"Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" — A Couple Tentative Answers to a Rhetorical Question

The 1A show on NPR on May Day 2018 was on "Big Guns," a title of a book by former U.S. Representative in Congress Steve Israel, with the subtitle for the 1A broadcast, "Fighting Firearms With Funny." There was a significant rhetorical question raised, one I'd like to answer. The question was something like, "Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" 

One answer to the question is, criminals sloppy enough to have to figure on getting into shoot-outs with police or pathological enough to really desire a shoot-out with police.

More significant, though, are those for whom the Second Amendment primarily protects "The Right of Revolution" and (mis)understand revolution as mostly partisan warfare against the military forces of the State. And who are the front line of those forces of the State? The police, who sometimes where protective gear that will resist passage of ordinary bullets. 

This reading of "The Right of Revolution" also explains why one would want not just military-style weapons but military-grade weapons, 'cause that's what the military and paramilitary forces of the State have. The position usually involves paranoid fantasies of vast conspiracies by ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) or more fashionable embodiments of The World-Wide Conspiracy — and/or anticipations of race war — but after granting the assumptions, there is a logic to it. It's just not a logic you'll like if, say, you're a police officer or have police in the parts of the family you like or depend on the police for protection or dislike cops but not enough to want to kill them or want to improve the current American Republic and not overthrow it or have ideas about revolutions that are based more in history than in video games.

In the US, we tend to talk too much about "senseless violence"; here and elsewhere, we need to analyze  the ways in which most acts of violence do make sense — but are unjustified and evil.

DOWN WITH THE NRA (BUT DEFEND THE AGE OF MAJORITY)

News story passed along on Twitter: 

"The NRA [National Rifle Association ...]

just sued Florida based on the astounding 

argument that 18 year olds have a constitutional

right to buy assault rifles."

On this issue, I'm kind of with the NRA, which is something that hasn't happened much since I quit high school ROTC and the rifle team (in the 1950s) and since the NRA was taken over by fanatics.

I'll get in the argument this far, with my standard comment on young adults but with a bit of a twist: As is frequent, a wide-spread problem in the US about which we must DO SOMETHING!! is shifted to the schools and to young people. Mass shootings are only a small proportion of US gun deaths; most mass shootings do not occur in schools; the great majority of shooters in mass shootings are White males between the ages of 20 and 49, not teens. 

Humans mature into our social roles at different speeds and in complex ways, some people living long lives but never making it to adulthood. "The age of majority," therefore — when one gets pretty much the full rights and responsibilities of adulthood — is always somewhat arbitrary. That is *not*, however, a good argument for adulthood by degrees, but for setting a minimally ambiguous age of majority, enforcing it, and, in a manner appropriate in a secular republic, ritualizing it with some brief ceremony/"rite of passage." 

Old enough to be conscripted to take up weapons in defense of the country, old enough to vote. Old enough to function as a sovereign citizen electing officials and voting on referendums, old enough to buy legal psychotropic drugs such as ethyl alcohol (street names: booze, "drink" ...). Old enough to buy booze, old enough to keep and bear legal firearms: which I'd have bolt or pump-action, single-shot, small caliber long-guns unless one has a really good reason for something more deadly — plus a background check, training, and a license that needs periodic renewal after testing at least as rigorous as for initial drivers' licenses.

Donald Trump, "Second Amendment People," English Syntax, Revolution

I promise I will return to my usual, "Back to Basics"/Background — nonTrump — little essays shortly. But:

"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a rally that if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton 'gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people maybe there is, I don’t know.'" — MEDIA MATTERS, 9 August 2016 

 

      The most coherent argument for 2nd Amendment protection for light infantry weapons in the hands of US civilians is that the 2nd Amendment protects not only the right of the States to have powerful militias that could stand up to a Federal Army but protects the Right of (armed) Revolution that underpins all the other rights. This is also a standard argument among "2nd Amendment people" Given that Trump's broken syntax and other games with language require our interpreting his remarks, what he said for a lot of "2nd Amendment people" would indeed suggest that the response to a President Clinton appointing dangerous judges would be or could include insurrection: use those weapons to protect the right to hold those weapons, plus other American rights.  

