One day, one of our ancestors,
some Sahelanthropus Tchaedensis or Australopithecus Afarensis realized
that by wielding a rock to throw or an oaken club it was possible to
more efficiently either defend themselves from or better execute an
attack. Although the exact timeline of the progress made since then is
probably unknowable, even to the most esteemed experts currently
available, we do know that some considerable advances have been made.
Wood and stone eventually gave way to bronze and bronze eventually gave
way to iron. Longbows gave way to crossbows which, in turn, gave way to
muskets and flintlocks. Flintlocks gave way to revolvers, while muskets
gave way to rifles. Modern pistols come with magazines or clips that
need only be slid in for as little as a second, with training. From the
moment the first ancestral human primate picked up the first rock to the
time Smith & Wesson put forth their latest innovation in firearms,
the ability to enhance our ability to act offensively and defensively
has been with us and it will be with us as long as humanity has not
achieved so utopian a state as to no longer need worry about limited
resources or limited minds. Bearing that in mind, it is highly likely
that every human who has ever lived or will ever live on this planet
will have to contend with violence and the various technologies that
allow it to be more effective. Beyond this, what is clear, what is
obviously the intent of every wise and decent man involved in the
founding of this country, what is clearly best for protecting children
and others of the most vulnerable, what is clearly our God-given right
as American is absolutely nothing. If you think you can say all that is
sensible and good to be said about the issues of an armed humanity on a
bumper sticker, then you don't understand enough about it to
meaningfully participate in the discussion. What is stridently asserted
in black and white terms can also be dismissed those same terms. So it
goes, on and on and on it goes. Those involved in both sides this
debate, not that much of this garbage deserves the term, want to parse
the 2nd Amendment like it's Biblical Greek, link to news stories high on
shock and low on insight, and, of course, simply engage in ad hominem
attacks. Neither side wins the day. They both lose, but not because of
each other. No, they lose because of shame that comes from the fact that
they refused to do the one thing that might've actually gotten the
other side to think about their points and reevaluate their own. Such
refusal to think is absolutely maddening because there's no reason it
has to be like this. Despite my utter disappointment with the
embarrassing mockery of debate many of my friends have displayed on both
sides of this issue, I continue to believe that they are all
intelligent and good people capable of compassion and of understanding
ideas that originated outside of their own heads and their own tribe. If
you actually want to talk and think about this issue without shouting
at one another, I'm going to do my best. Say whatever you like in
response, but, please, think it through.
We'll start with my side of this debate, which, you can probably guess is pro-gun one. There are many good arguments for the right to bear arms, but you'd have a hard time finding that out from watching a television screen or loading a browser page. Here's the thing about sound arguments. They are not reliant upon who made them. To paraphrase what Martin Luther King Jr. said about men, ideas ought to be judged upon no more than their content. Say for a moment that all the parsing the left is doing of the 2nd Amendment is correct and all the parsing the right is doing is folly. For the sake of argument, every last founding father, were he living today, would favor us to all throw our arms into giant incinerators like they did on that Simpsons episode based on The Monkey's Paw. Would that sway you away from a lifetime of belief that the right to bear arms is a fundamental right of humankind? Answering yes to that question renders you not only unworthy of this debate, but a useless sheep peddling whatever dogma is most successfully indoctrinated into your brain when it is at its most defenseless. Happily, although your focus on the second amendment doesn't reflect this in the slightest, I happen to believe that there are few on the right who would change their minds for so poor a reason. An actual reason, on the other hand, should sway you. If logic and facts indicated that abolishing the right for individuals to bear arms would allow for a truly utopian society, or some equally unquestionably greater good, whatever value they would have wouldn't be worth preserving humanity the chance at such a society. No matter