very blandly describes life in a world where the idea of being shot in her school has been so utterly normalized for her that she has a hard time generating the same level of fear about it as the adults do. It is genuinely nauseating. Her sisters are practically crying into their microphones, sick with horror that their little sister goes to school entirely accepting that another member of her school not only might wander in with a gun and shoot-up the place, but would not be culturally abnormal for having done so. The young Ms. Smirl is already used to being evacuated: kids at her school have brought guns, brought bombs, and while nothing fatal has yet happened, she would be unsurprised if it did. resigned to the fact. If the shooter only murdered a handful of people the story wouldn’t still be in the news after a couple days (did you even remember there was a synagogue shooting a week ago?) - and if they’d killed dozens they’d be superseded by another shooting within a few weeks. (As of writing - April 26 2019 - there have been six school shootings in the US since the start of the year Eight. There were two more school shootings between me first writing this down on April 26 and coming back to finish it on May 11/12th. There were 20 mass shootings in total in just those fifteen days. 21 fatalities. Jesus Fucking Christ, America.) You know, I wouldn’t care if guns hadn’t killed a soul in 2017. If the simple spectre of their presence - the easy access, the sheer volume, the cultural identity - created a fraction of that level of fear and fatalism you hear in Rileigh Smirl’s voice in school children across America I would happily rip every single gun from the living hands of every American gun owner and melt them in a pyre the size of Delaware rather than let such a state of affairs continue. A mere 10000 gun owners were murderers in 2017? A mere 10000 gun owners a year have been murderers for the last 20 years? A mere 2,000,000 gun murderers in two decades? Damn you all. Keep in mind we haven’t touched on anything other than homicides. 10000-plus gun owners made the decision to murder others with their gun in 2017. People often bring up car deaths as a rebuttal to the gun stats - 40000 car deaths in 2017 to 10000 gun deaths should we therefore ban cars, you idiot? What a disingenuous question. That’s 40000 car deaths of all kinds - I’m talking about homicide alone, where the so-called ‘responsible person’ is proven to use their ‘responsibly’-owned item for irresponsible ends. The ‘bad-eggs.’ You know how many bad-egg car owners murdered people in 2017 as an act of willful homicide? No. And neither do I. It’s another stat so low it is presumably lumped-in with an aggregate - the 976 deaths in 2017 known only as “miscellaneous.” This, again, on a chart that notes that 13 people were murdered by poison, 4 people were murdered by being pushed, and zero people were murdered with explosions. The number of cars used to murder people? Presumably less than three. Could be as low as zero. [Note: the number is actually 50. See the Addendum and this follow-up article for expanded stats.] There are a little over 270 million car owners in the US, and from that we can conclude that while 0.009% of gun owners a year can’t stop themselves from murdering people with their guns, less than 0.000001% of car owners can’t stop themselves from being a first-degree car murderer. On the face of it those are pretty tiny numbers - infinitesimal, really. Less than one percent. Insignificant. Why get worked up? 10,000 lives ended by guns fired with a purpose to kill. By civilians, only, mind - I haven’t even touched on gun deaths by police officers, or the even broader question of gun deaths by US soldiers looking to shoot people. We’re still just focussed on civilian gun owners who felt the need to kill other human beings. ~10,000 American gun murders in 2017 alone. Three times the entire population of the Falklands, your closet neighbours in terms of guns-to-population ratio. I’m Canadian - 36 million people, a disturbing 36 guns per 100 people. If I go to Windsor and drive across the bridge I instantly become 10 time more likely to be shot to death - not specifically because I am now in Detroit, not specifically because I’m a Canadian in the United States, but simply because I went from any developed nation that wasn’t America into America. Taking Detroit specifics account, if you drive back and forth across the Ambassador bridge your odds of getting shot jump some 50 times every time you cross an invisible line on the Detroit River. Detroit and Windsor have very different crime rates: 2017 saw 267 murders in Detroit. Windsor saw 3. The Detroit Murder Rate is 45 per 100,000 people - Windsor is 0.89. These cities are less than 2000 feet apart. About 600 metres. 0.6 kilometres. 