The Second Amendment

It’s trite, but I believe in our right to arm bears. Claws and teeth are insufficient in a modern age. Laughs aside, I would want a Taurus 454 “Raging Bull” in my hand if I were being pursued by an enraged Grizzly. The goal would be stopping power because I can’t run at all and nobody can run faster than an enraged grizzly. Everybody that has been pursued by an enraged grizzly raise your hand. OK, we have now identified the tiny percentage of people Charles Darwin spoke about. In the 21^st century if you are doing something that irritates grizzly bears the gene pool might be better off without your contribution. I concede, though, that a tiny percent of the tiny percent of you that would find yourself in that situation may have a legitimate purpose to be in a situation that a grizzly would find unwelcome. You should probably be packing.

I understand the passion of the NRA to see the second amendment as a grail just short of life itself. What I don’t understand is why the NRA stops at the “assault rifle”. As anybody who has ever gone hunting knows, you can’t beat the M4A1 when you are surprised by a whole herd of deer that need to reach the pinnacle of their mortal purpose, having their heads mounted on a wall (in this day and age I don’t want to offend vegans with the idea that meat might be good for you or that they may be legitimate reasons to eat Bambi). Of course I know that you will never see a herd of dear with 5-point racks. Bucks insist on being the only “man” in the herd.

But what about the times only an FN SCAR CQC with its mounted FN40L-GL is enough? The grenade launcher is a part of this gun, so doesn’t the NRA insist on the right to buy these? Most of this rifle is, well, rifle. And you still can’t beat a FIM-92 for those times when some criminally minded airliner may have chosen your house as its destination. At 33 and a half pounds it looks just like a big rifle. Then there’s the StunRay whose manufacturers say “… will blind you into submission” with a light flash 10 times more intense than an aircraft landing light (all from a 75 watt bulb!) that overwhelms your visual cortex causing complete paralysis of the body at a distance that a Taser just envies. There’s also the “hard sound rifle” which has given me a healthier respect for my headphones. I can’t confirm it as real, but has a loyal following with HALO players. And all of these are just considered “small bore weapons” by NATO. Everybody knows that no group is complete without the venerable, reliable M2. Any Humvee (American Motors last gasp?) worth riding in has its M2HB or its baby sister the M240G. Yes the SAW is just a small bore gun, but when you need to shoot somebody 740 times in a minute (just under 13 times per second) it’s hard to beat [note: most gunners don’t exceed 100 rpm for prolonged use or the barrel becomes a little soft]. Of course, the Marines now want something with a little more accuracy.

Why doesn’t the “right to bear arms” extend to the Howitzer? Some of the best performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture have included the M198. And then there’s the world of smooth bore cannon. The Army realized early on that a 105mm round couldn’t do what a 120mm could from an Abrams tank. After all, it’s a  Chrysler. The original minivan is a Chrysler. Why can’t I have a 120mm RheinMetall on my Voyager? Anyone who has ever baked a pie knows how much more mass each millimeter gives you (for reference an 8” cake pan (assuming 1.5” inches high) gives you six cups while a 9” (same height) gives you 8 cups). Step up to a 10” and you’ve got almost 13 cups. Now instead of cake batter toss some high explosive and depleted uranium in there and watch the walls tumble down).

The point of this silliness is the same with all my friends in the NRA, and I have many friends carrying NRA cards. Except for the perspective terrorists, everybody will agree that the “right to bear arms” ends somewhere. In 1805 the standard musket in capable hands had a one in three chance of hitting a man-size target at 100 yards. This is the reason that you lined up as many musketeers as you could in a line. If you had 60 firing effectively you might bring down 20 of the enemy. The state of the art Baker Rifle, a flintlock, doubled that to 200 yards and Rifleman Thomas Plunkett is thought to have shot a French general at as much as 600 yards. With the improvement came a compromise. A skilled musketeer could get off 4 rounds in a minute while the time required to load and fire a Baker with its bullet in oiled leather (or more commonly linen) reduced the rate of fire to two rounds per minute.

Facts would indicate that for most Americans, the limit for the right to bear arms is in the neighborhood of what are characterized as “assault rifles”. I say this because it took most Americans agreeing with this idea for their representatives to ban them in 1994 (but only if that ban had a shelf life of 10 years). That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider the “Brady” camp has a budget of about $7 million/year while the NRA admits to between $100 and $300 million. They also seem to be able raise another $200 million with a toaster (I am not kidding). The problem is that whenever the characteristics of an assault rifle are defined someone can make some minor alteration (which can usually be unmade in seconds) to disqualify it.

I sincerely believe that if you took General Washington or President Jefferson and gave him an AK-47, the most prolific, most reputable, most reliable, most destructive bang for the buck they would say, “We had no idea people would want weapons of mass destruction in their closet. We were thinking muskets. You know a one in three chance at 100 yards maybe four times a minute.” FYI – An AK-47 on burst can fire 400 rounds per minute (600 rounds cycling rate). Yes, that is 100 times as many shots as the Founding Fathers had ever imagined. It is considered “inaccurate” by today’s standards because the stamped models only produce a 4” to 6” reliable target at 300 yards. Marksmen set its effective rate at up to 800 yards.