what a person's ideas, they must avoid becoming a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is defined here as a person impossible to convince in principle no matter what argument or evidence is presented to him. However convinced one might be, one must always account for the possibility one might be unconvinced of even one's most deeply held beliefs. Contrary to what may be considered intuitive, keeping the possibility of being wrong open does not make one's ability to hold to and defend one's position weaker. So long as one is open to the possibility one is wrong, it becomes second nature to seek out arguments that are actually scrutinized to make sure that they make sense and are sufficiently understood by oneself. For example, try on the following: "Engineering a society, where, by law, and through no fault of their own, some members of society are forced to be more vulnerable than others is immoral and elitist. To say the children of some shall be protected by armed guard while others are forced to walk home alone through neighborhoods where no law-abiding person can be armed, and to call this moral, is inequality that is often downright fatal." Now try on some of the standard boilerplate: "From my cold dead hands...", "Guns don't kill people. People kill people," or, "I gotta have guns in case we need to overthrow the government." The former is calm and makes a point that is not easily blustered away and the latter are so blustery themselves that it won't matter if you're right because you'll look so goddamned stupid.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Basically, it translates as, "Who guards the guardians?" This is a question the left ought to be asking themselves any time they want to be involved in a debate on this topic. The only time it wouldn't apply is if you're such a pacifist that you believe it's feasible for everyone to just throw away their guns and that every person on Earth would comply with this. If you seriously think that, you're not worth my time or the oxygen you're using. For those of us involved in actual discussions taking place in the real world, you're going to have to make two concessions, right up front. You've always got to have a military and a police force. These people, realistically, are going to be carrying firearms in the modern world. So, at a minimum, we the civilian citizenry are going to be relying upon various uniformed personnel to defend us, and, in our daily lives, that's going to mean the police. As a Republican, I tend to trust the police, and I suppose that's also to do with my background as a wealthy white straight person whose worst offense was a ticket for careless driving at 16. Do you, the left, trust the police? Is your trust in them, in fact, great enough that you feel all the populate ought to trust them to be competent enough, staffed enough, uncorruptable enough, free of prejudice enough, fast enough, and brave enough to be where they need to be in time to stop violent tragedies a sufficient percentage of the time that it warrants that populace being disallowed access to their most effective means of self-defense? I hear tales sometimes of neighborhoods in America where the police are afraid to go right now because of issues with gangs. Lately, there have been entire border towns where this is the case due to drug cartels. Imagine entire neighborhoods or towns and they have a choice. This is a choice that I sincerely hope no one reading ever has to make. Since they can't count on the police to protect, them, they can either be a criminal or a sitting duck. Obviously, there is a plethora of reasons that things have gotten so bad in some places in America, but the fact remains that, for the people there, they have gotten that bad. So an elderly person whose local police force cannot be counted upon to save them, who lives on a fixed income, who is running out of groceries, and is afraid to leave her apartment because of what happen to her on the street should not have a gun. No, she shall risk her life and, if she dies because she was so defenseless, she will be a martyr to the cause of gun control. Sure, she was an exception, but the rule is still preventing Sandy Hooks from happening out there, so we should all be for gun control. Maybe that sentence makes sense as a policy to the left, but they can stop pretending it's such clear moral high ground. Yeah, we can talk about matters of degree. Clip sizes, fully automatic, armor piercing rounds, and so on, but don't act like, in principle, the men and women paid to police society are the only line of defense any individual ought to need or that you've made your peace with anyone who falls through the cracks of that defense becoming a sitting duck.
