Thomas R. Wells: The Political Philosohpy of Guns

[Winehole23]

Best diagnosis I've seen in awhile. As with most political divides, the two sides mostly talk past each other, but the left has abandoned political philosophy for the utilitarianism of public health statistics -- not a winning formula, and politically much the worse than their opponents.

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First a diagnosis. Both sides of the gun control debate know they are right. But only one side recognises it as a fundamentally philosophical dispute. The other has systematically evaded the real debate about values in favour of the faux objectivity of a statistical public health argument [See Hunt for a discussion of what the gun control debate is actually about]. Second some positive advice. The advocates of gun control need to take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and show that a society without guns is a better society not that it is a safer one.

I

I’m going to have to be blunt. Gun control advocates rely excessively on a public health case that is not only much weaker than they believe it to be but also crowds out the kind of arguments that might actually win over their opponents. Their confidence that they are on the right side of history has blinded them to the fact that they have chosen to fight on the wrong ground. They keep harping on about guns killing people. As if guns were like cigarettes, and as if the numbers were big enough to matter.

http://www.thecritique.com/articles/...sophy-of-guns/

[Winehole23]

Even the overarching assumption that weak gun control laws cause murders is underwhelming. The rollback of gun control laws by judges and Republican legislators began in the 1980s, but the murder rate in America has actually fallen by half since then, back to what it was in 1950 [CDC] [6]. The reason is that rates of violence have a lot more to do with social conditions and inequality than with particular technologies. Most of America is nearly as safe as Western Europe, but some areas of concentrated hopelessness in particular cities like Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore have the murder rates of Central America. The real causes of such violence are ones that America, among rich countries, is particularly bad at addressing. That is a failure of politics but not of gun control.

[Winehole23]

striking comparison with terrorism

Specifically, I believe that the underlying concern of gun control advocates is not objective statistical risk to our lives, but a feeling of vulnerability as citizens. Gun rights make many Americans feel afraid of what other citizens might do and that subjective feeling matters in a way that mere statistics cannot. Americans worry about arguments over parking spaces turning into gunfights and about racist fools shooting their son for wearing a threatening hoodie. And they worry about maniacs with military style weapons turning up at their children’s school, or their church, or their subway car.


In this light, mass killings matter not because they present a significant public health risk to our lifespans to be analysed like car accidents or cigarettes, but because they are deliberate attacks on our society to be analysed like terrorism. Mass killers are nearly always loners lacking the political organisation and agenda of regular terrorists, but they nevertheless engage in symbolic violence against civic ins utions, such as schools, that is particularly terrifying exactly because it is so impersonal: the victims of their violence are merely interchangeable extras in the screenplay they are trying to produce. Mass killings are not interpersonal squabbles but deliberate attacks on the peace itself, and this is something citizens have the right to hold their government responsible for.

[Winehole23]

the philosophical fork:

It is a truism of political philosophy that a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the legitimacy of any state is its ability to provide its citizens with freedom from fear. But there are different routes to this. Some believe that they can only overcome this feeling of vulnerability with the right to carry a gun of their own (hence the e in gun sales after every mass shooting). Others want the freedom to live as civilians rather than in a state of militaristic hypervigilance always ready and alert to respond to deadly attack. There are thus two views of government and citizenship in play. In one political philosophy, government is there to help good citizens defend their rights and liberties for themselves. In the other, government is expected to guarantee security directly by removing the sources of fear.

There is a reason most gun control advocates are on what passes for the left in American politics, and why they are often mocked as ‘European’. This is fundamentally a dispute about how citizens should relate to the state, and especially a dispute between the state as a guarantor of security (after the timid absolutism of Hobbes) or as a guarantor of liberty (after the rebellious Locke).