My point is that almost everyone recognizes that there is a limit, some limit somewhere defined as “the right to bear arms”. This is the crux of the argument about “constitutionality”. Once we admit that there is a limit to our right to the weapon, we have accepted that it is constitutional to set limitations on the right to bear arms without “infringing” on that right. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of “infringe” is “to transgress or exceed the limits of” indicating that limits must first be established for infringement to incur.

There are estimated to be more than 300 million guns in circulation in the United States. A law making it a criminal offense to possess a gun would be about as enforceable as Prohibition. At the same time, a law restricting the sale of firearms would lend itself to reducing the availability of guns to criminals. The existence of guns could not accomplished completely, maybe not even effectively for years, decades or even centuries. The question is not “how much good would regulating firearms accomplish” but simply if regulating firearms would result in a benefit to the majority of citizens.

We frequently compare ourselves to Canada. We eat the same food, drive the same cars, speak mostly the same language and share a lot of our heritage. Canada has its share of deaths by GSW. Most of these are suicides. In the US 45% of gunshot deaths are homicide while only 32% are suicides. In terms of lives taken there is an obvious and proportionate correlation with the availability of firearms. There is also a correlation in the reduction of GSW with the increased control of firearms since 1991 in Canada, a 65% reduction. Obviously the number and percentage of lives destroyed by guns is much higher in the US.

A more appealing way to look at this might be the cost of gun violence. Who would not be willing to pay a little less tax? In 1991 GSW cost Canadians $6.6 billion. A similar study in 1992 showed the cost to Americans as $126 billion. I would be willing to promote a provision that gun ownership continue to be regulated as it is presently as long as all the costs related to GSW is paid by gun owners.

For those of you who reacted to the shooting of five and six year olds by creating more wealth for the makers and sellers of guns all I can hope is that you are not my next door neighbor. How sad it would be to live next to somebody who would rather shoot me than share a loaf of bread. . I assure you that you won’t have to hold a gun to my head to get half of my last loaf. How I would hate to survive in a world where the only reason I’m alive is because I shot you and my neighbors.

The gun lobby will tap into the lowest form of human manipulation to sell assault weapons. I don’t know a single gun control advocate who would find relevance or redemption in [NSFW] something like this, but it was one of the highest hits on “second amendment rights”. I think even the men of the world like General Washington and President Jefferson would be disgusted that their prayerful hours work is associated today with such an image. I hope I don’t know anyone who would pay $21.99 to own it.

Hiroshima

For the last several weeks I have been reading book after book about the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't know why I do this. I become frustrated, depressed and distraught when I read the details about the horrors of war, but since my earliest memories I have not been able to turn away from pictures and words of war while at the same time fearing such a horrible waste of humanity.

Some of the books concentrated strictly on the science, the physics of what happens when a small fraction of nuclear material is brought to critical mass. Some discussed the human and social tragedy that were direct results of the bombs, but did so dispassionately; strictly an empirical representation of death, disease and trauma. Many authors stated clearly in their introduction that their introduction that they were not going to address the morality or immorality of the bombs or try to assign blame. One, however, asserted that the whole question of blame is useless moving the argument from the citizens of opposed countries to the economic and social practices of those countries that brought people to put on uniforms and attempt to kill those who dressed differently. Eventually it all seemed to devolve to the point where one individual was trying to kill another because they would try to kill him.

I've mentioned before that I don't believe in the concept of innocent civilian bystanders. We choose to honor and support our executive and nation or we oppose it. If we pay our taxes and accept conscription we enable war. Weapons are rarely built by soldiers, they are built by citizens and every citizen from the school teacher who taught that employee math to the grocer who sold them breakfast is involved. The rations are grown by farmers and the money to pay for it all financed by bankers. Every one participates in the process, partly because of allegiance and patriotism and partly because of the need to pay for the necessities of life.

Some of the books were written specifically to address the morality of waging war with atomic weapons. This begs the question, "Is there a moral way to wage war?" This is where our irrationality stands up screaming. How is dying from a metal fragment through the chest more moral than dying from every cell of the body vaporizing? How can it be more noble to take a life with a rifle or a bayonet than it is with a Predator and a Hellfire missile? What we call "collateral damage" is killing the people who feed the soldiers, make their weapons, bring them information and generally enable war. How is killing as many people as you can in smaller batches preferable to killing them in one huge cataclysm?

To assert that there is a "immoral" way to wage war relies on the premise that there is a "moral" way to do it. War is about greed. Greed is always the primary cause. Someone wants something someone else has, which in the end all boils down to agency. Someone wants to impose their will on someone else in a way that will give them what they want. Any action, any method used is moral to protect and defend the exercise of agency. If we accept that "...all men are created equal..." this is the place where equality exists: We are all endowed by the Creator with the right to make our own decisions and choose for ourselves what we do with our resources.

There is no way to morally take away the agency of another. Efforts to explain it in terms of territory, money and resources are the details we use to obfuscate the motivation of the instigator to impose their will.