A 'Merican without a gun?

[garote]

I do not own a gun, and will never own one. (I have handled and fired them though.) Occasionally someone asks me why. I'm writing this so I can refer them to it.

If I were in the military and had to do dangerous things around dangerous people, no doubt I would possess and use one. Do I do dangerous things around dangerous people at home? No. But I know something about myself: If I had a gun at home, I might be inclined to use it anyway. Then I'd have to live with the guilt after - for example - ending the life of some stupid junkie kid trying to break into my house at night to steal possessions that I could re-purchase in a couple of months at most.

I think a handgun is, in its present form, a silly thing for a private citizen to own.  I find American culture's belief in guns as a kind of household tool to be weirdly contradictory. Some places, yeah, you need a rifle to shoot game and defend your livestock. But in the suburbs? Land of lawn darts and barbecues? In the city, packed in with thousands of strangers?  How does that math work? I'm okay with tightening the regulatory noose around ownership of any firearm that isn't purpose-built to hunt game, and I think innovation in gun safety is long overdue. For example, we unlock our phones with a fingerprint; why not our guns? A solid-state finger scanner can easily be made to handle the shock of firing, and the shock itself can generate the power to recharge the sensor. At the very least a home invader or your own child wouldn't be able to fire it.

But gun control laws are actually a sideshow. People have to decide, one at a time, that keeping a gun isn't their best move. It has to be their decision. It has to be a cultural shift. Rallying for laws is missing the point.

Every time a mass shooting in a park or a school commandeers a zillion eyeballs worldwide, I see the same self-satisfied arguments pushed out on top of the same firearm statistics, and after the fifth or tenth time of being told that 'Merica is a seething hellscape of whizzing bullets and hare-brained yankees in stars-and-bars t-shirts and if only we just rewrote some laws more like (insert Northern European country here) the bullets would stop whizzing ... well, it gets tiresome.

I live in a neighborhood where gangs have turf wars.  Armed robberies and drive-by shootings happen here.  Someone was shot to death on a street corner across from my house last spring.  The previous year there was a drive-by in front of the church on the opposite corner. I've learned the difference between fireworks and gunshots without trying, just by exposure.  Oakland is not a very safe place to live, and gun violence plays a part in that.

But relative to the amount of attention it claims in the mind, it's not actually a large part. In 2016, Oakland had 85 homicides with ~60 involving guns. Divide that into the population, and my 0.0002% yearly chance of being murdered via firearm is, in absolute terms, not something I worry about, and if I ditched Oakland for London and reduced that chance to 0.000012%, I would not consider it an important win.

In the same year in Oakland, there were 30 traffic fatalities plus another 200 people maimed in traffic accidents.  I ride my bike to work and back every day, making my exposure in that betting pool way, waaay higher than the one for gun violence.  Every single day as I step onto the pedals, the thought passes through my mind:  Is this the day I get plowed under some random car?  I have close calls every year, even with 30+ years of experience cycling around cars.  There are "ghost bicycles", painted white, chained to posts on corners all around the city, marking where cyclists have been killed recently.  Becoming a ghost bicycle -- that's what I worry about.  Not whizzing bullets from gang-bangers and yee-haw yankees.

But oh look, here's another wave of headlines, another horde of talk show speechifying, another crowd of angry protestors shouting, "we could get these gun laws passed, if it wasn't for those heartless, unfathomably stupid, backwards rednecks in thrall to the NRA!"

This big emergency about a conspiracy that has people freaking the hell out, and baffled at the apparent apathy of the other side ... Well, other people have done the math, subconsciously or no, and they are worried about other things. For me, it's death by car. (That and the endless annoyance of having my own car and property vandalized multiple times every year, which is another thing that happens in Oakland.) You know what's really got you in a panic?

Your internet connection.

Seriously. I just described what it's like in my city, and what I'm actually afraid of: Cars. So what's your excuse?

I don't own a gun, but I'm not in a hurry to ban them either. I fully understand that for other people - people who feel less physically secure, or have more dangerous jobs - a gun might seem like the right choice. The "solution" to that isn't to make it impossible for them to legally get the gun. Mandatory but affordable training, and alternate options for self defense, are better ideas. And ultimately the solution is to find out what's making them feel insecure, and reduce that instead.

Like, duh. But that's a complicated and reasonable task, and it doesn't declare an obvious scapegoat. HOW BORING!! Let's just sit on our hands instead, and mutter about rednecks, and feel afraid, until the next mass shooting, and then leap up out of our seats and scream like we did last time. It might work! We'll get that law on the books and then gun crime will evaporate like morning mist. Yeah; no.

Here's one thing I do know, and have chosen to live by: The fewer guns there are in circulation, the less my chances of getting killed or maimed by one. That's the bottom line reason why I have not added one to my home. Cars make my life dangerous enough as it is ... But there's no way in hell I'm going to give up cycling. You'll have to pry my bicycle from between my cold, dead legs!

