(no subject)

[hawkwing_lb]

Some things, I don't think about. Some things, I don't talk about.

Sometimes that's because I don't know. Sometimes it's because I don't care, or because I'm burned out from caring. Sometimes, it feels like appropriating someone else's issues, or griefs, or concerns. I'd make an appallingly bad journalist in this day and age. Probably in any.

Reading the blog coverage of the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, the one thing that jumps out at me is the way the issue of gun control keeps coming up, again and again and again.

Let me just say that the US attitude to killing weapons purely baffles me. Whatever about owning hunting weapons, and keeping guns for sport shooting at a range - but then, I come from a place where even the general run of the police force are unarmed, and the only civilians who carry guns make the majority of their income from criminal enterprises. Yeah, we have armed crime, and gun murder - there're quite a few serious weapons floating around, particularly since (according to rumour) the IRA offloaded some of theirs during the ceasefire, and some more before disarmament. But I digress.

One of the arguments I see coming up on these discussions on gun control, from the pro-gun side, is the need for the populace to be able to protect themselves from the government. Or more specifically, the potential tyranny or oppression of the government.

You hear that noise there? That was my head exploding.

I mean, I consider myself a cynic of the first water. Government - even democratic government - exists to a) make money for politicians and civil servants, and b) grudgingly provide those services to its citizens it can't get out of. It'll happily fuck over anyone who can't buy themselves a TD - or at least a county councillor or three. It's a broken system, and the only reason it still exists is that while nearly everybody dislikes it, no one can agree on how to fix it.

But if you're worried you'll need guns to defend yourself from your own elected representives, then your system is not merely broken, but seriously, dangerously dysfunctional. Either that or you're on the paranoid side of the sanity division.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm biased, living a few kilometres down the road from Nor'n Ireland. Thirty years of the troubles and some of the most innovative bomb-making techniques around, and the guys fighting against what they saw as the 'tyranny' of British rule didn't win. (Note: achieving détente is not winning.)

Or maybe I'm biased, having a good understanding of my own country's founding mythology and knowing just how skewed it is. We didn't win our war of independence. David Lloyd George offered a pretty shitty compromise (although probably he thought it generous), and that only because his domestic public opinion was against a war of suppression in Ireland.

And those are instances of relatively united forces - in the IRA's case, with significant external funding and an extremely well-developed support network - facing a 'foreign' enemy. If your own government is prepared to turn the big guns on you regardless of public opinion, then small arms aren't going to help you. (Well, they might help you fight a civil war that lasts for a few decades and leaves no one all that much better off. But I really don't consider that helping.)

So can someone explain to this very puzzled European why some USians think guns are a good thing to have? And why that's a good argument for having them?

Comments

[blackaire.livejournal.com]

Please note, to anyone else reading: I'm NOT going to debate gun control in the comments. Opinion asked for, opinion given. Fin.

To answer your question, you pretty much nailed it when you said that Americans carry guns out of a fear that some day they will need them to defend themselves--from the guv'ment, from the black people, from the white people, from the Mexicans, from drug deals, from the DEA...I could go on forever. The Constitution at this moment guarantees Americans the right to own guns, and Americans choose to exercise that right because they are afraid of the boogeyman. I could go on and talk about how we were founded by a group of armed dissidents, and how we're an upstart country and we foster the "frotier" mentality of it being a big world and it's us against Them, ect, but at the root: it's fear.

Americans are armed because they're afraid, and they don't have any rules in place that force them to deal with that societal fear in a more civilized fahsion, unlike the UK, Ireland, Japan and most other first-world nations where gun control is vastly stricter. (The notable exception is Canada, where they have just as many guns, and fairly lax gun control policies, and yet don't shoot each other. The majority opinion down here is that their system of government doesn't foster the feeling that Someone, Somewhere, is Planning to Kill You RIGHT NOW, whereas America's government does.)

I can't think of a good argument for owning guns, except that some hobbyists might enjoy target shooting, or a sustenance hunter needs to feed their family. For self-defense...let me just put out there that if you point a gun at me, I know three fast and painful ways to disarm you. Then I will have your gun, and I will probably be in a bad mood. How does that work out in your favor?

Again...I'm not going to debate...I'm just offering an American POV here.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That makes a certain amount of sense.

I don't mean to swipe at anyone who likes guns and feels more secure by having them, even if I think it's a false sense of security (hell, I keep a kitchen knife beside my bed when I'm in the house alone at night, because it makes me feel safer: I've no call to go calling anyone out on their false sense of security): I just suffer from the perpetual desire to understand why. About everything.

One of these days it's probably going to get me into trouble. :)

Anyway, appreciate the answer.

[blackaire.livejournal.com]

I keep a Maglite flashlight next to my bed--light and skull-crushing in one elegant package!

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Ooo. That's efficient.

Maybe I'll switch. :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I came to the conclusion in a usenet debate on gnu control that the Americans really need their guns so they can be sure of fighting off George III, as they feel they may need to at any moment.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Well, an undead George III and his army of (presumably also, by this time) undead English soldiery would be a terrible thing to have to face...

I guess everyone has their national psychoses.

