Guns

A word about guns.





See? You’re already pissed. After all, your ink-stained wretch may say something with which you disagree.  Or he will not say something strongly enough that you do believe.

Everyone is so entrenched in their position (and in the  cliches that go along with them) that scarcely anyone can even read any other point. Can’t “They” just see the moral righteousness of whatever they believe?  Period.  End of discussion.

Usually, I like to propose answers to public questions. Tonight, I just have some observations, take them as you will.

1.  Guns are fearsome some things. You see, that’s the idea behind guns, the fear factor.  Anyone who is not afraid of guns is an idiot.

People are afraid of the fearsome noise.   Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story, “Gun Without a Bang.” The premise was that somebody had an ideal weapon which was absolutely silent. You pointed it and whatever you pointed it at disappeared. The problem was that it had no “bang,” so the other predators couldn’t learn to feel fear. The story ends with the owner using “the weapon” as a hammer.

People are afraid of the recoil.  According to Newton’s First Law, a force exerted also exerts an equal and opposite reaction. You shoot again, and the gun will press back against your hands and arms.  If the muzzle is much above the gun’s center of gravity – which it almost always is – the gun will rise. To accurately shoot it again, you have to re-center the sights. That bothers people.

People fear guns in others’ hands. They feel that they will be unable to protect themselves and their families. They fear that bad guys will be better armed.

Self defense is a legal right and a natural right. The “legal right” thing is shot with exceptions. The natural right can be seen as God-given or evolutionary, take it either way. The people least likely to be murdered will have more opportunities to reproduce than the other people 

We hear about “bad guys” and “good guys.” We can argue about bad guys and good  guys, but one thing is near certain: A bad guy with drawn gun will very likely come out on top of a good guy without a gun. 

There is a rough correlation between gun support and public safety response time. If you live in a place takes the police 30 minutes to get to you, you are more likely to accept guns. Places where there is a relatively low fear of guns are places like Texas, West Virginia, Colorado and Minnesota. If you go into Canada and have license tags from any of those states, you will be questioned very carefully about whether you have weapons.  Conversely, in places where there is reasonably quick access to safety response – New York City, Southern California – non-supporters probably out number gun supporters. 


Also there is a cultural thing. Some people grow up in a culture where the “rules” about cars, drinking, weapons, hairstyle, clothing, and so forth have a established norm.

Now I think – although I’m less certain about this – that the Florida school shooter, the Las Vegas shooter, and most other shooters also are based on fear. They see a world where the only choice they can see is to lash out. Maybe they are psychopaths. Maybe they are sociopaths.  But most of them are fearful. They may be afraid of non-existent things, but their fear is real nevertheless

(Not all of them are motivated by fear.   I have met very, very few sociopaths in my 40 years of practice.  Two of them had 10 bodies between them.

Can we at least acknowledge that we are afraid guns on some level? 

I am “cautiously comfortable” around firearms. I know how to use most of them, I know what they do and I realize the effect it has when I choose to fire them. But if you go around armed, you MUST accept that you now are bearing a lethal device. You must scrupulously avoid an confrontation that may lead to a drawn gun. Once a gun is introduced, things happen real fast.

Also, there something known as the “Body Alarm reaction,” the physical reactions of stress, loosely called the “flight or fight syndrome.” Everyone who experiences a sudden emergency will pass through a Body Alarm Reaction.  Think back to when you watch the unfolding 9-11 on TV.  You experienced at least a bit of the Body Alarm Reaction. If you had a friend in city, you felt it worse. All first responders throughout the world felt it.

The Body Alarm Reaction has purely physical effects..  You experience time dilation – time seems to stand still. It involves tunnel vision – you are focused on the threat and information that does not have anything to do with threat does not reach your mind. The body dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream. This enables your big muscles to exert maximum speed and force. It also severely diminishes your fine muscle control. Some say that the Body Alarm Reaction sets in in less than a quarter of a second.  The same people say that logical thought does not start for several seconds.

Think of this in terms of firearms. Suddenly, you are presented with a set of circumstances which are threatening. (Cue adrenaline dump.) Do you run or hide or fight? If you fight, how will you fight? Will you draw a gun and introduce lethality into the mix? If you have never seen somebody dead of a gunshot wound, I may be talking Greek to you. Only in these circumstances, you have a short period time to decide.

NOBODY WHO HAS NOT BEEN THROUGH A FULL BODY ALARM REACTION CAN UNDERSTAND IT.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT.

I have never fired a weapon at a person. I understand the Body Alarm Reaction up to pulling a gun on a person. I don’t want to find the rest out. But I cannot control that possibility.

I read a comment or post that says armed people should be exposed to a “shoot out house,” where they are surprised and taught by instructors. Who knows, maybe that will give some little bit of experience, but nothing resembling experience of the military or the police departments. Even THEY know that practice is make-believe. All you can do get as close to real as possible, which is not too close.

