Now, when there is a mass shooting incident, a new strategy has begun to appear; it’s a form of “what about-ism” – delaying having to do anything by throwing up a barrage of problems with every possibility that anyone offers.
Some of them are transparently dishonest, like the old NRA “if guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns” slogan. Others are more subtle; I can’t decide if they are just not thinking very carefully or if they are deliberately dishonest. I’ve taken to tactically re-posting my “From My Cold Dead Hands” proposal [stderr] in various places on FaceBook, and it almost always garners “but what about …?” responses.
As I write in the beginning of the piece,
I know this is never going to happen, because the forces arrayed against the citizens of the US are going to force them to endure this “freedom” whether they want it or not.
This is a matter of throwing ideas out to the internet – I don’t think anyone realistically expects to change minds or influence public policy, but perhaps we remove an objection or strengthen someone’s argument. We imagine we are making a difference, however tiny it may be, and that’s what makes it worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s just moving HTML around on pages that nobody but some search engine’s ever going to see.
But then there are the comments like the one I got last night. I could practically hear the disdainful puffing coming over the distant tubes:
“Interesting suggestion, except that criminals would still have guns.”
Is it worth calling attention to the whole piece where I argued that one of the biggest benefits from banning guns would be that our emergency response diagnoses suddenly gets a lot easier: “someone with a gun: bad” that’s a rule you can teach a kid, like “red means stop, green means go” and “don’t put your tongue in the light socket.”
I had to suck in a deep breath and reply, “at the bottom of the article, I answered your question. If you actually read the piece you could critique it better.”
Of course criminals would still have guns. That’s the bleedin’ point of criminalizing them, innit?
From Hot Fuzz; encountering an American-style gun collector
It also ignores some of the interesting demographics of gun ownership – apparently it’s rather lopsided. 3% of the population own over half the guns in the US.
Want to guess how gun ownership breaks along race lines? (If you can, picture it in Howard Zinn’s old Brooklyn accent: “southern. white. men.”) [pew research]
That means that there are some people who spend all of their available money on guns, apparently. (Hang onto that thought; we’ll come back to it.) There are people, like my old acquaintance D—- who once bought 3 pallet-loads of .50cal linked ammunition for his M-1 machine-gun. UPS had to send a larger truck because the little vans they use couldn’t support that kind of weight. By the way, he did get a visit from the FBI but they were asking him (seriously) if he was planning on selling it to drug cartels or something.
The problem is that people like D—-, who are almost certainly harmless, are an unintentional smoke-screen under which the less pleasant weapons-collectors can operate. They’re a big part of the problem, actually, because in order to protect their collecting they’re the ones who keep throwing out the endless “but what about…?” responses. I know because, to a certain degree, I’ve been guilty of that in the past, myself; “I’ve never shot anyone, not even when I was in the army, and I have no interest in shooting anyone now – why take away my entertaining death-spitters?”
Now let me get to the awkward point: the awkward point is that there appear to be a small percentage of people in the US who spend a tremendous amount of money on guns: $13 billion, give or take. [abc] If our hypothetical 3% bought half of those, they spent quite a lot of money. They also spent it in a way that, I believe I have argued successfully, offers them diminishing returns on already dubious benefits. [stderr] It begins to sound like the typical gun-owner might fall down the stairs and break their neck, because they are trying to carry a huge double-armload of weapons they cannot ever practically deploy.
But the awkward point remains that there appear to be some americans that will spend their kids’ college educations on guns; they will spend their heroin money on guns; they will spend the money they could have spent on getting a professional house-cleaner – on guns. They have the money; those AR-15s are expensive, and they get more expensive every time one of them is used to shoot up a school: sales surge briefly. Because the gun collectors are thinking “I’d better buy 2 more while I still can…” I remember when they made high-capacity magazines restricted in Maryland; they “grandfathered” in old ones, so if you already had a collection, you could keep it. Naturally, the price of high-capacity magazines quadrupled as everyone rushed to “grandfather” a few cases. D—- with the .50cal: he warehoused pallet-loads of high-capacity magazines and probably sits atop the pile, like some kind of weird dragon counting his hoard.
This is why our collective response to mass shootings must not be to require insurance, or classes, or tax them, or otherwise make them more expensive: the people that are the problem simply don’t care about the money. If we act to make guns more expensive or harder to get, the people that are the problem will simply spend more and continue to be part of the problem.
Here’s what’s going to happen: you are going to hear lots of calls for throwing black people under the bus. That seems to be white amerikkka’s response to a lot of things – of course it won’t be explicitly black people, it’ll be people who can’t afford jacked-up costly guns, who can’t or don’t want to take the time to get additional licensing, who can’t afford to have a “place of business” (i.e.: become a gun dealer as a way of enlarging their collection, like D—- did) white capitalist amerikkka has declared class war on the poor, and race war on people of color, and raising the cost of guns just plays right into their hands.
So, please, dear reader, when you encounter someone who starts saying “we should make people get proficiency tests and insurance before they can get a gun” point out to them that they are dutifully playing in suit in the class war; they are helping increase the power-differential money brings in this country.