      Thomas Jefferson, who knew a thing or two about insurrection, wrote that "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

      You can argue that not even George III and, more to the point, his Parliament evinced "a design to reduce" Britain's American colonies "under absolute Despotism." For sure, when you're talking about a Democratic President nominating liberal justices and judges, you're not talking "absolute Despotism" or any other justification for a second American Revolution. You, or more specifically Donald Trump, are talking dangerous nonsense that would be sedition (or a threat of assassination) if the man were capable and/or willing to put his thoughts into straight-forward English.

Quick Comment on "The Right to Bear Arms"

Arms don't have to be guns. For a long time most cops even in very tough parts of London and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland got by with clubs, and the American weapon of home defense for most of my life was a baseball bat in the bedroom. (When my richer friends were talking about home security systems, I said, truthfully, that I'd upgraded mine by trading in my old wooden bat for a Little-League size aluminum bat.) 

We'll get sensible gun control laws in the USA when there's (1) open-carry in the US Congress; (2) someone yells "Gun!" and (3) a fair number of representatives are taken out by "friendly fire"; the survivors just might pass some decent legislation. 

The racial, ethnic, and class issues behind our laws on "bearing arms" become a whole lot clearer when you consider the laws on guns vs. knives. 

Guns, Abortion, the Second Amendment ... Logic

            The argument on gun control is like the one on abortion: going 'round and 'round because the two major sets of arguments proceed from very different premises or even worldviews. In the case of abortion, the major disagreement is on the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings, which is about as major a disagreement as I can think of offhand. If a human being is essentially (literally in essence) a creature with a soul, and if ensoulment occurs at conception, then .... Etc. Which is quite different from my idea of a zygote, a fertilized human egg, which I don't see as a human person, and you-all probably don't either.

            Similarly, if you want gun control, youse folk who read Leftish blogs such as this will talk about decreasing gun deaths. But most places in the USA most of those gun deaths are suicides or gang related and can seem a reasonable price to pay for people who believe the 2nd Amendment protects all our rights by giving substance to the Right of Revolution, and if you believe effective revolution requires a citizenry not just armed but armed heavily enough to hold off the forces of the State until the military sides with the revolution and the revolution is won (more exactly, the opening round is won, but that gets into complicated history and political analysis).

            I go with Hannah Arendt in On Violence (1970) and elsewhere on how violence undercuts revolutionary power, but I'd concede that a fair number of bolt-action rifles in the hands of citizens probably would help underpin a right to revolution but add that handguns are officers' weapons to keep the grunts in line and that the AK-47 and similar weapons would be for some sort of right of coup or guerrilla warfare and not classical revolution as such. As a kid I put money in cans to plant trees in Israel, and maybe buy arms to drive the British (and as it turns out, Palestinians) from Palestine; as a young adult at neighborhood pubs, I gave money to help the widows and orphans in Ireland, with maybe a few quid going to our boys in the Irish Republican Army to buy weapons to drive the Brits out of the occupied counties. And money for humanitarian aid freed funds to buy weapons by the NLF, ANC, FLN, PLO, and other groups alphabetical, revolutionary, and willing to use violence.

            Most people who'll read this far think those who think President Barack Obama a tyrant are simply crazy: dissociated from reality. Those who think Obama a tyrant (or a potential one) obviously think otherwise and go from perception to premise to the conclusion that they need high-power weapons to hold off the forces of the tyrant, who will insulate his regime from revolution by seizing their weapons.

            So: the arguments on the necessity for assault rifles and such for personal self-defense and home defense are often just bullshit if you look at the statistics, but that's irrelevant: the serious arguments here are on armed insurrection, and for the most part that's not what people want to talk about, and may be an area (like parts of the abortion debate) where clarity would be more honest and less frustrating but really, really dangerous.

Reprise: "Freedom isn't free" — Gun Deaths (19 Sept. 2013)

            For forty years of my life I taught just about every year at least two classes in Rhetoric and Composition. To a great extent, I taught argument, and with that sort of background even sampling most current debates in US politics can be very frustrating, rarely more frustrating than the fights over guns.


