Steve A. Stone
Originally written on June 16, 2017
Dear Friends and Patriots,
The title of this article is the main question, though it sort of lacks context doesn’t it? Since it’s today, just a couple of days removed from the shooting of Congress-man Scalise, let’s focus on guns.
I like guns. I like the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the mechanics of guns. I like the feel of a good gun in my hand. I like the looks of them. I like the thrill I get when I pop off a round. It never fails to make my heart jump just a little bit. It’s an even greater thrill when I hit what I aim at. It’s a power thing, maybe. It may be related to the notion that you can have a physical effect on something that’s too remote to reach out and touch with your hand. Some might say it’s a “guy thing.” I don’t know about that, though. Most women I know who shoot guns seem to have the same thoughts about them. You can call me a gun lover. Go ahead! I can take it.
I’ve long contemplated arguments by anti-gun people. Many of them believe guns kill people, but I’m convinced guns do so with extraordinary rarity. You know the old test of leaving a loaded gun on a table and waiting to see when it’ll decide to do something on its own. Yes, I’ve never once heard of a single occasion where a gun used its own free will to kill a human. How much proof does one need that guns have no free will at all? Evidently, a lot. We still see headlines and hear anti-gun people screaming about someone being killed by a gun. It’s as insane as that spate of headlines a few years back that shouted out every time an SUV was involved in an automobile fatality. There’s a lot about that kind of thinking that just isn’t logical or rational. It’s all emotion. Some of that emotion is genuine, but a lot is mere political fakery. We all know that.
The truth is – guns are tools. They’re instruments in the hands of some, almost like a coronet or a clarinet to a good musician. Yet, when the conversation is guns all too often the obvious utility and occasional artistic creativity of gun use is ignored and the misuse and evil intent of the criminal gun wielder is mischaracterized or ignored. The anti-gun media and lobbyists always talk in terms of guns that kill, not the people who wield them. It’s a tiresome argument. I’d much rather focus on the role of guns in providing food for tables and the skill of some shooters to consistently put bullets into very small, preselected spaces. That’s utility and artistic creativity.
It’s always true that criminals use guns to rob and kill. If they didn’t have guns they’d rob and kill with knives as their weapons. If they didn’t have guns and knives, they’d use baseball bats or tire irons. Bad people are infinitely creative in the selection of weapons to exercise their need to take from others. In prehistoric days those kinds of people would occasionally resort to bashing the brains out of their victims with rocks. It would seem true that bad people will always find a weapon of some kind to aid them in their quests for that which is not theirs or to exert power over their adversaries. Today, many use guns. It’s a fact, but that doesn’t make the gun unlike a knife, baseball bat, tire iron, or even a rock in that regard. All weapons are tools. Many other tools are potential weapons. The focus should always be on the user, not the tool.
Those who think they’re smart on this subject, but hate guns, use specific terms to describe what they hate. They understand they might not win the complete argument if they try to take it on all at once. Instead they tend to fragment their arguments to appear as if they’re only bothered by one teeny, tiny aspect of guns. You hear them speak of “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazines.” Sometimes they go a bit overboard in their zeal and find themselves uttering nonsensical criticisms of “ … those insidious clips.” They promote legislation to make it illegal to put more than 7 rounds in a magazine or to carry more than one loaded magazine on your person at any one time. One sometimes wonders if those adversaries of guns are insane, but of course they aren’t. They know perfectly well there’s no functional difference between an “assault weapon” and a hunting rifle. Both make those loud “bang-bang” noises and both send bullets off in a near-linear fashion toward whatever the barrel is pointed at. Most of the difference is truly cosmetic, not functional. But, how can you influence the unknowing with that truth?
All the arguments the anti-gun people use are pretty dumb, when you get down to it. All but one. People do die after being shot. But, people also die after being stabbed, clubbed, and struck in the head with hard objects. People die from drug overdoses, car accidents, tobacco and chemically-induced cancers, and a host of other things, too. Why is it the anti-gun crowd is so intent on eliminating guns from our society? Why, indeed?