0.4 of a mile. Statistically speaking most of those crimes in Detroit were firearm deaths. I can stand in Windsor (having had an excellent meal at Smoke & Spice Southern Barbecue), walk some 300 yards, and my life-expectancy from being slain by a passing bullet balloons 50 times. People just die more in America. That’s - to be fair - partially a matter of volume. Contrasted against Canada, say, and you’re looking at nine times the number of people: of course you’ve got more deaths. But the homicide numbers don’t scale that way. Canada had 266 firearm homicides in 2017. If you made the population of Canada nine times larger, so that we had population parity with the US, we would have had about 2394 gun homicides - still only a quarter of the USA’s 10,982. You’d have to make Canada 41 times larger than it is now, creating a billion and a half Canadians, which amounts to a full 20% of the existing world population. You’d need there to be 1.2 billion more Canadians than there are Americans now to have the same number of gun homicides. Homicides alone! Because we’re still - still - not talking about suicides. Or home ‘defence.’ Or police shootings. Or killings by US troops. Just civilians with guns and the capacity to use them on fellow citizens out of a need to murder. If this getting through? Tell me this is getting through. Americans - your family, friends, colleagues, comrades, acquaintances, lovers, crushes, vaguely-recognized strangers are dying at rates from causes that are not present elsewhere in the stable places of the world. You are dying from solved problems. If ~10,000 Americans were dying yearly from the black plague you’d be upset. You’d be doing something. America has a disease, and that disease is a willingness to let friends, family, lovers, even children die rather than change. Six eight school shootings in four five months. “It’s lucky that fatalities were low,” you might say if you were a lunatic. That’s not lucky. Gut-wrenchingly relieving, all things being equal: six eight schools threatened and only one family four families had to lose a child. It didn’t happen to us think the thousands of parents whose children walked out of those six eight shootings alive. A school bus company that had six eight crashes in four five months wouldn’t count itself lucky that only one child four children died. It would be defunct as a company, drowning in litigation, its corporate officers hounded in the streets by mobs of furious parents horrified that this company had proven so incapable of a simple act like protecting their children. But six eight schools across the nation experienced an event with armed gunman and its not even notable. America, you’re broken. You’re just broken. And your problem is the guns. So I don’t care that you’re a responsible gun owner with a gun cabinet who memorized the rifleman’s credo. I absolutely don’t give a damn that you have fond memories of you and your grandfather stalking deer and bonding as family. If I weigh the cost of you sharing that bonding experience with your own grandchild someday against the ~10000 people shot dead in 2017, and the ~100000 people shot dead over the decade your warm fuzzies don’t amount to shit. Teach your grandkid to bake cookies. Go camping. Introduce him to the love of baseball. If you cannot imagine formative bonding without killing something go take a butchery course at the community college and learn how to barbecue a pig - hey, look, valuable life lessons, a trade skill, and I just made you a must-get for cool parties. Yes, I am talking about taking your guns away. All of your guns. All of them. This is a future I want - because you, America, collectively, have proven that you are not socially responsible enough to be a country that owns guns. If you can ban Kinder Eggs for 50 years because you thought it would take that much time to train your children not to swallow a massive plastic capsule that the rest of the world’s children have no problem surviving, I think at the very least a 50-year moratorium on firearms is the bare fucking minimum. There were 23 school shootings in America in 2018. There have been 20 school shootings in Canada in the entire 152 years of our existence. Over 10000 American civilians decide every year to shoot people to death. That doesn’t happen in other stable places. The difference is THE GUNS. IT’S ALL THE GUNS! IT’S ALL THE FUCKING GUNS! You can’t just talk about tightening guns laws. You can’t just talk about making gun owners more responsible - statistically speaking American gun owners are individually responsible! It doesn’t matter, because collectively you’re all irresponsible. Responsible people don’t prioritize their interests and hobbies over bi-monthly school shootings. Responsible people don’t ‘Good German’ themselves when children’s are under threat at least once a month nation-wide.