When I talk to “sensible gun owners” (as many style themselves) I point out that their own ideology argues that they should be doing everything possible to arm the poor – to arm them against the police and immigration police so that they can defend their freedoms. They will need high capacity magazines when ICE kicks in their door. They will need gas masks when cops spray pepper gas. They will need body armor and flash bangs, and remote detonators and drones.
You will find that the gun owner is suddenly not as sure of their ideology. If that’s what happens, then their ideology is not what they say it is.
Here’s a closing thought: if we banned the guns, we mostly only inconvenience 3% of the population.
I consider myself a “current but former gun-owner.” I haven’t gotten rid of them yet but they are never going back out on the market. Embarrassingly I’m probably closer to that 3% than not – which is part of why this issue has come to bother me so profoundly. The last time I moved residences, I made an entire run with my GMC Suburban loaded with weapons. Granted, a lot of them were swords and things like that, but it oughtn’t require strategic genius to realize that you can’t use a wheelbarrow-load of guns in any kind of tactical situation that is ever going to arise (unless that situation is “holed up in the house while the FBI surrounds the place and shoots you to bits”).
The rich/poor divide is something I didn’t think enough about. For us foreigners, the arm issue in the US is so alien on so many levels… For some reason, this time, I am stuck imagining myself dropping my virtual kids at school, only to learn later on that some angry gunman killed them, for no other reason than he had a bad hair day.
It’s the sort of thing you would expect in a country deep into a civil war. For all I know, all the other countries with a mostly functioning government and active public schools don’t experience mass school shootings on a monthly basis. Even sh!tholes countries.
Careful here, mentioning ICE will just trigger the automatic answer “then they are illegal criminal aliens and have no rights in America”.
Now, if you were to mention the IRS or the FBI instead, a compare and comment session will be indeed interesting.
This is a matter of throwing ideas out to the internet – I don’t think anyone realistically expects to change minds or influence public policy, but perhaps we remove an objection or strengthen someone’s argument. We imagine we are making a difference, however tiny it may be, and that’s what makes it worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s just moving HTML around on pages that nobody but some search engine’s ever going to see.
Personally, I have little hopes for convincing somebody. People (myself included) are very reluctant to change their opinions. My reasons for debating with others are different:
1. It is fun (this is my main reason). I enjoy debating.
2. Learning what different opinions other people have (and their reasons for disagreeing with me) is useful for me. That helps me to better understand what’s going on in this world.
3. I get a chance to test my beliefs and arguments that support them. Arguing against other people who disagree with me forces me to think about how I can defend my position. It also forces me to think about the rebuttals that other people use against my arguments. If I have some opinion, I at least want to know why I have it and whether it’s tenable.
“I’ve never shot anyone, not even when I was in the army, and I have no interest in shooting anyone now – why take away my entertaining death-spitters?”
Yes, guns can be very entertaining. I certainly enjoyed the time I spent in a shooting range. Last time I went to a shooting range, I was on a date. Me: “Why don’t we go out somewhere, I was thinking we could go to a shooting range.” Him: “You are weird. Don’t you like movies?” The guy agreed to come with me though.
But I still think that this argument is simple to refute. I would argue that after guns are taken away, the enjoyment can still remain. Just go to a shooting range and have fun with rented guns. And it’s possible to argue that going to a shooting range is better than having guns at home. There it’s safe, they have all the necessary facilities and they have instructors who will make sure that you don’t accidentally do something stupid.
The last time I moved residences, I made an entire run with my GMC Suburban loaded with weapons.
I’m getting the impression that the average American gun owner owns more guns than the entire arsenal of a typical Latvian shooting range. Last time I went to a shooting range, I only used a Margolin pistol and a Winchester rifle. I think they had a couple more guns, but overall they had less than ten guns there.
D—- who once bought 3 pallet-loads of .50cal linked ammunition for his M-1 machine-gun.
In Latvia machine guns are banned even from shooting ranges. Here not only people aren’t allowed to own them, they aren’t even allowed to touch one (without joining the military that is). Here in shooting ranges only semi-automatic firearms are allowed.
An endless debate, because it’s emotionally based. When emotionally-based opinions are the stuff of debate, there will never be a resolution, because emotions have no validity in fact on their own. (They can be BASED on facts, but are not factual.)
FACT: Cars kill more people by accident than guns do on purpose; cars ARE regulated, to the degree that licensure and insurance are requisite, yet that does nothing to reduce the appalling numbers of deaths related to them. It would be reasonable to conclude, then, that more legislation, short of BANNING, would be of little effect. It would be logical to further conclude that the analogy of banning cars does not help with the concept of banning guns, because cars cannot be carried concealed.
It is a cultural problem, not a legalistic one; sadly, MANY of the concepts our Founding Fathers based the Constitution on have been subverted. The BODY of the Constitution includes the meaning as applied by the FF’s for “militia”, since that is a major point of contention about the 2nd Amendment. As defined, the “militia” would most closely resemble the military Reserves/National Guard components, since there is actually a prohibition against a standing army in the document. That the “militia” would be fed/housed/armed by the government, presumably during periods of necessary military activity, forces the question: “Does ‘keep and bear arms’ include private ownership?”
The 2nd Amendment is, to us today, clumsily worded; many would (I think correctly) interpret it as “BECAUSE a well-regulated militia IS necessary for the preservation of a free state…..”
