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Apr. 20th, 2007 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbSome 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?
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?