[cristalia.livejournal.com]

...write that please. *g*

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Well, sure.

Someday. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

BRAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSSSSSS!

Or am I wrong?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

BRAAAIIINNNSSS!

:)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I am not afraid of guns, having grown up in a small town where people hunted game or went target shooting. No one I knew ever carried a gun because of fear, but it is certainly a main reason that many people in this country carry a gun.

We're still a young country, comparatively. We still seem to feel that the Indians in the area might go on rampage, or the British might come burn our houses.

The arguments about carrying guns to reduce crime are just so much blather, and what Old Jarhead and Libby Spencer said on Making Light was very well-put. On the other hand, it's just so much easier to let the trained citizens carry their guns and make themselves feel safer. I think the vast majority of Americans are not infatuated with guns, do not personally own or carry, and feel no need to rush out to buy one now.

If I want protection, I have a bat and a Japanese cavalry officer's saber. Plus a dog. Plus martial arts training. Plus my paranoia.

I don't need a gun to feel safe, and I'm quite certain most of my neighbors think the same. Of course, the nuts out there would probably proclaim us liberal wimps, to which I would only smile. As a wise man once said, when you resort to violence, you have already lost.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Appreciate the answer. It's good of you to help satisfy my craving to understand. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I can barely understand Americans myself. ;-) We're a complex tangle of imperatives -- f'r instance, we left the British Empire and rejected the monarchy of England, but look at how Anglophilic we are today. We have this nearly insane drive to make things safer for everyone -- children can barely play outside without some parents freaking out, and Scout leaders must never be alone with children; always two trained leaders with kids -- and yet we allow guns just because people don't feel safe.

Some of this is an inherent intellectual laziness; we want the quick fix and we want it yesterday. Rather than spend time and money solving true problems like poverty and illiteracy, which lead to increased crime, we instead spend time and money on building more prisons.

Some of this (IMHO) is our comparative youth. We haven't had the centuries of warfare with our next-door neighbors, or occupation, or thousands of years of civilization. We're brash and argumentative, and know-it-all, yet not as experienced as other countries in some important ways.

No society is perfect, but American arrogance certainly implies that our citizenry thinks this country is better than anyone else's. There's a lot of good about this country -- we do tend to be very generous. There's lots of places to go. We have not had a history of religious differences so there's all kinds of people co-existing.

It's a big country. There's plenty of room for disagreement. :-) I'm still figuring out this place myself.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Some of this is an inherent intellectual laziness; we want the quick fix and we want it yesterday. Rather than spend time and money solving true problems like poverty and illiteracy, which lead to increased crime, we instead spend time and money on building more prisons.

I wonder - how much of that is true intellectual laziness, and how much is the near-religious conviction that the for-profit method of everything is without doubt the better?

Alas, I become more of an anarcho-socialist with every passing year. ;)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I dunno -- do you mean the idea that businessmen are more motivated to find solutions to problems as opposed to "bureaucrats"? It's this idea that is one of the factors driving the US Government push to contract out most services. (The other major factor is the political points gained by telling the public that you've "decreased the size of the Federal Government", and omitting to tell them that the Government still pays for those contract employees.)

There are people who do fall for that branch of the American Ideal, whereupon you pull yourself out of poverty by your own bootstraps, and make a million by the time you're forty twenty-five. The truth is, not many people can do that here. The divide between the haves and the have-nots is growing larger, mainly because of the laws and regulations that have been passed, primarily by Republicans but also by Democrats.

On the other hand, there is an intellectual laziness in this country. We pay lip-service to "brains" but drop the smart kids in favor of the jocks as fast as you can say "Championship Game". There's a great editorial cartoon somewhere where W is telling a jock bully to lift with his knees, as the bully gives a wedgie to the smart glass-wearing kid at the microscope. Bush comes across as a wannabe "Real Man" with all his posturing and brush-cutting, not to mention his admission that he "doesn't read the newspapers". That's a sad thing for a President to say. It implies that knowledge isn't as good as "gut instinct", but you don't get gut instinct without learning, unless you're W, I suppose.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I recall reading, somewhere, that the majority of prisons and hospitals in the US were privately owned concerns. Which is not an incentive for social reform.

Functionally, from the outside the US looks a lot like an aristocracy, or at least an oligarchy. There are no middle-class people in your federal government, much less working-class people. The Bush administration looks merely like an exemplar of some the worst traits of oligarchy - unenlightened self-interest being to the forefront. That being another disincentive for social reform.

Forgive me. I'm a cynic, and I'm watching my own political leaders attempt, in their variously (in)competent ways, to persuade the electorate that deregulation, privatisation, low taxes, and minimal governmental oversight is the best way forward.

(I have been wishing, most of this last year, for a Green Minister with an Energy and Environment portfolio and five billion euro to spend responsibly and accountably. Let Health, Justice, Transport and Enterprise go hang: just put someone competent in charge of Environment and give them room to actually do something. But I've come to think that if that ever happens, it will happen far too late.)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'd have to find a citation for that -- I know we do have Federal and State prisons which are not privately owned. However, even municipalities and states are contracting out services (such as health care) with occasionally bad results. At least, bad enough to come to the attention of the press.