So I've given both sides treatments consisting of a very long paragraph each. You know my biases and you know I do have a side I'm rooting for here, but I'm not willing to kowtow to anyone's dogma, nor do I need the validation of any scripture, secular or divine, to let me know my ideas are sound. Both sides of this debate need to stop ignoring the fact that nothing is perfectible in this world. Neither the documents that men write, nor the men themselves, are some infallible substitute for thinking. Thinking will be necessary anytime we make policy or decline to, and, either way, we must accept that there will always be death and destruction. Our role in this process isn't to look at the victims of Sandy Hook, or whatever ghastly occurrences have happened as of late as you read this, and panic. That means that we do not get to engage in logical fallacy just to feel safer and we do not get to game theory the sad event so that the shooter fails and the victims live. Life tends to contain so many variables that studying them all tends to be its own occupation, not something that can be done by Monday morning quarterbacking the events leading up to a horrible incident. There is never, however, harm in seeking understanding. Many, for instance, seek to understand the mental illness of shooters in these sorts of events, and understanding mental illness is a complex and worthy endeavor. When comes to matters of such complexity, as with many things, it is wise to listen to those who seek knowledge and unwise to listen to those who claim to have it. All wisdom begins with not knowing something and then patiently seeking to know it. Likewise, all compassion begins with admitting to not knowing something about another person and letting go of whatever presumptions one might've made about that person's experience. Compassion and individual rights are, as you probably well understand, the bottom line for me. As the bluster, withering sarcasm, and sloganeering fly in the debate over gun control, I look to the defenseless in the matter. Whatever my beliefs, I must have compassion for the old woman in a bad neighborhood who might need a gun to survive and the children who might be alive today without one evil man's access to one. All those shivering in fear and facing death deserve security and life. Tedious recitation of the 2nd Amendment or arrogant assurance that one has the answer to a problem that has plagued our species since before it even was our species will give them neither. Instead, no matter your position, I want you to contemplate the idea that you may not have the answer. Perhaps more challengingly, I want you to contemplate the idea that nobody does. To come up with the answers, we may have to give it a think. Humanity is gifted with a brain to body mass ratio unequaled in nature and that is what has allowed us to create our civilization, go to the moon, and split the atom. With all that we've accomplished by thinking, let's give it a go with this whole metal capsules flying fast through metal shafts quandary. We could also keep throwing quotes and slogans at each other. It's up to you.
-Frank
We'll start with my side of this debate, which, you can probably guess is pro-gun one. There are many good arguments for the right to bear arms, but you'd have a hard time finding that out from watching a television screen or loading a browser page. Here's the thing about sound arguments. They are not reliant upon who made them. To paraphrase what Martin Luther King Jr. said about men, ideas ought to be judged upon no more than their content. Say for a moment that all the parsing the left is doing of the 2nd Amendment is correct and all the parsing the right is doing is folly. For the sake of argument, every last founding father, were he living today, would favor us to all throw our arms into giant incinerators like they did on that Simpsons episode based on The Monkey's Paw. Would that sway you away from a lifetime of belief that the right to bear arms is a fundamental right of humankind? Answering yes to that question renders you not only unworthy of this debate, but a useless sheep peddling whatever dogma is most successfully indoctrinated into your brain when it is at its most defenseless. Happily, although your focus on the second amendment doesn't reflect this in the slightest, I happen to believe that there are few on the right who would change their minds for so poor a reason. An actual reason, on the other hand, should sway you. If logic and facts indicated that abolishing the right for individuals to bear arms would allow for a truly utopian society, or some equally unquestionably greater good, whatever value they would have wouldn't be worth preserving humanity the chance at such a society. No matter what a person's ideas, they must avoid becoming a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is defined here as a person impossible to convince in principle no matter what argument or evidence is presented to him. However convinced one might be, one must always account for the possibility one might be unconvinced of even one's most deeply held beliefs. Contrary to what may be considered intuitive, keeping the possibility of being wrong open does not make one's ability to hold to and defend one's position weaker. So long as one is open to the possibility one is wrong, it becomes second nature to seek out arguments that are actually scrutinized to make sure that they make sense and are sufficiently understood by oneself. For example, try on the following: "Engineering a society, where, by law, and through no fault of their own, some members of society are forced to be more vulnerable than others is immoral and elitist. To say the children of some shall be protected by armed guard while others are forced to walk home alone through neighborhoods where no law-abiding person can be armed, and to call this moral, is inequality that is often downright fatal." Now try on some of the standard boilerplate: "From my cold dead hands...", "Guns don't kill people. People kill people," or, "I gotta have guns in case we need to overthrow the government." The former is calm and makes a point that is not easily blustered away and the latter are so blustery themselves that it won't matter if you're right because you'll look so goddamned stupid.