Come on my fellow Americans: Let's beat those handguns into bike parts! I guarantee it's a better hobby (even though it probably eats up just as much money, and more time, and gets you greasier and smellier than a trip to the range.) You can put a cup holder on your handlebars; can a gun do that? I rest my case.

Oh, and if you live in the city, consider this: Riding a bike to get around keeps you way safer than walking with a gun. Yes! JOIN US.

Comments

[matrixmann]

Whenever I get to see something about the campaigns of pro- and anti-gun activists group in the US here, I can't help than just shaking head over it 'cause no fraction actually behaves better than the other side. Each tries to whitewash its position, denying possible negative consequences of their campaings, not even to speak about the lack of effect their desired politics may have.

The anti-side, for example, in my opinion, always keeps that fact out of its sight: How much gun crime in America depends on guns who aren't owned illegally anyway?
Criminals don't ask for permission, they just have the guns - and they continue to do so even if there are tighter restrictions.
Why this is so? Because the gun industry in America is a very profitable business, and until this day they seemingly have never considered the idea of getting another pillar of their business which makes money from civil issues. So to say, one business pillar for war (and all that comes attached to that), another one for something that a civilized society would spend money on.
This could make them easily become less dependent on sales from guns and war equipment. So they're also not that dependent on keeping lobbys paid that their gun business still flows as it currently does. (Really, this is some business matter.)

Another thing that the anti-side ignores since the very beginning of claiming stricter gun laws in America - and that is since Columbine at least: Going down on the mental structures that make out America.
Every child in America learns quickly how to perform the ways of dog-eat-dog society, that the strong, the powerful and, especially, the wealthy take whatever they want and when they want it and barely anyone punishes them for their misbehavior.
So, with that on, try to explain it to a child why it shouldn't copycat the same sneaky behavior in order to get whatever it wants.
There simply is no logical reason.
With that being on, nobody should ever become wondering why anybody gets to the conscious or indrect conclusion to also include a gun into his mental spectrum of means in order to achieve his goals. (Actually, extend that to "violent means" in general.)
Simply, it's what he can see every day as soon as he's old enough.
The powerful do whatever they want and the justice system bows down to them...

This is shit barely been targeted in the last decade. After Columbine this still was on the table, but since the last few idiots going on a rampage, everything only focuses on the firearmes (like firearms alone would decide over people becoming violent or not; if they don't have these, then they grab knives and baseball bats...).

And, some other thing that I perceive about this topic: The general uneducatedness of the average American citizen.
Intelligent people you don't need to tell that, if you have a gun in your household, you should never keep it in any drawer or cupboard that is reachable at the height of a child. Intelligent people you also don't need to tell "real guns are no toys for children" and that you have to have your deep respect for these tools. They already do this on their own and teach that to their children, giving them a blow in their necks if they start to handle them irresponsible.
Dumb people drag their kids onto the shooting range every week, ramble about their American freedoms and even buy their daughters pink rifles.
Dumb people also become paranoid about the white race dying out and minorities taking over world domination and thinking needing to do something against that through violence.
So, how's the tackling of this?
Nada. Zero. Stupidity is like another one of these basic American rights and freedoms.
And when discovered as a problem, the only thing the fraction who stumbled over it has to offer is stupid lecturing from their high, high mountain of snobism. "Guns are bad, mkay?". And the NRA is bad and has its hands on every politician who doesn't join the choir of "no guns".
Damn, like every person with a little bit of intelligence wouldn't know!
Who needs these lectures and its smart-aleck teachers?
The really stupid citizen is going to react with an allergy to this because he gets to feel how basically stupid he is - and he will react with supporting the opposite of what these smart-aleck teachers preach.
So, what is there instead to do?
Better get down on (school-)educating the average American citizen some more, so he doesn't treat guns like candy-bars.
Sophisticated societies strangely don't feel the need to behave like cowboys all the freaking day and are proud of it.

[garote]

I think you've hit on something pretty key here. There are definitely two views of American ideology. The dog-eat-dog view where the real risk of death forces people to be aggressive and take sides, and the collective join-or-die view where people strip away everything - including politics and religion - and value each other for their integrity and how hard they work because they know they'd fight over anything else. One ideology divides people, the other binds them.

And there are stupid people doing stupid things on both sides. Some of them on the dog-eat-dog side believe in cultural purity and religious purity and embrace racism and blind patriotism. Some of them on the collective side believe in identity politics and appallingly naïve ideas like universal basic income.

But I think you and I see the baseline level of "stupid" differently, and that's probably because the stupid people tend to claim all the attention, either directly, or indirectly from the press. The ground truth is quite different. Either way it's obvious that Americans have a special (i.e. fucked up) relationship with firearms and we all need to collectively decide that we just want less of them around. Not by passing a law, but by making the choice independent of the law.