The Second Amendment was written in part to ensure all citizens maintain both the Natural Right of and material capacity for adequate self-defense. It’s true the language of the Second Amendment mentions a well-regulated militia, but that was then and this is now. While we don’t necessarily need a well-regulated militia, the principle of maintaining your Natural Right of and capacity for self-defense hasn’t changed, nor has the best method to exercise that right. Since the writing of the Constitution there has been no superior method of self-defense developed that can supplant a firearm. As of this moment, a good gun in the hands of a trained shooter is still the best and cheapest form of self-defense there is.
There is an argument made that with the general omnipresence of law enforcement there’s no need for a private citizen to fret about self-protection – just pick up your cell phone and press ‘911.’ But as with many arguments of this kind, there’s a critical flaw. If you’re home alone and someone is intent on harming you, how much time do you think you have to wait for the police? Seconds? Possibly as much as a minute? How fast do the police respond in your area? Twenty minutes (my own case)? Ten minutes? Five? Regardless of how fast they try to respond the police would have to be in your front yard right behind any invader to be of any use to you. In the vast majority of incidents of home invasion or other personal attack on private property the intended victim has seconds to take any assertive action. The time to get the phone and press ‘911’ is after that assertive action, not before. Delays in acting sometimes prove fatal. So, yes, there is still a valid need for a good self-defense weapon. Every home should have guns. Understand this point – police rarely can prevent crimes; they mostly respond to them.
Anti-gun people like to quote statistics. They’ll tell you how many people get killed or injured by gunshots every year. They can tell you how many children die from gunshots. What they can’t, or won’t tell you is the overall statistics of gun ownership vs gun incidents. They won’t tell you how many victims of gunshot wounds are victims of related criminal activity as a percentage of the overall population of the nation or the population of guns in the country. They won’t tell you the statistics regarding accidental and criminal deaths that involve NRA members. They won’t tell you that the US is one of the safest nations on Earth if you take just four major metropolitan areas out of the consideration. If you don’t live in Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, or Detroit your chances of getting shot by a gun are about equal to that of a citizen of France or Germany. If you exclude some other high crime large cities like East St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami, Cleveland, Dallas and a few others, you’re in as much danger as someone living in Norway or even Iceland.
In the vast majority of the towns and cities of the nation gun violence is a rare and disturbing occurrence, not the nightly expectation of citizens in the worst of our nation’s inner cities. And there are other facts that tell us something. The cities with the worst crime have two things in common. They are the cities with the most restrictive gun possession ordinances, and are also cities traditionally run by Democratic Party regimes. It’s all just facts, folks. The discussion of guns can’t be rational if one side refuses to acknowledge all the facts instead of just the few they keep ponying up.
Anti-gun people do have some valid points, and they’re getting listened to by lots of responsible gun owners. No one wants to see children die, and the efforts to keep guns away from the eager hands of little kids are worthwhile, as is the legal focus on parents whose children are killed and injured because those parents didn’t do the right things to ensure such things can’t happen. More and more people are using gun safes and ensuring their weapons are in a “safe” mode when stored. People are now using smart technologies to ensure their loaded, response-ready guns can’t be accessed by anyone but themselves. Those are measures that make sense and don’t intrude on anyone’s Second Amendment rights. We should continue to consider any measure that promises to make gun ownership safer, while still affording adequate protection.
There is also a good argument made regarding who should not have free access to firearms. It’s easy to make that argument when discussing a person who has limited mental capacity or has a history of violent behavior. It’s fairly easy to make that argument regarding those who are legally considered to be mentally defective or who are addicted to or prescribed behavior-altering drugs. But, it’s not so clear when it comes to others who are part of the consideration. If a person is schizophrenic but is stabilized by their medication and is otherwise almost 100% functional, should we consider barring them from owning a firearm for life? Similarly, if a person has a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, but is stabilized by medication, is it reasonable to think they are a present or future danger to themselves or others and bar them from gun ownership? Is it reasonable to think an 88 year old veteran who still has his wits about him should have his gun taken away merely because of his advanced age?
We need to hew very closely to the intent of the Constitution on these matters. No citizen should ever be denied a Constitutional right, including the right to keep and bear arms, unless they have gone before a judge of appropriate jurisdiction on the question and legally had their right considered. There should never be such a thing as an administrative denial of a Constitutional right. No citizen should ever have any personal property, let along guns, confiscated by anyone for any reason unless a judge issues a written order to that effect. Anything less should be illegal. But, today it isn’t. Today we see and hear of many instances of gun confiscation, based on the slimmest pretexts. This should concern us all.
