A Few Thoughts on Gun Control.

I know what I write is a waste of time.  It won’t change any minds, it won’t persuade those who demand legislation to ban guns or “assault-like” weapons, it won’t convince those who plead for change because some young school children, or Asians, or grocery shoppers were killed by a mad-man with a gun, nor will it change the minds of those who believe any change in gun control violates their personal freedom. But I write to appease me.

First, guns are tools.  They may be good tools or bad tools based on your personal view or immediate need, but there is an old adage that goes something like “It is a poor workman who blames his tools for his failure.”  If we substitute the word “society” for "workman" I think we come up with an accurate view of guns.  It is a poor society that blames guns for society's failure (i.e. to create an agreed-to level of safety).

Nothing brings this home for me as much as a FaceBook posting from the United States Air Force Special Tactics organization.  In Air Force Special Operations and Special Tactics, we have Doctors, Nurses and Medics trained to deal with the battlefield trauma our Airman, the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and the allied partners they support will experience in combat. 

How exactly do we train our medical personnel to be proficient in the life-threatening injuries they may find as our combat troops protect the nation and execute its foreign policy?  We send them to work in inner-city hospitals in large cities like New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles.  There they find far more combat-type trauma than we can simulate in training and they, unfortunately, experience the frightening reality of gunshot wounds and other “combat” related injuries while they help their civilian counterparts care for the neediest.

Are all these injuries a result of some single madman and a mass shooting?  No, they are the reality of an on-going war the news can’t be bothered covering and it involves people who’ve lost their moral basis for decision-making and a society that has cast them aside as just so much flotsam and jetsam.  

When we as a society have reached a point where we argue the technical details of a rifle, rather than the sanity of a gunman and how best to treat him or her, while ignoring the reality of life in the inner-cities, we have all surrendered our belief in the actual basis of our society. A belief that each of us must be responsible for ourselves, our family, and our society.  Why is this?

Is it because so many of us reject the idea of God as a higher power, and now believe ourselves god-like?  Perhaps it is because we’ve destroyed the foundation of family for the poorest among us and the young men and women grow up with the role models of the entertainment industry where outlandish style and behavior sell the next ticket? Maybe it is just a generalized sense of “it’s somebody else’s job” that leads to this, but if it is whose job is it to unite society with a purpose to protect the individual and his/her rights?  Clearly, our politicians don’t think it is their role, beyond the promises they make what can the new laws and the spending on entitlements really do to change the shape of society?

George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  The one truth a study of the past teaches is civilizations come and go, falling most often to the foolishness of mankind.  The question then becomes how much longer will this modern civilization continue until it to is replaced by some dark age where all the glories of the past are buried in some tomb waiting for the reawakening of minds open to the possibilities of the future rather than the condemnation of the past?

Another Uninformed Opinion

Uninformed opinions seem to be the order of the day as we deal with more lethal violence in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH.  So here is one more.

I am reminded of a line from the movie Casablanca where Claude Raines, playing Police Captain Louis Renault, tells his deputy “Round up the usual suspects.”  It doesn’t take a genius to know that will be the same thing now.  We will have those who demand we prohibit guns and those who demand we not.  Fundamentally, I tend to come down on the side of those who would not prohibit guns. 

It’s not so much that I believe we need them to stop the government from imposing some autocratic and dictatorial regime for if that happens it will be too late and more than half of us will have voted them into office.  Nor do I believe the second amendment was etched in stone and carried down from Mount Rushmore by George Washington.  Rather, I am unconvinced it is possible to prohibit firearms and even if we did, it would not change the dynamics that are, in my opinion, the true sources of this violence.

What I hear from those who demand we eliminate guns is the angry rhetoric, opinions voiced by those who live protected lives, and little discussion of the social dynamics that cause mostly young angry men to kill others.  What I don’t hear is how a prohibition of guns would be different than the last prohibition we tried. 

You remember that one, don’t you?  Started by the progressive temperance movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the passage of the 18^th Amendment in 1919 issued in the age of illegal alcohol.  Its beginnings held the loftiest of ideals.  It would end poverty, child abuse, domestic violence and a whole card deck full of things caused by the evils of alcohol.  What it actually accomplished was the creation of vast networks of organized crime and civil disobedience that led consumers to disregard the laws. It was so unsuccessful it led the Democratic party to make its repeal a plank in the party's platform for the 1932 elections.  Within two years of FDR's election, the 21^st Amendment was ratified. Officially ending the short-lived social experiment.  Unfortunately, the unintended consequences or by-products of prohibition still remain with us.

What would those who wish to end this violence really be willing to do?  Since those in the social sciences seem unwilling to consider the total dynamics of a changing society, and those who vote on whatever changes we need to make, communicate in little more than 15-second sound bites it seems increasingly unlikely our federal government will ever develop an effective strategy that a majority of the population can support.  It is almost as if we are playing chess with the human lives and each side is down to having only a king and a queen.  We are in a state of perpetual check but will never achieve a checkmate.  Smart players would call it a draw and start a new game, but that's not for us.

When Will We As a Society End the Madness?

In the face of another mind-numbing school shooting I am watching the usual suspects say the usual things, but one question from someone who advocates for taking guns away caught my attention.  “When will we, as a society, end the madness and protect our children?”  That is a fair question, the only problem with it is the idea that society can end the problem as if there is some magic solution.  If we do X then everything will be okay.  That is the fatal flaw in the left’s approach, they think if they destroy the NRA and remove all the guns from society things will be better.

We have spent the last 60-years creating this society.  It has been formed through the social evolution of both the right and the left where we move to the extreme and each social group demands their supremacy and vilifies those who don’t support them.  We’ve funded an entertainment industry that makes billions of dollars off the violent nature of man while creating an economic elite who feel it is their right to tell the average person how life should be lived.  We’ve encouraged that same entertainment industry to vilify family and family values, suggesting on almost every medium the parents are stupid and if it wasn’t for the kid's everything would unravel, or that one race is superior to another.

At the same time, I see social postings from my generation who talk about how they were disciplined as children and today’s children have it too easy.  But where is their acknowledgment of their choice not to disciple their children, or condemn the social evolution that took place in front of their own eyes?

We want the madness to end but believe it’s someone else’s fault it exists and it is someone else’s job to fix it.  Whose job is it?  Surely not the government’s?  It can’t even implement a simple thing like a reasonable immigration standard or agree on a budget before the government shuts down.  How about the teachers?  Don’t we now want them to teach morality to a generation of children, whose parents have spent a lifetime questioning the morality of their parents?  They are the ones who’ve allowed the bullying to take place while advocating for social justice for the misunderstood.  Clearly, they can fix the problem since, according to some, they’ve created it. If we just throw them some more money the problem will go away?

Maybe we can turn to the entertainment industry who are more than happy to weigh in on the evil of guns while guarded by armed security.  They will have an answer while pushing the latest gun-filled mega-epic.

How about all the millennials who fill the social media space with thought-provoking and insightful posts like “your [sic] a whore.”  I am certain they have the solution, unfortunately, it would require our abandonment of the Constitution.

Here is an idea I’ve not heard discussed much by the experts in the media.  Maybe we should think about the role of a family in society and how important the parents are to creating a good person and start with that as a way to change the narrative.

Silly me, that would never work.  How can you get a click-bait headline out of “Child successfully integrates into society thanks to good parents.”