            The biggest group for gun deaths in the USA is my people: old fart White guys killing ourselves. If you want a direct and effective way to reduce gun deaths in America, make it easier for old folks to off ourselves in ways more elegant than blowing out our brains. Providing alternatives to getting intimate with a Smith & Wesson .38 Special could also provide compassionate and objective counseling along with cyanide (or whatever) and help limit suicide to cases where it's a rational (secular) choice.

            There are also gun deaths through sheer accidents and carelessness, and gun deaths where it's just as well that the person shot dead was shot dead (e.g., someone shooting children who can only be stopped with a bullet, or a number of bullets); but for analysis let's throw together for the moment (figuratively) all the bodies and say that widespread gun ownership results in 30,000 avoidable deaths in America each year.

            Even in such a biased context, gun advocates could still argue that "Freedom isn't free" and that the right to keep and bear arms is the ultimate guarantor of all the other rights Americans possess. Humankind may have been endowed at the Creation, individual humans may be endowed at birth, with "certain unalienable rights," but those rights are made real against tyranny by the ultimate Right of Revolution; and the Right of Revolution is made a real threat to potential tyrants by an armed citizenry.

            And in a country the size of the USA, thirty thousand deaths a year would be a steep price to pay for freedom, but, obviously, affordable.

            Now Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reformulated "Freedom isn't free" for themselves and for my generation and sang "Find the cost of freedom," and one can take that injunction more literally than Neil Young and Stephen Stills intended — and come up with one's own calculations and dicker over freedom's sensible price. One should do that calculating, but the immediate counter-argument to a pro-gun argument in terms of the Bill of Rights must first be about rights.

            So on the subject of rights and making rights real and not just theoretical — on the subject of rights, the claimed right of gun owners to all the armaments they might want has contributed to a culture with a whole lot of guns and ammo and armor and an arms race among the somewhat overlapping groups of cops, criminals, "civilians," and (to a lesser extent) the National Guard and Federal forces who'd take on as necessary the task of putting down insurrections. All of these citizens — and noncitizens among us benefiting from the Second Amendment in arming themselves — all of these folk have ramped up their fire-power, and we now have police militarized beyond anything I grew up with in the violent big city of Chicago, and kids subjected to privacy invasions rare when I was growing up and a young adult in the youth-fearing eras of the 1950s and 1960s.

            As a practical matter, the over-insistence on Second Amendment rights has led to a diminution of other rights as citizens have come to be viewed by cops as those "civilians" and treated as potential threats. So we get "Stop and Frisk" laws and metal detectors and locker searches in schools and increases of State power epitomized by SWAT teams with automatic weapons.

            The Right of Revolution and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are indeed rights, but they must be recognized as rights in the real world in competition with other rights, starting with such things as ordinary citizens' arrested for crimes having the right to expect to be asked to "Come along quietly" and not routinely handcuffed. I do blame the cops for not being as courageous and courteous as they ought to be, but it makes perverse sense to treat just about everyone as potentially armed and dangerous when just about everyone a cop arrests is potentially armed and dangerous.

            Etc.

            "[T]he right of the people" as individuals "to keep and bear arms" is an important right — but if the subject is rights, there needs to be balance, and it can and should be argued the right to buy a 30-cartridge magazine if one takes a mind to is trumped by the right of kids not to go to schools increasingly managed like prisons, complete with "lock downs."

            That necessity for balancing of rights having been established, we can get down to facts, details, and dickering. For one thing, there are historical issues to be resolved over just what sort of citizen armaments are useful for resisting tyranny — hint: the State always starts out with overwhelming fire power; the turning point in revolutions is when ordinary soldiers refuse to fire on the people and join them. Perhaps "The People, united, / Will never be defeated"; but even with assault rifles they won't be taking out a tank platoon.

            After arguing out the history, we can dicker over hunting weapons and what is reasonable for home defense (where I've lived, home defense meant a serious knife or two and a baseball bat).

            Or we could dicker if the politics allowed it. But they don't, so for now about the best we can do is improve the statistics by getting old folks to kill ourselves without firearms — and we unarmed or lightly-armed Americans can embark on a long-term project of making our over-armed fellow Americans a little less fearful. Long term, we need to give all Americans a little more confidence in the "collective security" of government and a whole lot less confidence in the effectiveness of self-help justice.