[Winehole23]

clientelism on both sides: terrorism caused the right to abandon it's heroic vision of citizenship on 9/11

The gun rights movement seems to me to reflect a heroic vision of citizenship, and hence of society, that taps into an enduring strain of rugged individualism in America’s political psychology. Most Western polities are characterised by an overwhelming emotional and ins utional dependence on a beneficent, all seeing, all powerful government. This plays a significant role in American politics too – just look at how Americans from all points on the political spectrum responded to 9/11 by demanding the federal government do whatever it took to make them feel safe again. However, America also has a long Lockean tradition which emphasises the enduring independence of the individuals who make up a political society, including their right to revolution if the state fails to fulfil its responsibilities

[Winehole23]

on how gun culture weakens society and makes us more dependent on top-down government solutions:

This is because, besides fostering political assertiveness in defence of classical liberal views of the state, extensive gun ownership also undermines the very society it is supposed to defend against tyrannical government. Gun rights introduce a new fear and distance between fellow citizens, whether they choose to arm themselves or not. As the philosopher Firmin DeBrabander argues, an armed society is a polite society not because everyone in it recognises that others deserve respect, but only because everyone is afraid to say or do anything that might be considered threatening:

“Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite”. (Firmin DeBrabander) [8]

Here is where the feeling of vulnerability to guns comes into political significance. Guns were supposed to protect society from threats, including from its own government. But instead they undermine its health from within, weakening civil society and leaving us unable to relate to each other except via the legalistic forms controlled by the state or else down the barrel of mutual su ion, as in a spaghetti Western. The great irony of gun rights is that they actually make citizens more dependent on the state and less able to resist it because we lose the sense of solidarity that civilian society so readily supports.

[Winehole23]

I share the intuition of many Americans that there is something very wrong with a society in which peace is supposed to be achieved by each individual’s fear of every other’s capability for deadly force. I understand their appal at the gun rights pundits lining up on mainstream media after every atrocity to sombrely declare that the only solution to bad guys with guns is for good guys with guns to step up and volunteer to guard schools. This is not the kind of society I would want to live in either.

But the problems with this society are not the actuarial risks it imposes on individuals, nor even the defiant ‘take it or leave it’ at ude towards government associated with the second amendment. Rather it is the relations between citizens that suffer most in an armed society. This is a harm that at least a large proportion of believers in gun rights could be persuaded to take seriously, since it undermines the very integrity and resilience of society, and thus its independence of government, that is central to their political philosophy.

[TheSanityAnnex]

Interesting read.

[TeyshaBlue]

“Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite”. (Firmin DeBrabander) [8]"
This, and the following paragraph is a superb insight that I agree with completely.

[boutons_deux]

Anybody want to try to translate the article into practice of solving America's gun violence problem?

or do y'all buy his point that relatively few people are injured, killed by gun violence, so don't prioritize gun violence as a public health problem?

[Winehole23]

you obviously didn't read the article. his point was to meet proponents of a strong gun culture on the ground where they are strongest -- political philosophy -- and beat them there, instead of pretending statistical public health appeals will win the day.

They won't. On their own turf, they're weaker than you think.

If you read the article, you'd have to grapple with that.

[boutons_deux]

you obviously didn't read the article. his point was to meet proponents of a strong gun culture on the ground where they are strongest -- political philosophy -- and beat them there, instead of pretending statistical public health appeals will win the day.

They won't. On their own turf, they're weaker than you think.

If you read the article, you'd have to grapple with that.

Talking "political philosophy" with unread rednecks, bubbas, kickers, Real Men, gun fellators, racists ("I gotta a gun to kill knitters"), people programmed from childhood by the example with mommy and daddy shooting, hunting ( aka "sportsmen" who love animals and nature )

Intellectual discussion with these assholes won't accomplish anything because their gun fellatin is emotional, tribal, not intellectual. Their "knowledge" and "political philosophy" starts and stops with their self-serving adoration of their "righteous" perversion of the 2nd Amendment.

They're the kind of American anti-intellectuals who despise anybody well-read, educated, using big words, or any vocab beyond 4th grade.

so ...

"Anybody want to try to translate the article into practice of solving America's gun violence problem?"

... There is no path to solving America's gun violence problem since that would require laws and regulations, all impossible, still-born, blocked because of corrupt BigGun's $$$ owning the corrupt -ish legislators, regulators.