I do not hold to this philosophy that the 2nd Amendment provides “the people” with the means and authority to overthrow an oppressive government; in fact, I would directly refute it as a fantasy. ONE state in the Union has an allowance for the overthrow of ITS government — New Hampshire’s people CAN dissolve and rebuild the state government, although there is no provision for violent insurrection (some would argue that it is implied by the question, “How ELSE would you do it?”).
I found a graphic a couple years ago that sums it up well. It reads:
“Guns don’t kill people, PEOPLE kill people.
“Well, NO SHIT — we want mandatory safety courses for PEOPLE, not guns. We want more thorough background checks for PEOPLE, not guns. We want stricter negligence penalties imposed on PEOPLE, not guns.
“If you’re stupid enough to think activists are pissed at guns, you’re too stupid to own one.”
Emotional? Yes. Also logical? YES. But sadly, another dead end.
Prohibition proved that you cannot legislate morality, and that is the question being addressed in the matter of gun regulation. You cannot legislate morality…or common sense…or intelligence…or a social conscience…or the core values of society. They must be changed CULTURALLY, and I am not sure that this can be done, especially when Asimov’s observation is demonstrably true: “The cult of anti-intellectualism holds that my ignorance is just as valid as your informed opinion.”
When we find a way to make people smarter and more socially concerned, we can make progress. But as things stand, without a period of draconian oppression — during which ALL guns are purged from the private sector, legal AND illegal — the status quo will not change.
LIFE must be made more valuable than the trappings OF it.
As a Briton, I have just one word for you:
Dunblane.
Mark Brewster @#2
The analogy is inappropriate. People need cars. We need transportation. We need transportation so badly in our daily lives that we accept traffic accidents as an unfortunate price, because the alternative (a world where cars are banned) would be even worse. It’s a whole different matter with guns, namely, we don’t need guns.
Why does it even matter what the constitution says? If the constitution is badly written, humans can rewrite it. (I live in a country where parts of the constitution have been rewritten several times during the last few decades.)
This is another inappropriate analogy. I live in Europe and gun ownership is banned here. People don’t own guns here and people don’t shoot each other here. Banning guns has worked pretty much everywhere in the civilized world (frankly, USA doesn’t seem like a civilized country in my eyes). Moreover, you can make alcohol in your basement or in your kitchen. It’s not like you can make a gun in your kitchen. If alcohol gets banned, people make some at home. Don’t tell me you believe that people will start making guns in their kitchens. Moreover, people really desire booze. They desire it so badly, that they are willing to go to great lengths in order to obtain it once it gets banned. It’s not like people desire guns so badly. Yes, Europeans are used to living without guns, so for us it feels natural and normal. Saying goodbye to their guns would be harder for Americans. But still, it could be done.
Fact: gun ownership is closely correlated with deaths by gun. On the balance, guns are not useful tools.
……….
Ieva Skrebele
Not in their kitchens but in their basements, their back sheds. Guns aren’t very difficult to make if you have the right tools, you only need a small space for compact lathes etc. Having the skill to accurately machine gun parts isn’t exceptional, no different to say, needlework or dancing or driving.
@Lofty
Come on, you cannot compare needlework and gun making. Firstly, the cost of tools. If you want to start doing needlework, you just need to buy some thread, fabric and needles. That costs a couple of dollars and you are good to go. It’s not like you can buy all the tools necessary for making a gun for a few dollars. Moreover, needlework or driving are common skills. I don’t know how it’s in other countries, but in Latvia every woman knows the basics of needlework. We have a really discriminatory education system. At school girls are taught skills like sewing, knitting, needlework while boys are taught woodworking. Kids are split in two groups and these lessons happen simultaneously. (By the way, this discrimination really sucked, personally, I’m much more interested in woodworking than in sewing, yet my school didn’t allow me to take the boy’s lessons.) Anyway, making guns is a lot rarer skill, it’s not like they teach it to school kids.
I have never heard about anybody in Latvia creating some handmade guns. Even if they have made some, they must have kept these creations well hidden in their homes. In Latvia school shootings do not happen, people don’t shoot each other on the street. This simply does not happen.
Sure, if you ban guns, somebody might turn out to be desperate and dedicated enough to make a gun on their own. But how many people will go so far? Very few. People are lazy. If you can get a gun by simply walking to a store, that’s easy, many people will be willing to do so. Making your own gun is a lot harder. Very few people have the necessary skills and tools. Majority of human population just won’t bother making their own guns. Which is exactly what we need. Our goal is to reduce access to guns. Which accomplishes the goal of reducing school shootings.
Incidentally, Latvians who desperately want a gun get one differently. If you become a bodyguard or a security guard or something similar, you can legally buy a gun. It’s simpler to get appropriate education and become a certified security guard than to make your own guns. So yeah, it is possible to get a gun in Latvia if you desperately want one and are dedicated enough. But very few people are that desperate, so the end result is that gun ownership remains rare in my country.
Lofty,
Yeah, but a gun without ammo is a basically a badly-made club.
People who handload their ammo don’t typically produce the propellant.
This is not true. Starting in the 1960s, a number of regulatory changes were made to improve car safety, with a great deal of success. Back in 1965 (the year prior to the introduction of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act), there were 5.3 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles in the USA. In 2015, there were 1.13. [Source] That’s a reduction of approximately 80%… I certainly wouldn’t call that “nothing”.