From the outside is an excellent perspective, and one that I appreciate hearing about. From in here, I'd have to say we do have working class and middle class people in the federal government. Of course, the definition of the middle class is a bit different from the definition of, say, 30 years ago (it's gone up a bit, as it's harder to make a living).

You do have to keep in mind that most people who work for the federal government are career employees and not political appointees; it is the political ones that make the news. When Americans start ranting about government bureaucrats they often don't realize they're going on about the career employees who are tasked with carrying out policies set by political employees.

But yes, the higher you go in government operations, the more things smell. I am safely tucked away in a junior position at a small institute which isn't in the limelight and which does a lot of public good. So I'm one of the career employees who can safely say I help make life better. ;-)

Cynical I am, and skeptical too. It's safe to say that I tend not to trust my fellow man (or woman), for -- if given half a chance -- they seem to choose the wrong thing. I just read an article about the misuse of some transfers that we can get for public transportation. There's a system by which you can agree to use public transport instead of driving, and then you get free passes for the Metro and buses. It's illegal to sell these passes. It says so right on the back of the passes. Some people made several thousands of dollars selling their passes on eBay. "Free" money, they thought.

So it goes.

I can responsibly manage the energy and environment around here...shall I apply for that position? ;-) I know how to turn off the lights, I've replaced most of the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got the heating/cooling system turned off most days. What more do I need?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Forgive me, I mispoke: there are no middle class people in the US's elected federal government; it appears that to be in a position to have a chance of affecting policy, one must be on the obscene side of wealthy.

(I suspect when I say 'federal government' you might be hearing the equivalent of 'civil service' when I really mean 'elected representatives'?)

I have nothing but respect for (most) career government employees, wherever they may be: the assorted (unpleasant, corrupt, take-your-pick) incompetants one finds in any large-scale system give the rest of them a bad name. Lack of adequate oversight and lack of competant leadership are the two major problems in all civil service, everywhere.

What more do I need?

Alas, first you must become elected to the Dáil, and then you must convince the Taoiseach (or a sufficient number within his party, who will then convince the Taoiseach) to award you said portfolio. After which, you must gird your loins for battle with the Department of Finance...

Sadly, the average environmentally-conscious person who acknowledges that the consequences of global warming are both dangerous and immediate is probably better qualified for such a portfolio than most of the current crop of TDs. And is probably more competent than half the Greens.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

"(I suspect when I say 'federal government' you might be hearing the equivalent of 'civil service' when I really mean 'elected representatives'?)"

Hm.

The federal government is a vast bureaucracy, after all. Very few positions are elected; most of the appointed positions are indeed awarded to the rich and well-connected scions. Congress is composed of elected officials and unelected staff, so we outnumber the elected ones.

The federal government isn't just Congress and the President, I should say. All of us faceless bureaucrats work for the various departments, like State, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Treasury, etc., etc., and truly run the departments. That's the civil service, to be sure, but that's the majority of the government (IMHO).

Now, with respect to the elected officials, most of whom are decent human beings with perhaps a smidgen more ambition than the rest of us, yes -- more of them are above middle class than not. It takes money to attain that lofty goal. There are a fair number of Representatives who are middle class, at least until they are first elected. I'm sure things can change after that.

When I think of wealthy, I think of ambassadors, secretaries of (insert department here), and the like. The highest of the high. I don't consider them to be my government, and perhaps I should rethink that. ;-)

Elected to the Dáil? Can't I bribe someone? Make a pot of tea or something?

;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Ah. Now I believe I understand my confusion of terms. For when I say government, I am meaning the duly constituted set of elected representatives who set policy and official goals.

The civil service, not being legally supposed to set broad policy, is not in my ideolect part of the government, but one of the tools the government uses to govern. Being the people who actually do the hard work of implementing policy (or saying 'Yes, Minister!' and doing the opposite for Really Stupid [tm] policy). If that makes sense?

Elected to the Dáil? Can't I bribe someone? Make a pot of tea or something?


Well, if you want to get into the Seanad, bribing the Taoiseach would probably work. Since he appoints about a dozen members to that august body. :)

For the Dáil, alas, one has to go out doorstepping. ;)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes, now I understand. I am a tool. A very useful one. ;-) And you are entirely correct; there are no middle class people in the government. All rich and well-connected.

Doorstepping is a lovely word which we (over on this side of the Pond) ought to use. I believe our phrase is "Going door-to-door". My father did some doorstepping in his campaign for Town Supervisor, lo these 30-odd years ago. And they were odd.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Tools are necessary.

Governments come and go, but the civil service is forever. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I think I could be a nail gun. Of the patriarchy, naturally. And you have established my new motto. I shall needlepoint it into a suitable bit of canvas, stuff it and make a charming little throw pillow (channeling my grandmother and one of her sisters, who used to do these things), and then keep it in my office.

And then, when someone irritates me, I can throw it at them. :-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Glad to have been of service. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

...and civil, too.

Is this how it begins? The slow slide into darkness Civil Servitude? Only time will tell....(cue evil music).

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I dare not even hazard a guess. :)