Instead of wandering all over the planet on this subject I return to the original question, one asked just this week, “How many more have to die?” The truthful answer is, “Who knows?” The truthful answer is, “As long as there are crazy people in the world, or people who are motivated by an ideology that approves of violence.” The answer is, “As long as we continue to allow it.” We can never predict who will become a killer or when. What we can do is fight any ideology that approves of violence as a means to meet their objectives. We don’t have to allow it and we have to fight against such things each and every day.
Just as a tip to you all, any philosophy or ideology that incorporates a phrase such as “. . . by any means necessary” has already declared its intent. Adherents to such belief systems have members who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. The shooter this week, a head-case named James T. Hodgkinson, was an adherent to just such an ideology. The people shot this week were far from the first to be attacked in the furtherance of that ideology. Millions have died in decades before, many are dying today, and if that ideology isn’t stamped out, millions more may die in the future. It’s the terrible flaw of communism / socialism / progressivism that’s the problem in this particular instance. That ideology carries with it an intent to control the world “. . . by any means necessary.” And, what can stop them? It’s the individual ownership of guns and the patriotic will to use them when necessary.
I need say no more on this subject today. Thanks for paying attention.
In Liberty,
Steve
16 June 2017
With all that’s going on in the world there’s a logical question we should all ask ourselves. The title of this piece is that question: how many more have to die? Perhaps it’s better to ask it a different way: When is violence okay, and when is it not? Seems simple enough doesn’t it? It’s not, though. If it was we might see a lot less violence in the world. Even so, it’s always a subject worth taking a run at. Maybe if more people took the time to understand the ethics of violence they’d think a bit before acting. Then again, we’re talking about humans, aren’t we?
The subject of violence takes one down many roads. Domestic violence is within families and those close to them. Is there anything about such violence that’s defensible? It happens, but in most cultures it’s a very hard sell to justify any domestic violence as ethical. It’s almost always fueled by emotion and adrenalin, and often there are drugs or alcohol as contributing factors. No one wants it and no one likes it, but it’s all too common. It’s not hard to understand the ethical dilemmas that are at play. All humans have their failings and weaknesses, and sometimes a confluence of events and emotions result in such violence. It’s not being judgmental to state with no reservations that domestic violence of any form is ethically wrong. It just is.
When I was a kid my father taught me that fighting was something not to be taken lightly. We were discussing schoolyard fights at the time. He told me that it’s always wrong to provoke a fight, but if someone else wants to be “that kid” it often turns out to be a mistake not to accommodate them. His advice was simple. “Just hit him in the nose a couple of times and he’ll quit bothering you.”
Back in those pre-PC days fights on the schoolyard weren’t unusual, and were almost the equivalent of a social event. Kids would hear of a fight brewing and often show up to see the action. It wasn’t unusual to have 40 or 50 kids as spectators for an after-school fight. We didn’t have a specific word for all that. No one worried about bullying. It was just something that was done. Some kids picked on others unless those others objected and fought back. You didn’t run home to cry to your parents. If you did they’d most likely tell you to suck it up and fight back. But, that was elementary school in the ‘50s, back when Matt Dillon was the new marshal of Dodge City and crying was for sissies. Things aren’t that way these days. But, the truth of my father’s dictum and advice is still firmly fixed in my psyche – never pick a fight, but don’t back down from one either.
Today we see fights all around us, but oddly enough they’re totally discouraged on schoolyards. Kids aren’t allowed to fight today. It’s not PC. If someone picks on a kid today, they can’t pop the aggressor in the nose for it. Doing so might get them arrested for assault. No, today’s kids are supposed to run to the school office and file the equivalent of a Hurt Feelings Report and label the other kid a bully. Maybe I’m just old fashioned (maybe?) but I think all this teaches kids their problems are for others to fix. It’s no wonder we live in an entitlement society. Kids today are supposed to be snowflakes. It’s not considered good parenting to teach your kids how to take up for themselves and fight their battles. Good parenting today involves all manner of considerations for the feelings of every human in the universe. Good parenting today is giving your kids cell phones with your number on speed dial. Good parenting today is instructing your kids to run immediately to the school office and demand they intercede in every petty grievance. School counselors have become union stewards, arbitrating tiffs between student bargaining unit members. When arbitration doesn’t work, the cops come and all too often someone goes away in the back of a police cruiser. All these new tactics do is teach some kids how to be litigious snivelers while criminalizing others. What kind of citizens do you suppose all this creates?