Also, we have no idea what the current number of road deaths would be without licensure and insurance, so I don’t see how you can assert that they have no effect.
When I write “Guns aren’t very difficult to make” I of course mean a tool for projecting a number of bullets, not a beautifully manufactured tool that is designed to reliably fire thousands of rounds. More what’s known as a “Saturday night special”. Just like there’s crappy needlework and stuff fit to dress a royal. Serviceable guns are even made by 3D printing these days.
As for lathes, small hobby lathes aren’t all that dear. I bought my first, a second hand one while still a student, and the second one I bought the year after I still have 3 decades later. Numberless small tubular steel objects have been created on that lathe, just not guns because I never really wanted one.
As for propellant, a determined dabbler could find ways of gleaning or making the stuff at home, after all guns have been around for centuries.
This something I’ve been wondering.
What do you do when your gun collector dad dies and leaves you a huge pile of mostly unused guns and ammo? Suppose you’re not personally into gun collecting, or you just need some money (maybe because you don’t have a college degree or a decent job). Or maybe you actually *are* into gun collecting.
Can you legally keep those guns without any kind of background check? If not, how will anyone know you have them? Can you legally sell them to another private citizen – who just happens to be a friend of your drug dealer? If you yield the guns to the police, can you get any reimbursement?
Is there a legal trade for secondhand guns? Incidentally, is this something gun industry vehemently lobbies against?
What will eventually happen to most guns?
Lofty, @ #10: Yeah, that’s all technically true… But do you know how many people have been killed or injured with home-made firearms here in the UK since we introduced our very strict gun laws? One.
It’s also easy to grow your own weed, but surprisingly few people do. Well, maybe it’s not that surprising, when you consider how lazy most people are…
It’s very important to remember that majority of crimes are not carefully premeditated by dedicated and determined master criminals – they’re mostly committed on the spur of the moment by dumbasses with poor impulse control. Any obstacle you can put between the initial impulse and the final act can prevent quite a lot of crime. No door lock ever invented is entirely invulnerable against a determined and skilled attacker, yet it remains worthwhile to lock your door, even if it’s only with locks that a moderately-good thief could bypass in a matter of seconds.
If you could reduce the number of people in the US who own guns to somewhere around the same level as the number of people who make their own clothes, you’d have made huge progress.
Lofty@#10:
When I write “Guns aren’t very difficult to make” I of course mean a tool for projecting a number of bullets, not a beautifully manufactured tool that is designed to reliably fire thousands of rounds.
For a while in the 90s there was a cottage industry selling components from Sten submachine guns – you could get a “parts kit” for about $100. I am pretty sure that a fair number of them got assembled into illegal submachine guns and probably are buried all over the south.
The 2nd amendment (PBUH) doesn’t say anything about ammo. 50 rounds/year for individual ownership is all anyone should be allowed. You can buy as much as you want while at a shooting range, but you can’t leave or manufacture more than 50 total rounds/year.
lumipuna@#11:
What do you do when your gun collector dad dies and leaves you a huge pile of mostly unused guns and ammo? Suppose you’re not personally into gun collecting, or you just need some money (maybe because you don’t have a college degree or a decent job). Or maybe you actually *are* into gun collecting.
Typically you take the whole load to a gun store, or someone who has a federal firearms license, and they either sell them off piecemeal for you at gun shows, or buy the lot (usually at a steep discount on its presumed value).
Because of interstate firearms transport and sale laws, the gun dealers are interposed in most transactions and get to make a pretty tidy profit because they get you going and coming.
Can you legally keep those guns without any kind of background check? If not, how will anyone know you have them? Can you legally sell them to another private citizen – who just happens to be a friend of your drug dealer? If you yield the guns to the police, can you get any reimbursement?
If the guns grandpa owned were not legally logged, then you get “grandfathered” guns – literally. Usually it’s OK to continue to own them but you’re responsible for knowing about and complying with laws – so, if grandpa left you a vietnam war-trophy full-auto AK-47 … you have inherited a problem, as they say. In that case, what you do is go visit the state police and tell them about the thing, then invite them to come collect it. That has its own problems, naturally, since state police are just as likely to be corrupt as not – grandpa’s AK may wind up becoming a range toy for the state troopers; law enforcement in the US has a very bad history of losing the nastiest kinds of weapons imaginable (because they are the most desirable to that mind-set)
There was an incident back when I lived in Baltimore, where it turned out someone had turned in a machine pistol to the state police, who were using it as a range toy and blew through $60,000 of small arms ammunition with it, then were caught – and tried to throw the former owner under the bus by claiming it was an illegal weapon that was “seized” in a “raid”…
At this point, I would chopsaw the guns in half through the receiver/firing chamber and give the pieces to the state police, who would be thoroughly pissed off.
OK, thanks. I was also wondering how long it’d take after a total gun ban for most privately owned guns to either become unusable due age or exit circulation otherwise, and whether many of them would be sold to criminals in that while.
In my mind, this process of slowly de-arming America evokes a comparison to Europe’s leftover WWII artillery shells.
Dunc@#12:
If you could reduce the number of people in the US who own guns to somewhere around the same level as the number of people who make their own clothes, you’d have made huge progress.