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Basically, it translates as, "Who guards the guardians?" This is a question the left ought to be asking themselves any time they want to be involved in a debate on this topic. The only time it wouldn't apply is if you're such a pacifist that you believe it's feasible for everyone to just throw away their guns and that every person on Earth would comply with this. If you seriously think that, you're not worth my time or the oxygen you're using. For those of us involved in actual discussions taking place in the real world, you're going to have to make two concessions, right up front. You've always got to have a military and a police force. These people, realistically, are going to be carrying firearms in the modern world. So, at a minimum, we the civilian citizenry are going to be relying upon various uniformed personnel to defend us, and, in our daily lives, that's going to mean the police. As a Republican, I tend to trust the police, and I suppose that's also to do with my background as a wealthy white straight person whose worst offense was a ticket for careless driving at 16. Do you, the left, trust the police? Is your trust in them, in fact, great enough that you feel all the populate ought to trust them to be competent enough, staffed enough, uncorruptable enough, free of prejudice enough, fast enough, and brave enough to be where they need to be in time to stop violent tragedies a sufficient percentage of the time that it warrants that populace being disallowed access to their most effective means of self-defense? I hear tales sometimes of neighborhoods in America where the police are afraid to go right now because of issues with gangs. Lately, there have been entire border towns where this is the case due to drug cartels. Imagine entire neighborhoods or towns and they have a choice. This is a choice that I sincerely hope no one reading ever has to make. Since they can't count on the police to protect, them, they can either be a criminal or a sitting duck. Obviously, there is a plethora of reasons that things have gotten so bad in some places in America, but the fact remains that, for the people there, they have gotten that bad. So an elderly person whose local police force cannot be counted upon to save them, who lives on a fixed income, who is running out of groceries, and is afraid to leave her apartment because of what happen to her on the street should not have a gun. No, she shall risk her life and, if she dies because she was so defenseless, she will be a martyr to the cause of gun control. Sure, she was an exception, but the rule is still preventing Sandy Hooks from happening out there, so we should all be for gun control. Maybe that sentence makes sense as a policy to the left, but they can stop pretending it's such clear moral high ground. Yeah, we can talk about matters of degree. Clip sizes, fully automatic, armor piercing rounds, and so on, but don't act like, in principle, the men and women paid to police society are the only line of defense any individual ought to need or that you've made your peace with anyone who falls through the cracks of that defense becoming a sitting duck.
So I've given both sides treatments consisting of a very long paragraph each. You know my biases and you know I do have a side I'm rooting for here, but I'm not willing to kowtow to anyone's dogma, nor do I need the validation of any scripture, secular or divine, to let me know my ideas are sound. Both sides of this debate need to stop ignoring the fact that nothing is perfectible in this world. Neither the documents that men write, nor the men themselves, are some infallible substitute for thinking. Thinking will be necessary anytime we make policy or decline to, and, either way, we must accept that there will always be death and destruction. Our role in this process isn't to look at the victims of Sandy Hook, or whatever ghastly occurrences have happened as of late as you read this, and panic. That means that we do not get to engage in logical fallacy just to feel safer and we do not get to game theory the sad event so that the shooter fails and the victims live. Life tends to contain so many variables that studying them all tends to be its own occupation, not something that can be done by Monday morning quarterbacking the events leading up to a horrible incident. There is never, however, harm in seeking understanding. Many, for instance, seek to understand the mental illness of shooters in these sorts of events, and understanding mental illness is a complex and worthy endeavor. When comes to matters of such complexity, as with many things, it is wise to listen to those who seek knowledge and unwise to listen to those who claim to have it. All wisdom begins with not knowing something and then patiently seeking to know it. Likewise, all compassion begins with admitting to not knowing something about another person and letting go of whatever presumptions one might've made about that person's experience. Compassion and individual rights are, as you probably well understand, the bottom line for me. As the bluster, withering sarcasm, and sloganeering fly in the debate over gun control, I look to the defenseless in the matter. Whatever my beliefs, I must have compassion for the old woman in a bad neighborhood who might need a gun to survive and the children who might be alive today without one evil man's access to one. All those shivering in fear and facing death deserve security and life. Tedious recitation of the 2nd Amendment or arrogant assurance that one has the answer to a problem that has plagued our species since before it even was our species will give them neither. Instead, no matter your position, I want you to contemplate the idea that you may not have the answer. Perhaps more challengingly, I want you to contemplate the idea that nobody does. To come up with the answers, we may have to give it a think. Humanity is gifted with a brain to body mass ratio unequaled in nature and that is what has allowed us to create our civilization, go to the moon, and split the atom. With all that we've accomplished by thinking, let's give it a go with this whole metal capsules flying fast through metal shafts quandary. We could also keep throwing quotes and slogans at each other. It's up to you.
-Frank
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