There is a time and place for violence. I’m not an advocate for encouraging children to fight. I do advocate they learn how and when to defend themselves. The real issues of violence aren’t with kids anyway. It’s still rare for kids to resort to weapons when they do battle. Even if kids fight they usually don’t hurt each other in a permanent way. No, the kids aren’t the ones who need to learn the philosophic basis for fighting; that’s an adult thing.
If you’re a believer in God, also known as “The Almighty,” you understand the concept of Natural Rights. One Natural Right is that of self-defense. That right was first codified into law during the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and has since been incorporated into most legal systems, including English Common Law and the US Code of Law. As individuals, each of us has a right to defend both our person and our property. In this connotation, property includes real and tangible goods and members of our families. The basic premise is, it’s permissible to use violence if necessary to defend yourself, your family members, and your property. The degree of violence that’s considered appropriate varies with the severity of the threat, up to and including measures that could result in the death of a person who violates your rights.
Almost all libertarians hew to the Non-Aggression Principle. The Non-Aggression Principle (or NAP) holds that any form of aggression against another person or their property is unethical. The NAP is often debated among libertarians, some of whom believe it is an absolute maxim. Those who do believe in the NAP as an absolute consider any and all acts of violence to be unethical, sometimes even self-defense. Most libertarians are not so extreme. Most believe aggression in defense of self or property to be entirely ethical and good common sense.
It’s apparent the use of violence in defense of self and property is not only legal and ethical, it’s socially accepted. As long as an individual doesn’t escalate a defense response to an “unnecessary” level, there’s generally no legal or social stigma attached to it. The problems tend to start whenever a response nears that boundary where “acceptable” begins to come into question. There’s a very fine line there; not a bold demarcation. Furthermore, each situation stands alone. Today, almost all incidents that involve violent self-defense result in law suits, and most often the truths of those incidents surface.
The same principles of self-defense apply at social echelons above the family, though they manifest in different ways. Towns and cities have the same Natural Right of self-defense as the individual. In most of the world’s history that right was exercised on a fairly frequent basis. History is replete with accounts of cities under siege by armies of warlords, or kings, or rebellious factions that wanted to either neutralize them as military threats or to plunder them for their material wealth. Whether or not the aggressors had any ethical right to lay siege to a city, the city under siege always had the right to defend itself. Those cases seem to be fairly clear-cut and understandable to even our modern thinking. We see none of that kind of aggression in the modern “civilized” world of today. It may happen occasionally in the third world but today we don’t have city-states or fortress cities, so most sieges of cities are encompassed within the context of a greater conflict.
War is the ultimate state of violence. Wars are fought for all kinds of reasons, and most of them aren’t truly valid or ethical. Wars are often fought because the parties in conflict can’t reach a mutually satisfying accommodation through any other means. In other words – all efforts at diplomacy have failed, and one side is aggrieved enough to resort to armed conflict. Sometimes wars are nothing more than exercises in power and domination. Wars are fought over access to raw materials, or water, or solely to acquire more land.
Regardless of the cause the main participants in wars, the combatants, are customarily granted ethical exemptions. It’s not the fault of the soldier or sailor that they find themselves at war, nor is it the fault of the general or admiral. The military organizations that do the hard and bloody work of war are mere tools of their governments and are bound to follow the dictates of their over-lords. Military people don’t like war, and they rarely seek to prolong one. But because they are, by and large, professionals at the arts of war, it’s what they signed on to do as long as there’s a political will to continue. While it may seem that warriors should share the ethical failings engendered by the prosecution of war, as long as those warriors conduct themselves within the bounds of otherwise ethical personal and professional behavior the principle ethical dilemma actually falls on the heads of their respective political structures. Combatants now have written rules to guide them, via the Geneva Convention and what is referred to as the Law of War. It’s fair to say that wars are started and often ended by politicians, but they rarely suffer at all from the physical effects.
The number of books written about some aspect of war is in the millions. It’s well-plowed ground. The ethical questions posed by war are encompassed in courses of advanced military education in many nations. Almost all senior officers in our military study the ethics of war. They have to. Those courses explain their personal absolution.