Exactly.
Here’s another thought: since there is tracking and licensing of guns, the 3% – the “super hoarders” would be easily discernable through sales transaction records. They own half the guns in the US! They’re also the demographic that does mass shootings: white, southern (50%) male.
I wish the statistics I have were broken down in terms of the “super hoarders” versus everyone else. Want to bet that what we’re looking at is white, southern men? Who are they planning to protect themselves from?
lumipuna@#16:
I was also wondering how long it’d take after a total gun ban for most privately owned guns to either become unusable due age or exit circulation otherwise, and whether many of them would be sold to criminals in that while.
Well, the 3% – we know who they are. They are the ones that show up all over the FBI’s computer database saying they just bought another AR-15… Start there.
My proposal [stderr] actually has the virtue of being workable: age them out of the population. All that is necessary is to disallow further legal transfers and ban ownership for anyone born after ${date} Then time will just take care of it.
Nobody likes my idea, at least my American friends don’t. I see it as perfectly sensible (but then I would, it’s why I had the idea!) we Americans are already comfortable with telling the future generations: “you will have no car. you will have no clean water. you will have no agriculture. you will have shitty gig economy jobs washing aging capitalists’ poopy butt. you will never experience a high standard of living. you will never own real estate; you’ll rent it from capitalists who already locked up the market. you will face starvation. medical problems will bankrupt you. you will never have medical insurance, flood insurance, or fire insurance. you will continue to live 15 minutes from nuclear war.” It doesn’t seem like “oh yeah, no you won’t inherit grandpa’s guns either” is that much more to add to the pile.
Marcus, I certainly see a lot of people purportedly not understanding that gun restrictions would be more effective in the long term, for the benefit of future generations. It’s like, “If we can’t immediately confiscate all the guns and end gun violence wholesale, then any gun control is futile”.
Nobody likes my idea, at least my American friends don’t. I see it as perfectly sensible (but then I would, it’s why I had the idea!)
Your proposal seems reasonable in my opinion. My suspicion is that Americans don’t like it, simply because they want to keep their guns, therefore they are bound to dislike any proposal that could actually succeed in taking guns away from people.
Americans are already comfortable with telling the future generations: “you will have no car. you will have no clean water. you will have no agriculture. you will have shitty gig economy jobs washing aging capitalists’ poopy butt. you will never experience a high standard of living. you will never own real estate; you’ll rent it from capitalists who already locked up the market. you will face starvation. medical problems will bankrupt you. you will never have medical insurance, flood insurance, or fire insurance. you will continue to live 15 minutes from nuclear war.” It doesn’t seem like “oh yeah, no you won’t inherit grandpa’s guns either” is that much more to add to the pile.
I’m puzzled. Is this a joke? I see obvious problems with this statement (namely: it’s false), but, then again, it doesn’t seem like something that could be said seriously, so perhaps you didn’t mean it literally. Struggling to discern when people are serious and when they are joking can be a real pain.
Ieva Skrebele@#20:
I’m puzzled. Is this a joke? I see obvious problems with this statement (namely: it’s false), but, then again, it doesn’t seem like something that could be said seriously, so perhaps you didn’t mean it literally.
It’s not intended to be a true or false statement.
As a civilization, America seems to be quite willing to fuck over its own future generations. Enthusiastic, almost. Given that, any claims that guns are needed for future protection from some kind of emerging autocracy ought to be highly suspect.
leva: I am not sure this is “false” in any real sense. Just over the past twelve months, we are selling off shorelines to oil drilling (and even under the Peace Prize President, nothing was done to reign in the far more dangerous practices of fracking). I think Marcus’ economic prognostications may be exaggerated for shock/amusement value, but they are not 100% “false” for many people.
bmiller @#22
OK, then I’ll give more details about exactly where I disagree with Marcus’ statements.
It’s not “Americans” as in “the people.” It’s only the 1% who seem willing to fuck the lives of descendants of the remaining 99%. Unfortunately, since the 1% are those who make laws, they also decide what “America” as a country does.
I could divide all those statements into two groups: 1) problems caused by capitalist greed, 2) problems caused by the climate change. #1 is something that is caused by the few rich people; it’s not like majority of Americans support these policies. #2 is caused by climate change denialists. Those people who are educated enough and understand that there’s a problem also generally tend to care. The result is that there are very few people who are outright willing to say their grandchildren: “You will have no planet to live on.” Instead we have climate change denialists who insist that everything will be OK for future generations, because there is no problem, and we also have people who are aware of the problem and care about it and would like to stop it.
Speaking of environmental problems, have you noticed that for those people who care about the problem, it’s really hard to change their lifestyle into something more environmentally friendly, because we lack the necessary infrastructure? You care about the climate change and would like to reduce your CO2 emissions by getting rid of your car and using public transportation instead? Great, but good luck with that if you happen to live in USA, because there is no public transportation. Want to buy electricity that’s not generated by burning coal? It’s not like you can choose.