[TheSanityAnnex]

Talking "political philosophy" with unread rednecks, bubbas, kickers, Real Men, gun fellators, racists ("I gotta a gun to kill knitters"), people programmed from childhood by the example with mommy and daddy shooting, hunting ( aka "sportsmen" who love animals and nature )

Intellectual discussion with these assholes won't accomplish anything because their gun fellatin is emotional, tribal, not intellectual. Their "knowledge" and "political philosophy" starts and stops with their self-serving adoration of their "righteous" perversion of the 2nd Amendment.

They're the kind of American anti-intellectuals who despise anybody well-read, educated, using big words, or any vocab beyond 4th grade.

so ...

"Anybody want to try to translate the article into practice of solving America's gun violence problem?"

... There is no path to solving America's gun violence problem since that would require laws and regulations, all impossible, still-born, blocked because of corrupt BigGun's $$$ owning the corrupt -ish legislators, regulators.

Gun control is not merely a phony solution to inner-city youth violence. It is a formidable political obstacle to genuine solutions, because gun control offers political officials a high-profile (but empty) way to tell the public that the legislature is "doing something." Every gun control bill that is introduced, and every editorial demanding that we "do something about guns," makes it that much harder to force the political system to do something real about the desperate conditions of the inner city, to address the fundamental social pathologies of modern America.
Criminologist Gary Kleck summarizes:

Fixating on guns seems to be, for many people, a fetish which allows them to ignore the more intransigent causes of American violence, including its dying cities, inequality, deteriorating family structure, and the all-pervasive economic and social consequences of a history of slavery and racism. . . . All parties to the crime debate would do well to give more concentrated attention to more difficult, but far more relevant, issues like how to generate more good-paying jobs for the underclass, an issue which is at the heart of the violence problem.

[HI-FI]

Very interesting article, thanks for posting.

[boutons_deux]

Gun control is not merely a phony solution to inner-city youth violence. It is a formidable political obstacle to genuine solutions, because gun control offers political officials a high-profile (but empty) way to tell the public that the legislature is "doing something." Every gun control bill that is introduced, and every editorial demanding that we "do something about guns," makes it that much harder to force the political system to do something real about the desperate conditions of the inner city, to address the fundamental social pathologies of modern America.
Criminologist Gary Kleck summarizes:

Fixating on guns seems to be, for many people, a fetish which allows them to ignore the more intransigent causes of American violence, including its dying cities, inequality, deteriorating family structure, and the all-pervasive economic and social consequences of a history of slavery and racism. . . . All parties to the crime debate would do well to give more concentrated attention to more difficult, but far more relevant, issues like how to generate more good-paying jobs for the underclass, an issue which is at the heart of the violence problem.

yep, guns don't kill people, other stuff does. So Don't Nobody Touch My ing Guns.

[TheSanityAnnex]

yep, guns don't kill people, other stuff does. So Don't Nobody Touch My ing Guns.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to crime if resources/time/effort were devoted to fixing inner cities?

[boutons_deux]

Have you ever wondered what would happen to crime if resources/time/effort were devoted to fixing inner cities?

Yep, like Fed minimum wage at $20+/hour, free child care, etc.

White supremacist/Randian Repugs have and will block all such programs, as well as defunding public schools with majority black and brown.

[russellgoat]

A PC society is a polite society not because everyone in it recognises that others deserve respect, but only because everyone is afraid to say or do anything that might be considered threatening.

[Winehole23]

"Anybody want to try to translate the article into practice of solving America's gun violence problem?"

I find it unremittingly odd that you demand solutions to social ills from bulletin boards and newspaper articles. That's not what bulletin board and newspapers are for. Expecting solutions from discussion boards and journalists is like expecting rain from a photograph of the sky.

[boutons_deux]

I find it unremittingly odd that you demand solutions to social ills from bulletin boards and newspaper articles. That's not what bulletin board and newspapers are for. Expecting solutions from discussion boards and journalists is like expecting rain from a photograph of the sky.

the problems are well known, debated to death, but you find it "odd" the solutions are not to be discussed?