2. The gun show loophole. This is easy and ridiculous. At a gun show, people go to sell guns and accessories.  If you go to a gun show, you should expect to be backgrounded. No background, no gun. That part is simple.
a
3. The Second Amendment ws written in 1789 and has not been rewritten.  Then, the weapons available were muzzleloader’s. A good marksman could fire 2 to 3 shots a minute. The only way to fire more was to carry more guns.  Edward “Blackbeard” Teach carried six pistols in his sash.  (That’s called a New York reload.)  (He also carried burning slow matches - the cords which set off cannons - stuck in his beard.)

4. We have 300 million guns in America. Those are already there. And they last a long time.  A gun will not go and fire a few times, and rust away or just get tuckered out. My favorite long gun is an ‘03 Springfield, made 90 years ago in 1928. This weapon will be around a lot longer than I will.

5. Suppose we have a law that says turn in your guns or at least part of your guns, like semi-automatics – How do you imagine that would work? I don’t think we would see drug dealers, mafioso, gangbangers, robbers or even really, really serious “gun people” lining up at police stations to turn in their guns. What if we put some teeth into the law? How much teeth would it take? And how many guns would be reported stolen or lost?

It would be interesting to monitor the sale of cosmolene (or whatever they use now to prepare guns for a long storage), big PVC pipe and ends and glue that makes a water proof container. Oh, and shovels. I wonder if anybody’s monitored that?

Other fixes have been suggested. (Actually, one third the people think they are too much, one third of the people think they are too little, and one third don’t care.) 

6. Ban assault weapons. An “assault weapon” is a semi-automatic long gun which uses a detectable magazine. They are also black, look vicious, may have such features such as a bipod, pistol grip, laser, or an absolutely useless bayonet stud. However, the lower receiver – what makes it a firearm – can be attached to lots of less “evil” looking weapons. After all, “evil” is a human imposed subjective judgment. What traditionally makes an “assault weapon” really doesn’t count.  It’s the detachable magazine. The detachable magazine is what makes a supposedly accurate gun into what you can use for the “spray and pray” approach. The Las Vegas shooter was not shooting at individuals. He was shooting at a crowd, knowing that he would hit somebody. (He was also using what is called a “bump stock” which led officers on the radio to conclude that they were under machine gun fire.)

7.  A suggestion is to limit what a magazine will hold. I have little trouble with that. I’ve always said these 30 round magazines make gun people look silly. Connecticutt and California have a 10 round limit for magazines. And to be fair, if you can’t do the job in 10 rounds, you’re in big trouble.

8.  Let’s raise the age to buy a gun.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  We accept 18-year-olds into the military and they get guns. On the other hand, some 30-year-olds are not smart enough to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the bottom, but we’ll sell them guns.

9.  How about an alcohol or drug test before you buy? Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who purchase guns at the pawn shop down the street would have a clean test. Do we really want somebody zonked on ethanol or drugs carrying a firearm?

10. Restrict or ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons. Semi-automatic actions have been around 110+ years. Some are virtually unchanged. Also, a lot of the 300 million guns (not all of which will get turned in) are similarly-semi-automatic. Something about restricting a 110-year-old technology because it has become trendy bothers me. On the other hand, we tried banning alcohol. But we clearly understood the lethality of weapons after about the third one was built.

11.  How about private background check? You want to sell a gun, get a background check.  This leads to gun registration, the big bad boogie man the NRA fears.  Um, maybe it is equal to vehicle registration. Anyway, if we outlaw cars, you’ll find as many of them stolen or hidden as you will firearms.

12. Guns do not shoot themselves. If we do not address the human element, we lose. Guns are fired by human actions, sometime intentionally and sometimes through stupidity. Pakistan recently approved arming teachers.  A teacher was cleaning his gun at school and had an accidental discharge. It killed a student. Those don’t happen often, but they do. My deceased brother was a master competitive pistol shooter.  He carried around a casing that came from his own cleaning accident. (Nickle knowledge: In the great move to the American frontier, a lot more people were killed in firearms accidents than were killed by Indians.)

The Florida school shooter, the Las Vegas shooter, the hundred plus people who chose to shoot at somebody today all made a decision. Some were mentally ill; some had uncontrollable anger; some had misplaced fear; and some had rational and proper fear. But in each case the physical result was the same. A piece of metal was accelerated to transonic or supersonic speed to go straight (actually on a ballistic course) until it hit something or someone. So if we don’t address the human factor, we have nothing

A final thought. Americans are compliant. Look how much we pay attention to private security, ushers, flight attendants, etc. here. But if it offends some fundamental belief – rational or irrational – we react badly.  If you try to restrict guns, some people, a lot of people, are going to react badly.  What we need is something we never sought: consensus. Compromise.  And right now, Americans are stubborn to thing about consensus or compromise.

Mizpah!