I tend to notice these problems, because I’m uncomfortable about leaving a trail of trash behind me. I’m also uncomfortable about wasting resources. At home I go to the market with my own reusable milk bottle, and there the seller just fills my bottle. When buying fruits and vegetables, I just put them straight into my reusable fabric shopping bags. I generate no trash like this. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to do that in many other countries and cities. While living in Germany, if I wanted to buy some milk or get a kilogram of tomatoes, they came in plastic packaging. And there was no alternative.
And sometimes you have the alternative, but it’s a real hassle. A few weeks ago I attended a conference in Germany, and there in the conference room we had bottled water placed on the tables. While listening to the speeches, at one point I found myself in a pesky situation. I wanted a drink and I had two options: 1) drink from that bottle that is located right in front of me on my table; 2) leave the conference room, go to my hotel room, take my reusable water bottle out of my bag, go to the toilet to fill that bottle with water, return back to the conference room. Of course I chose the first option. I’m lazy. It’s not that I don’t care, I’m just really lazy. The conference organizers could have arranged the whole situation differently. Install a water tap in the conference room, put reusable glasses on the tables, maybe even put some containers with tap water on the tables. People could just redesign the situations we face in our daily lives so that choosing the environmentally conscious option is no longer so frustrating.
For me it feels like the whole world is designed to make it hard to choose the environmentally friendly option.
Dumpster diving is great for the environment, but, unfortunately, it’s illegal in most places.
Same goes for living in tiny houses. America’s tiny house movement is semi legal. For example, Steve Weissmann was forced to build his tiny house on wheels only because otherwise it would have been illegal. I also remember reading about a guy who wanted to build a small home, and he was forced to legally declare his building as a garage in order to appease building inspectors.
It’s even worse for people who simply want to sleep outdoors. Richard Roberts is a piano tuner who lives in London and he decided to literally move out and sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag (he writes about his experiences in his blog – http://www.piano-tuning.co.uk/lifestyle/ ). He’s been doing fine with this lifestyle, but it wasn’t easy for him to find spots where he could legally spend the nights on the ground.
And then you also have people’s expectations. If you want to work in certain professions, you are forced to buy lots of stuff, because coworkers expect you to do so, and they would look down on you if, for example, you lived in a small home, didn’t own a car, and wore the same set of cheap clothes every day.
I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. Some people are simply uneducated and unaware about the problems and believe that everything will be fine. Some people would be willing to make a change, but they lack the means to do so. Most people simply do not think about these problems on a daily basis. In general, people simply tend to not think about future that’s far away. It’s hard to imagine life 50 years from now. And you have urgent problems to think about, so your mind is already full with things to deal with. But outright malicious people who are enthusiastic to fuck over the future generations? I’d say there are very few such people.
There’s also the matter of perceptions. People go through their daily lives without thinking about how they are causing the climate change that will result in their grandchildren having no food. They aren’t just saying, “You will have no food.” Instead they just don’t think about the problem. Making a law and saying, “Oh yeah, no you won’t inherit grandpa’s guns either!” would require a conscious decision to ban guns, instead of just going through your daily life without thinking about what consequences your actions are going to have fifty years from now. So there is a big difference.
Mark Brewster says
Citation please, particularly regarding the efficacy claim. This claim is probably bullshit.
I don’t know how reliable the reports are – good statistics on this topic are hard to come by – but I’ve heard reports that training hunters and licensing hunters does a load of good to prevent accidents. I happen to think that certain kinds of training and licensing and regulations would do a huge amount of good for a certain kind of gun deaths : negligent accidents, like leaving a loaded gun where children are present.
You’re wrong. Historically, in short, the word “militia” means “all able-bodied adult males”. The word “militia” refers to a legal arrangement that goes back about 1000 years in the English context, where the king required all adult males to keep weapons of war so that the king could call them forth whenever he felt like it. This continued to circa 1800, where the founders passed the second federal militia act of 1792 which required all adult white males to own a gun, and a laundry list of military equipment. They were called forth to militia training once a year, with a primary purpose to ensure that they had properly equipped themselves as required by law. Even today, federal law defines the militia as practically all male citizens between the ages of 17 and 45 – of course federal law today no longer requires members of the militia to have guns.
That’s a fine argument to have. For better or for worse, it’s still the law, until it’s amended or repealed.
What? No. We still legislate morality. Murder and theft are still illegal. Prohibition showed that trying to prevent people from having a good time with recreational drugs is doomed to failure. Entirely different thing. Just imagine your argument applied to murder. “Well, people still kill each other even if we make it illegal, and it’s really hard to enforce it.” You argument is patently absurd.
For the relevant history of the second amendment and gun rights, I strongly encourage you to read my google doc, which has a metric shitton of citations.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ak6bx8jyDxIlsLuFHHevw-4RQ7R5vJb15RtTNG5d79w/edit
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Crimson Clupeidae says
The first amendment doesn’t say anything about the internet either. Your post is asinine and patently intellectually dishonest.
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Ieva Skrebele says
I hope this doesn’t explode into a mass off-topic derail, but it is one of my pet peeves. Climate change is caused by the environmentalists. Nuclear is the best and only practical answer, and the environmentalists are the biggest opposition to nuclear power, and that’s why we’ll never fix climate change.
@ Lofty, #6: You don’t have to make it completely impossible for people to make their own guns. You just need to make sure that making a gun requires more effort than finding an alternative, non-murderous solution to the original problem they thought they couid have solved by shooting someone.