            It also would help to go back to the idea that guns are "equalizers"; the conviction that real men, and real women, can get by with words or, when things get violent, fists or knives or a baseball bat. Conflict is inevitable and violence may be; but you don't have drive-by knifings or a dozen people killed in a few minutes by a guy with a ball bat.

A Tentative Demur on a Last Bastion of Still-Acceptable Stereotyping (1 March 2014 / 20 March 2015)

In March of 2015, "migrating" my blogs from OpenSalon, now closed, I had the choice not to repost this one, which is a defense (or sorts) of fraternity men: a group most recently disgraced by some drunken Sigma Alpha Epsilon louts of Oklahoma U and the racist persuasion. Still ... I'm going to repost this since I'm convinced the fraternity issue is often a subset of youth-bashing, which is often a subset of scapegoating. In the background here is the idea that by our late teens most of us are pretty much who we are going to be for the rest of our lives, and if late teens and young adults are fairly often horrible, this is because they are a normal more-or-less adult population, but with special circumstances. And, to apply an old idea, specific "besetting sins." More specifically, the young tend toward the gross and bodily sins, while their elders get more sophisticated and intellectual in evil. The "besetting sin" of youth is Lust; the more deadly besetting sin of age is Greed. Etc. If the SAE's of OK U were obnoxious in their racist singing — and indeed they were — they were less dangerous in their evil than genteel racists who would never, ever say "nigger," not even in private, but who prevent African-Americans from getting loans or having a chance for contracts or, sometimes voting. So I will damn to humiliation the punks of the Oklahoma SAE, but would remind people to look to quieter but far more dangerous, respectable older folk of the Lost Cause Old Confederacy and new model Southern Strategies.

===================================

   

            A friend sent me a copy of an op-ed piece from The New York Times of 27 February 2014, wherein Greg Hampikian, identified as "a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University," raises the question, increasingly pressing given recent increases in the right to keep and bear and openly carry arms — sometimes including on college campuses — "When May I Shoot a Student?"

            This is a fine article, but I find myself troubled by one phrase even Professor Hampikian seems to find problematic. 

"Knee-jerk reactions from law enforcement officials and university presidents are best set aside. Ignore, for example, the lame argument that some drunken frat boys will fire their weapons in violation of best practices. This view is based on stereotypical depictions of drunken frat boys, a group whose dignity no one seems willing to defend."

             As a fraternity alumnus myself, I will not defend any obnoxious drunks but must deplore the use of the stereotyping and juvenalizing phrase "drunken frat boys." If one insists on denigration — and we writers of wise-ass punditry often so insist — I tentatively recommend the more exact, neutral, and gender-and-living-unit-inclusive formulation "obstreperous frat rats, inebriated sorority chicks, and indies."

            Partly here, I follow the example of an apartment mate I had in graduate school who wouldn’t go to a restaurant on Sunday evenings because the dormitories and independent houses on campus usually didn't serve Sunday dinner, so, "The dormies are out! The dormies are out!" He despised undergraduates of all varieties, but found those from the dorms most annoying. He was not a fraternity alum himself but a student of sociology and undoubtedly developed his views only after diligent research.

            As one might know if one has studied Elizabethan usage — and sure as hell knows if one is a Black man — "boy" is a traditional insult, but nowadays not as much as it should be.

            Given the generally suckiness of adult life for many Americans (if not 99%, still a fair number), and given how pleasant "campus life" can be if one takes care to avoid the "College is for Grownups" shit of class work, it is understandable than many young Americans use college as what one of my students called, "The Four-Year Vacation" and another called, more relevantly here, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood."

            So arrested development among young Americans is understandable, but it is not to be encouraged. And following from that principle, professors, parents, politicians, and pundits — and administrators and other nonalliterating classifications — should risk the occasional appearance of delusion and talk of "college men" and "college women," "sorority women" and "fraternity men" and, "students in the residence halls and independent houses."

            Pressing further, I would note that abuse of alcohol and other drugs is hardly limited to young people; it is just that youths tend to be loudest and most irritating about it, and certainly more apt than their elders to piss on your lawn or puke on your shoes. These problems, however, are often more a product of inexperience and some cultural/legal perversities than of youth, and America's young would do better if older members of their extended families would bloody well teach the little punks how to hold their liquor like civilized folk.

