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| Re: Iraq is probably the best argument against the idea that guns+civilians=free by Zseni 04/26/2007, 8:04pm PDT | ||||
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Jerry Whorebach wrote: I had to think about this for a couple days since RoL was, as usual, vigorously trashing every delicate strand of sense that I was teasing forth from the Shelob's web of current gun control arguments. Now I have to clean up his mess and restate my case. It's a difficult subject to make sense of precisely because the mindsets of either side are different - in ways that are almost irreconcilable. For example, the way you brought up heroin as a superior death method to the self-inflicted gunshot wound: of course death by boundless pleasure is a great way to die, but it's not a great way to kill yourself, because it leaves the question of whether you meant it or whether you just fucked up your dosage. It also leaves the question of what you were committing to when you died! But that issue alone is an artifact of a mindset which is essentially moralist, even Puritan, and these are characteristics which you probably have not. The gun/suicide question is particularly American anyway. So when I talk about how important the IDEA of rule of law is, or the IDEA of responsibility of self-defense, again I'm talking from this Puritan and moralist mindset, and it looks crazy to anyone who isn't also Puritan and moralist. But you've been making civilized arguments about social stability, so let's talk less about my crazy ideas and more about social stability. Or rather, let's talk about my crazy ideas being, in fact, your crazy ideas about social stability in starched collars. We begin and end with law and order, or specifically, using law to create order. You brought up Iraq, but dude, Iraqis weren't gunning each other down nearly so often before we got there. Almost all of the new guns in Iraq are ones we brought to the party, so that means there were plenty there before our shit even arrived. In the case of Iraq, the rise in gun-related fatalities stems from one and only one cause: using law to create order. At its heart OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM is a legal war, begun on a basis in international law, and with the goal of creating a legal change: the transformation of a semi-democratic dictatorship to fully democratic republic. That we are using force to enact this change just makes us more like cops than usual. But law isn't the best way to create order. Oooooooops! Just like having lots of cops around doesn't necessarily make you safe: just ask all the dead dissidents of pre-Iraqi-Freedom Iraq. Laws and cops don't magically make orderly and stable societies. Neither do guns, of course. Here are some things which magically make orderly and stable societies: 1. A high degree of ethnic uniformity within the society 2. A high degree of ideological uniformity within the society Whenever you can't have those, you need to come up with some ways to make what you have look more like that groovy stability stuff. Saddam, like Mao and Stalin, did it by announcing new national orders: you are not Sunnis and Shias and Turks and Kurds anymore, you are Arabs - moreover you are Iraqis, the ancient enemies of Persia. This worked really good until Saddam started going nuts, playing favorites, and, in his favoritism, favoring Sunnis and gassing Kurds too often. Don't let the Mao and Stalin thing throw you: in general, declaring a new national order is an excellent way to bring disparate groups together. In a more subtle version, the citizenship tests, we use it in America as well, and confer upon our adoptees the status of "American citizen." You will note that with Saddam, as with Mao and Stalin, cops and laws became more and more necessary as the polish wore off the new national identity deal. Eventually the cops have to start policing people who question the national identity and their status as part of it - that's part of it, but more importantly cops and laws tend to proliferate to fill vacuums of power in political spheres. These vacuums were opened by the wiping of old identities and the creation of new ones. With each wipe, ways of life are made unavailable: churches in the Stalinist USSR, ancestor worship in Mao's China, things like that. Sometimes it was no great loss, sure. But power was bound up in these traditions and identities and ways of life which were destroyed: etiquette, social governance, communication, mediation of disputes, the dispensing of justice and charity to those who need either. When government must fill those roles for a society, they have to use: cops and laws, courts and mandates, protocols, bureaucracies. This tendency is magnified a thousand times over when a central government must fill these roles for local communities. So now we, the US, have marched into Iraq and trodden heavily upon what local government was left, and we have, you know, beheaded the central government. There's a lot of shit that is not settled, and there is nothing left to settle it with but laws and cops. This is an unsatisfactory solution to a problem of freedom. Now we come to the matter of guns: America is not, and never will be, a country of ethnic or ideological uniformity in any degree. We consider 53% to be a landslide majority here. We have to install special political systems to magnify majorities or create ones where there would be indecision. This is a great country and there is nothing wrong with running it in this fashion; it's useful for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that people from any walk of life and any corner of the globe can be successful here and not get killed. We are just now starting to learn the extent of what cops and laws can do for us, and we are disappointed and alarmed with their results: nobody is happy about how big prisons are now and how much they cost; whole segments of society are getting buried alive in these prisons, and when they come out, they have no way to catch back up. (In Hawaii, the parole system had been radically reformed, California will be following suit if The Schwartz gets his way.) The guns are necessary not to protect us from armed SWAT teams or idle rich people or even criminals but because they represent and preserve that which underlies our particular American stability: the rule of law, which even our own government must obey; self-reliance and personal responsibility; equal opportunity. Don't giggle, I'm being serious here. "Rule of law" is an easy one to explain: guns - they're right there in the Constitution, so even though it is fucking stupid and even though people get killed and even though THE WHOLE WORLD would be happier and safer if Americans didn't have guns, we still get to have guns, because that's the law. If laws could be nullified when they encouraged unsafe behavior, there would be no reason for our government not to declare other inconvenient things "unsafe" - kind of like abortion, or the whole habeas corpus thing. But our government has to obey the law. This cuts down on the number of unnecessary laws, too. Personal responsibility, along with its aged spinster sister, civic duty, underpin American stability like gangbusters: in America, you're supposed to take care of yourself. People in this country do not owe you a living. And that's why we can absorb hundreds of Hmong in the same year we absorb hundreds of Thais, and why Serbs and Croats baste themselves on our sunny shores in equal numbers: they know they aren't paying for the other guy's fun. Guns and credit are the supreme American symbols of this personal responsibility - of course you can use either one to trash your whole life, but the idea is that you can, and should, take command of your own personal and financial security. In fact, we can extend both to foreigners precisely because our national trust lies in that people will want to take care of their own business, that they have a vested interest in doing so. Equal opportunity is the thing which makes personal responsibility a workable concept: the Hmongs get guns and credit, and so do the Thais, and neither guy gets a leg up on the other one. They get the same voting rights, the same access to government, the same courts. The playing field is supposed to be even. You, personally, through your hard work, make your way in this country. The government does not play favorites. And so people are encouraged to play nice with others, and, if not respect, than at least ignore the eccentricities and foreign-ness of others. So everyone has to be able to get at the guns, not just the guys with money, not just the guys with friends in the FBI, and not just the white guys. These are the means by which we balance plurality against plurality. These are the elements which constantly maintain the tension between localizing and centralizing power and responsibility in our layers of government. You could try to make it work by taking the guns out of the picture, but it's not like you're going to take them away from the cops or the military, right? There will exist Americans with guns: the cops, and the criminals. Such a situation works against the peculiar pillars which uphold us; it encourages more cops, and more laws, to fill yet another vacuum of power - this one infinitely local. We can barely make speed limit reductions stick, and people with nothing to lose but their own lives still refuse to wear helmets and seatbelts. Alcohol is legal and so are cigarettes. We are permitted all kinds of unsafe behavior not only because it is Constitutional, but also because banning these behaviors would create more trouble than relief. To take on the case of VTech directly: the cops and laws we already had weren't enough to stop a single shooter at Virginia Tech! But also, one wingnut and thirty-two victims does not actually constitute social instability in a prosperous nation of two hundred and sixty million inhabitants. Guess how many Iraqis we've legally killed. |
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