There are a couple of other forms of violence that should have no absolution. One is terrorism. There’s no legitimate ethical position that favors terrorism. Most victims of such violence are innocents who are targeted simply because they have the bad fortune of being present at the precise place and precise time of a terrorist strike. That’s the nature of terrorism and the entire point. There’s no real way to predict a terrorist strike, and no sure way to defend against one. They’re intended to disrupt normal activity and instill fear in the populace. In the purely tactical sense terroristic activity is very powerful. The invested cost is usually very low (even considering suicide attacks) but the yield can be very high. Even so, most civilized humans can find no legitimate ethical justification for terrorism, and it doesn’t matter whether the terrorism is domestic or extra-national. All attempts at justification are no more than shallow, bankrupt excuses for wanton murder.
Another form of violence that should have no absolution is the politically motivated riot. We’ve seen several of those recently, and many in times past. They’re usually fomented by pretext. Professional agitators show up at demonstrations of often legitimate grievances and stir up the crowd with inflammatory rhetoric. The rhetoric gets reported and the crowd will often swell with the addition of people whose motivations are quite different from the original demonstrators. What started out as a peaceful demonstration of a legitimate concern ends up with riot police, tear gas, arrests, fights, burning, looting, and sometimes worse. Political violence is usually done for the benefit of the ever-present cameras and panting press. They are dramas, pre-planned and carefully coordinated for maximum effect. They are akin to terrorism in the intent to shape the mindset of the observing populace. As such, what may have started as a legitimate demonstration of real emotion and focus turns into chaos, seemingly for the sake of chaos. But, because such events have a strongly political undercurrent, the chaos is with purpose. Again, they are done to create and shape mindsets. As such, they’re completely manipulative and disingenuous. The instant a peaceful demonstration transitions and the first act of violence is committed, all claims of ethical legitimacy dissolve.
There are a few occasions when violence is not only necessary, but completely ethical. Most occasions of violence aren’t, though. When we, as average American citizens, are confronted with violence, we need to understand the ethical implications of what we witness and act accordingly. Good people should take swift actions to end unethical violence, whether through political activism or through direct intercession. Left unchecked unethical violence has the potential to end cultures and even civilizations.
All problem statements should be accompanied by proposed solutions. Because there are so many kinds of violence to deal with there are a plethora of solutions. But, many of those can be narrowed down to basic philosophic approaches.
Jesus Christ taught his followers to turn the other cheek when confronted. The Buddha taught his own followers to answer violence with expressions of peace and serenity. Mohandas Gandhi preached the power of passive resistance to violence. Martin Luther King learned and practiced the teachings of all three of those wise men. Violence does not live long in a climate of peace. But, peace requires strength. For an individual faced with a violent confrontation such peace may not be a ready option. To a soldier under fire in enemy territory there’s little opportunity to engage in peaceful overtures. But, often on the streets of our cities there are missed opportunities.
The “high road” response to street violence is complete non-violence. It takes enormous discipline to stand fast in the face of screaming, spitting, and other physical intimidation. But, non-responsiveness is the only sure way to defeat the chaos. When the cameras are turned on to build the case of those who take to the streets, they will necessarily capture the images of those who stand in passive resistance. Those who resort to violent means lose all pretense of legitimacy when they impose their violence on the obviously non-violent.
If you are intent on attending a demonstration as part of a patriotic response, my recommendation is to ensure to appear completely innocuous and non-responsive to the attempts of those who would foment chaos to draw you in and make you a victim. The path to victory is obvious, but hard. Find the high road and seize it. Don’t let the purveyors of violence bring you off that road. Stand fast and show all who observe the right way for a society to progress is the way of peace.
Today I was confronted by someone who I know to be a fellow libertarian and patriot. He told me when he goes out this weekend he’ll be carrying his sidearm. After some back and forth dialog he finally agreed he needed to just stay home. He admitted to having long-standing anger issues and realized the truth that he doesn’t have the self-discipline to maintain a place on that high road of peace. That’s the kind of self-evaluation everyone has to make. If you can’t succeed in challenging chaos with calm, you need to stay home and watch on TV. And, you need to hope there’s a whole lot more folks who can meet that challenge. In the end, it’s about two things – numbers and good optics. We need both.
© Steve A. StoneThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