As you said, if a violent person can't get a gun, he will get a bat or a knife. I know that's what I would do, personally. And I think that's a clear improvement.

[matrixmann]

Ah, dog-eat-dog society was meant differently from my side (I think), but that's a language thing here. Try to find a term corresponding to the German term "Ellenbogengesellschaft"... Technically, there's no direct pendant with the exact same meaning, as it seems.

I try to see things from a more basic point of view in this.
There's a lot of talking about the guns as "root of all evil", as the ultimate cause for violence, but if you ever happened to make a deeper connection with the rampage topic, one thing that you learn is: If there's a gun missing near someone who habors the motivation to kill people over anything, the next thing the mind focusses on is where to get one or what weapon is around near to achieve the same result.
So, basically - if the motivation only searches for a means, but continues existing if it doesn't find one right on the spot, why then still emphasizing all the time and acting like "guns are all root of evil"?.
Techncially this has been disproven as the only cause.
So, better thing to rack one's brains about is how to tackle these structures that create that motivation to kill in civilized circumstances.
'Cause all that gun crime around, whatever it is, there always come other structures attached to it creating the base for the issue to be in the first place.
For example: You can't kill gang and drug criminality if you only take away the firearms from these guys. Regardless that they have ways to get hold of some illegally anyway - if they can't get some, then they'll switch over to using knives and weapons for beating, and the drugs keep being around like before.
Anybody solved the problem then by just focussing on the firearms alone? No, they didn't.

As I see it, there are some very basic things going on in (especially American) society that shape one's inner wiring, which create the base condition of ever taking that lane to do harm to other people over more than only self-defense.
This applies to - maybe - all kinds of crime that involve violence, no matter what it is.
People already cut their teeth on it when they're infants.

America's basic way how society and economical success function - this "everyone regarding everyone else as an enemy on the road to a better life than one already has" and "climbing up the ladder via bringing down someone else" being the rule of the game, if you learn such things being the way things are run in early stages of your personality development, as well as if you seem them going on that way later in life, in my view it doesn't take much to conclude from that "all means are justified to practice this" and then go out kicking other people down the ladder, whenever you see yourself in the position of being the one threatened by that otherwise.
At least that's a very difference from America to Europe - America doesn't make a difference through what you achieve wealth, status and a warm home. In the end, it doesn't make too much a difference morally between crime and trying to do it the honest way, as long as you can pay enough for a lawyer to bail you out.
So, this ends up giving the wrong signal, it doesn't send out a "Don't be like this! This is bad for society!".
Which then rather works as a means to strengthen that mindset which lives by rules learned "it's only you who counts!".
In other words: Learned as a kid that it's only about your progress, seeing in later life things stay so, you don't really learn to see what's the moral problem if you enforce this with more powerful means. (e. g. violence, shooting someone) Within your head, it simply doesn't exist; you see things as justified that you do/have done.
So you end up doing it over and over again (if you can).

And this is the downward spiral in behavior that keeps on spinning then.
It can take whatever forms possible. Drug crime, shooting spree, murder, gang crime, rape... Whatever kind of heavy crime where one human needs to step on another.

[garote]

I agree with you about the ineffectiveness of gun laws.

But I think your description of America leaves out the other half of the equation I talked about above. There definitely is a collective side to Americans. It's relatively stripped-down, and also has an overlapping element of self-sufficiency, but it is very much there. It exists independent of the government (unlike, say, China) and independent of religion (unlike, say, Saudi Arabia), and considering the sheer size of the place, it works pretty well.

[matrixmann]

Well, it's the picture I got as an outsider.
Might be that not all of it is true...
But usually I even have a very different point of view onto things there. Sounding very abstract at first to most people (this mostly comes from having a good eye for subtle things).

Nevertheless, I hear what you say.

I think in this it isn't so much unlike here: If you took away the neurotic media and the people crying their neurotic shit into the mics every day, who knows what it did to peoples' judgment and to peoples' cooperation with each other.
As - just putting it clearly -: Those idiots standing there, trying to win you for some political campaign, these are actually the ones making the most profit from this shit. If they were busy with something else than throwing stupid phrases into the open space, they really had both of their hands full of work to do - and they'd be gone quickly from their positions because they weren't up to the job.
Which just is the case if you give some important job to a babblehead. He isn't suited for very much else...

[juan_gandhi]

Interesting point.

I decided not to own a gun (at least for now) because if I did, a good part of my thoughts would be around the gun(s) and how to deal with them, how to use them when needed, etc. Just not interested in transforming myself into that kind of guy.

Regarding bicycles, I saw horrible scenes, and feel like I have to stay away from where the traffic is.

[garote]

For sure. There are plenty of roads just around Oakland/Emeryville that I never, never cycle on...