Ieva Skrebele@#23:
It’s not “Americans” as in “the people.” It’s only the 1% who seem willing to fuck the lives of descendants of the remaining 99%.
I want to quote Bruce Lee’s “it is like a finger pointing the way to the moon” lecture at you, but that’s too obscure.
I am not making an argument that I want you to take literally, and dissect literally. I understand that you are a very literal person (you are probably thinking, right now, “is there any other kind?”) and that’s a great strength. But when I’m deliberately engaging in a bit of hyperbole, it doesn’t make any sense to decompile it into its component statements and worry about whether they are accurate, or not. Sometimes, you gotta just shake your head and let things go past you.
So, I was being hyperbolic but my statements were, literally, true. How can this be? Because I was talking about the trend. The trend is not just “we are fucking over future generations” it’s “we have fucked over future generations.” There is no “if” – it’s already in motion and is unstoppable. I do think it’s reasonable to say “in the face of the horrible disaster we have brought down upon you, the little things like whether or not you get to have a gun collection – they will be literally lost in the noise.” The big picture of the near-term future (not “likely future” but “what is going to happen”) is really ugly. Although EnlightenmentLiberal may call me something nasty for saying that.
Anyway: I am not going to allow you to force me to restrict myself to only stating dry facts and substantiating them with references. Being a bit hyperbolic, on occasion, is OK and I am going to indulge myself. Especially because I think that saying “we’re so fucked” is seriously understating the situation; a more appropriate reaction would be to run around screaming and rending my garments. (equally pointless)
(The finger at the moon: Lee was talking about a big picture concept, but his student was literally looking at the example Lee was using. This is a typical Taoist way of thinking about a problem – sometimes you need to stop looking at the small parts and just look at the problem. Other times, you need to look at the small parts and ignore the problem. Or: sometimes you can’t cut trees in the forest because all you see is the forest. Other times, you can’t find the forest because of all the trees that are in your way.)
I probably should not lecture at you, but I am being respectful.
I don’t think I would. I think I agree. I think that we can still do something about it, but the previous generation has fucked us, yes, concerning global warming and ocean acidification, geopolitical issues, and many more issues that I’m not even familiar with probably.
Marcus
Circular firing squads are a bad idea.
Or maybe a really good idea.
you are probably thinking, right now, “is there any other kind?”
No, I’m not. I know the theory, I know that rhetorical questions, hyperboles, metaphors, sarcasm, irony, jokes, similes, oxymorons and other figures of speech exist. This information was included in my school literature lessons. We also talked about this in the university, where I took several courses about literary text analysis. So I know the theory. The problem is with my ability to apply this knowledge to real world situations.
In literature tests it was simple. I was given a text fragment and a task description saying: “Find two hyperboles and three metaphors in the given text fragment.” That was so simple; I always got high scores in my literature tests. Knowing what to look for, I could easily find words or sentences that corresponded to the definitions I had memorized. The problem in real life situations is that I cannot know what to look for; I have no clue whether there are any figures of speech in the first place. And whenever I spot something suspicious, I’m left to wonder what was meant with it.
For me it’s also the same problem with facial expressions and body language. I have read books about these topics, I know the theory. I once took a test where there were photos with people’s faces and the task was to tell, which smiles were fake and which ones were real. I did very well, even better than average in that test. It was so simple. Two photos of the same face next to each other, one of them is the fake smile, the other is the real one. I had read the theory, so I knew that I just have to look for wrinkles in the corners of the eyes. And it worked, I could reliably tell, which smiles were fake. Unfortunately, real world situations aren’t that simple. Unlike most people, I cannot instinctively feel this stuff; I can only attempt to logically analyze what I’m seeing in front of me. And it just doesn’t work; figuring out a human being is a lot harder than figuring out the solution of a mathematics problem.
I’m very insecure in my ability to spot and correctly identify indirect communication; this is why I try to never make any assumptions. And when I don’t understand something, I just ask for a clarification.
Sometimes, you gotta just shake your head and let things go past you.
Years ago I used to do that all the time. I have no intentions of doing that ever again though. I have never gotten an official autism diagnosis, because, as a child, I was pretty good at faking being normal. At first I didn’t even realize that I’m faking something. I was in a room with several people, one person said something, and others started laughing. I just laughed as well, not even knowing why. I just assumed that it was the laughing time, so I did that. I observed how other people behaved in specific situations, and I simply imitated their behavior. I didn’t think about it much, I just assumed that this is what you are supposed to do. It took me years to realize that other people differ from me. That’s when I started to intentionally fake being normal. I didn’t enjoy that. Not understanding what’s going on around you and having to just fake a normal reaction sucks.
One of the weird quirks with my brain is that I find it extremely hard to memorize human faces. I can recognize faces; I can tell them apart, I can even accurately draw human faces. I just cannot memorize them. More precisely: for me memorizing a specific human face is just as easy as memorizing a specific horse or chimpanzee face or some architectural element. I have some visual memory; it’s just that my visual memory for human faces isn’t any better than my visual memory for everything else. At first, as a child, I didn’t even realize that there’s a problem with my brain. I recognized people based on their hairstyles, clothes, voices, situations (“those people around me at school got to be my classmates, who else could be here?”). But every now and then on the street I would experience situations that some person approached me and started talking with me as if they knew me, yet I had no clue who that person was. At first I tried to hide my inability to recognize people. I gave up on that one when I was 19. Once I was in the university and some girl approached me, she started talking with me as if she knew me. I couldn’t recognize her. We had this about 30 minutes long conversation during which I desperately looked for clues on who she was. Ultimately I figured out that the two of us used to go to the same school where we had some lessons together. You cannot even imagine how stupid I felt during that conversation. It seriously sucks having no clue what’s going on around me.