Real talk for you people out there who own guns, love guns, would never think or murdering anybody, and are genuinely angry that I keep acting like 10000-a-year bad apples reflects badly on your interests as a whole. How high does the number have to be before your association with your hobby would begin to make you feel uncomfortable with sharing an interest? Let me put it another way: enrolment in youth football teams is dropping nation-wide as parents aren’t comfortable putting their children at risk. Football has given America exciting games to watch, stories of victory and defeat, bonding with friends and family, and one of television’s true masterpieces, Friday Night Lights (#neededmoredevin #justiceforwaverly #justiceforsantiago). But all that good warm fuzzy feeling is running up against a problem: kids are getting hurt. In some cases kids are dying. 2017 saw 13 football-related deaths among the under-18 crowd: 4 direct fatalities, 9 indirect fatalities. (Direct fatalities are causes like head injuries and organ trauma. Indirect fatalities are causes like heat stroke.) That’s a death rate of 0.095/100,000 direct and 0.21/100,000 indirect - still lower than the murder rate in Windsor. And yet football enrolment declines. Because it’s more than just those thirteen deaths: it’s the up-front injuries like broken bones and sprains, it’s the long-term brain injuries that might not emerge for years, it’s the trauma of watching friends and teammates get seriously hurt, die, or simply find the sport a source of stress rather than joy. Right now football is experiencing white flight as predatory football pipelines double-down on players-of-colour to feed their football mills, but that too will decline as a generation that grows up not experiencing a close intimacy with football loses interest in the sport. (Another demographic timebomb lurking in America’s wings.) 13 child deaths by football in 2018. 44 students shot-dead the same year. High schools are shutting down their football programs - taking football completely away - because they can’t stomach all that death, injury, and trauma. The seriousness of this has proven that America is not a nation that can handle its football, and does not want to keep its kids playing football in the same numbers as it once did. (Anyone who wants to come in here and say “would you say the same about hockey, Canadian?” Yes. Absolutely. Instantly. Ditch the whole thing. It’s just a sport, a hobby. It is not more important than lives.) So what will it take to get you to admit that if America can’t handle football it can’t handle guns? A half-dozen kids got their hair chewed in the 90s and America decided that responsibility didn’t matter, that nobody should own a Snacktime Kid Cabbage Patch Doll. One kid died from a non-blunt lawn dart in 1987 and you’ve banned them since 1988. 44 kids got shot to death last year and America thought it unnecessarily restrictive of freedom to take away a single gun. Give me numbers. Please. How many kids would have to die in America this year before you felt uncomfortable owning a gun simply by transference of shame or guilt or association? What if every gun owner but you shot a kid at a school next year? Would you still say your responsibility kept your conscience clear? An absurd, hyperbolic question, fair enough. So let’s start counting down from those 117999999 gun-owning households who aren’t you: what’s the magic number when your responsible ownership of your thing-that-just-kills no longer sits comfortably against the annual number of gun-owning, school-child murderer-producing households? Not accidents, not mistakes, not once-in-a-generation horrors by an statistically aberrant psychopath - I’m talking about systemic patterns of yearly school-child homicide via gunshot. Because last year that was about 44 child murders from about 15 households. That’s currently a number that doesn’t shame you. Start counting up. I’m asking, genuinely, because I need to know. Is there a number? 440 kids murdered by 150 household? 4400 from 1500? 44000 from 15000? Or will others actions never affect you? Is what the rest of society does is of no import, no responsibility of yours? If you were the only responsible gun owner in America, ask yourself if you’d still be comfortable owning a gun. And think - real hard - at what the ratio of responsible-to-not-responsible gun murderers and death tolls are right now, and why you’re okay with that. Then ask yourself what other hobby has that kind of real-life school-kid homicide count that needs to be updated on a monthly basis. Not a lot of gunpla hobbyists struggling with the weight of rogue members murdering kids. Knitters can be vicious, but only socially. Mountain climbers and fast car enthusiasts see plenty of tragedy in their hobby - but they’re tragedies of accidents and mistakes. Not a lot of malicious intent going around. Not a lot of cut ropes and slashed brakes. Not to the tune of 10000+ homicides a year. Ask yourself if maybe - just maybe - America has a problem when it comes to guns. Maybe, just maybe, so many of you being responsible isn’t working. Maybe, just maybe, your hobby, your tradition, your culture, your warm family memories, your constitutional guarantees of ownership, are not worth the death of children in their schools, concert goers at their venues, worshipers at their altars, families in their homes year, after year, after year, after year, after year, after year, after year in numbers that simply, truthfully, are not present elsewhere in the world in places similar to America. Maybe, just maybe, being responsible isn’t enough. Maybe, at some point, the number of dead kids will be too many. And if it isn’t, you need to come clean and admit that every child in America could be shot to death tomorrow and you’d still love owning a gun. You can get rid of the guns, America, or you can start wearing shirts that say “kill all the kids you like - I’m proud to be a gun owner.” Because there’s no other choices left to you. The time for incremental change is long over. The time for saner, less drastic measures died decades ago. There is no moderate position left. It’s the guns, or it’s the children. There are no other choices.

________________________ Addendum: there is now a second part to this article, which expands upon some of the points made here with the more comprehensive fatality statistics from the CDC, including numbers I did not have when originally writing this article.

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