            CAUTION, however: serving liquor to even one's kids is illegal in many jurisdictions. The American rule is "Old enough to drive, be drafted, vote, and bring guns to class, but much too young to learn, even at home, how to use, not abuse, booze."

            But I digress; the topic here is language usage, about which I have some authority (we spoke English at my home). The topic here is usage and trying to talk inclusively rather than stereotyping. So avoid both overgeneralization and targeting an often-privileged minority group, but still a minority group. The problem isn't limited to "drunken frat boys," and my final advice is that one take care to slur more carefully, generally, and decorously: "obnoxious drunken assholes." 

About that Second Amendment ... (30 Oct. 2014)

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What TV news I watch is from an elliptical trainer, and I work hard to avoid commercials — every time you listen to a commercial the hucksters win — so I skip channels a bit and set the TV to mute fairly often and listen to an audio book. So I'm often confused about who said what on which program, but I got the clear message that my fellow Libs Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Chris Hayes, and/or Rachel Maddow got fairly shocked by the idea of a Republican candidate for office addressing gun enthusiasts and bringing up potential use of firearms to defend oneself against — i.e., shoot at with intent to wound, kill, or maim — various folk in the Federal government.

Uh, yeah. That goes with a reading of the Second Amendment that I heard from the 1960s on. The logic is straighforward. The Second Amendment is second only to the First — free speech and all that — in that the Right to Bear Arms ensures the other rights against the threat of a tyrannical government.

After all, Tom Jefferson and the guys held as self-evident axiomatic "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Under the Bill of Rights that we eventually got from the Revolution (or Counter-revolution, if that's your theory), citizens of the Republic could exercise our rights and peaceably assemble and shoot our mouths off "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." But let's say there's no redress: not this time, not for a long time. Let's say the newfangled Federal government, or "any Form of Government" starts destroying rights rather than protect them? Well then it is our right, nay, our duty to try "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as  [...] shall seem" to us "most likely to effect [... our] Safety and Happiness" and renewal of The Tree of Liberty.

Governments, however, don't like to be altered or abolished, and they fight back, with guns. (Mr. Jefferson was clear as to just what would water/manure the figurative Tree of Liberty.)

Now as a practical matter, the real revolutionary parts of revolutions are often pretty bloodless in the initial takeover. The fighting back comes after a bit, and what decides it isn't usually the weapons the peasants and revolutionary pros have but, instead, which way the troops finally decide to point their weapons. When the soldiers refuse to fire on the crowd and shoot instead their officers — or when military leaders join the rebels — that's when the revolution wins, at least for a while (until it gets betrayed ... and eventually the cycle starts all over again).

Still, at least in the initial stage of the revolution and maybe in the following guerilla warfare, it helps to have a well-armed populace to secure The Right of Revolution.

Which "Right," unfortunately, usually means some hotheads or fanatics gunning down cops or a standoff like Ruby Ridge and the siege at Waco leading to a skirmish and death. Or Shay's Rebellion. Or leading up to something as major as the US Civil War.

Which leads to the side of the Second Amendment coming from the other side of Tom Jefferson's life and that of a goodly number of the Founders and Framers: The need for well-armed White folk to put down any "servile insurrection" (or Indian attacks), or, later, just "uppity n*ggers." "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms," except for brief periods, meant the right of White folks to keep firearms, while you can — or more likely I can — get arrested for "open carry" of a knife.

(The joke is that a Liberal is the guy who brings a knife to a gun fight; in terms of "home defense," I live the joke.)

Anyway, Jon or Stephen or Chris and/or Rachel shouldn't be surprised at gun fans indicating a willingness to shoot agents of the Federal government: Federal Marshals, FBI, ATF — whatever. That's part of the theory. It's also close to rebellion, insurrection, or treason, and the Federal government can be expected to shoot back. Maybe not Sherman's march to the sea this time, or even a drone strike, but far heavier shit than dreamt of by people who hold such theories.

And if they keep talking that way and arming themselves quite so assiduously, then we can expect even more militarization of our police forces and the irony of the Second Amendment working not to preserve the Republic but to put it in danger.