After that incident I completely gave up on pretending to be normal. When I don’t understand something, I ask. I know that other people hate hearing, “Who are you? Have we met before?” or “That thing you just said, was it a joke, and if so, could you, please, explain it to me?” But I hate not understanding, what’s going on.
So, sure, I could just let things go past me and fake being normal, it’s just that I don’t want to do so.
Anyway: I am not going to allow you to force me to restrict myself to only stating dry facts and substantiating them with references.
I never had any intention to restrict other people’s speech or expressions. I am well aware that, statistically, people like me are the minority. It would be stupid if I demanded that majority of human population changed their behavior just to accommodate my limited perception abilities. I know that the problem is with me and not with others. However, when I don’t understand something, I won’t fake being normal and instead I will ask for a clarification.
I probably should not lecture at you, but I am being respectful.
It’s fine. After all, it’s true that the way how my brain works is weird.
[OT]
Ieva, we share some traits.
You have to sufficiently understand normality to fake it; you claim you cannot without asking.
One of those can be true — but not both.
(Besides, it’s normal for people to fail to understand one another)
Self-diagnosis can be self-fulfilling.
John Morales @#30
It’s not that simple. Firstly, knowing the theory is sufficient to fake being neurotypical. I know plenty of theory, I have observed people’s behavior, I have read novels, I have read psychology textbooks just for the sake of figuring out other people. The moment I realized that I’m weird, I intentionally set out to figure out exactly how I differ from normal people. If I know how a normal person is supposed to behave in a specific situation, I can just fake this behavior. I’m definitely not a good actor, but I can smile or laugh on demand, I can fake basic emotions.
Secondly, the moment I ask a question is generally when I out myself. Let’s assume I’m in a room with several other people. One person tells something and others start laughing. From other people’s reactions I can infer that whatever was just said was a joke. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the joke. At this point I have two choices: 1) start laughing with everybody else, this way nobody realizes that there’s something wrong with me, but I’m also left in the dark about the joke and what exactly was supposed to be funny there; 2) ask, “I didn’t understand the joke, could you, please, explain it for me?” If I choose the second option, I out myself, but at least I get to understand what just happened. As a child I always went for the first option, nowadays I tend to ask for clarifications whenever I don’t understand something. I’m pretty good at passing for somebody normal if I want to. I just don’t think it’s worth it.
It’s not that I’m completely unable to understand jokes or figures of speech. Often I understand them without any extra explanations. It’s simpler when I listen to comedians or read poetry. I expect to find this kind of language in such circumstances, therefore it’s simpler to correctly identify it. And I can enjoy reading poetry or listening to comedians, I’m certainly capable of enjoying non direct speech. Unfortunately, it’s a whole different situation when reading comments online. When something seems suspicious, I often cannot tell, whether it was meant seriously, as a hyperbole or as a joke. Online people can have all sorts of opinions and they can use either direct language or figures of speech. Thus I simply cannot tell.
Yes, of course I’m aware that I’m not qualified to diagnose myself with anything. It’s just that I don’t care about getting any official diagnosis. The only use of getting some diagnosis is that it facilitates treatment. For example, a child gets an autism diagnosis, and then medical professionals can offer help and treatment based on what they already know about autism patients in general. They use the diagnosis in order to figure out that this child probably needs special education and so on. Personally, I’m way too old to need this sort of help. I’m doing just fine on my own. So I don’t care about getting some label. I’m aware that there are some quirks about the way how my brain works. I have learned to compensate for them, to find workarounds or to just live with them. I’m perfectly happy with how my mind works. As a result, I just don’t care to find out whether I’m on autism spectrum or not. Whatever.
It was never really that bad with me, for example, I never had any problems with learning languages (I’m a polyglot). Basically, my only problems were with socializing. It turns out that some skills can be simply learned. By now I’m a pretty good public speaker and debater. I practiced a lot. Using voice intonations, pauses, gestures—I could just learn all that. It turned out that with practice I could just learn basic socializing skills and by now I don’t have any problems making friends or dealing with social interactions.
In some other situations I found out that I cannot learn some skill no matter how much I practice, so I found workarounds. For example, I simply cannot learn flirting. I’m really bad at noticing and interpreting other people’s indirect signals. I tried flirting, I couldn’t do it, so I just gave up. Nowadays, when I want sex, I just ask. Problem solved.
And some of the weird quirks of how my brain works don’t even matter that much. I have a limited ability to feel certain emotions. For example, I have never loved anyone. It’s always been like this, when I was six years old my dog died and I couldn’t feel anything (I know that this is not how people are supposed to react when their pets die). My ability to feel empathy is limited as well. I don’t have any problems living with this, it doesn’t limit my ability to live the way I want to, so whatever.