The Best Gun Control is a two-handed grip

A letter exchange about guns.

Jul 07, 2023

Mar 3:27 No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.

Ok, so this post is hopefully the first post in a ‘letter exchange’. with Daryl. It all started from a notes thread, so nothing to link to, but the general issue was ‘gun control’. As I have a rather serious and well thought out position on gun control, the idea interested me. Here goes:

My basic position:

I believe that society is best served when there is open, casual, frequent carry of firearms by normal civilians. I believe that this is most important in any area where there are vulnerable people: such as hospitals, schools, etc. I believe it is immoral for a society to disarm its populace.

Some foundations

‘Gun Crime’ and other nonsense

The use of terms such as ‘gun crime’, ‘gun violence’, and ‘gun deaths’ distorts the gun control issue. They are unhelpful and I reject them out of hand.

Suppose eight people get murdered on Tuesday night. One of them is shot. One of them is knifed. One of them is bludgeoned to death with a bat. One of them is drowned in a bathtub, intentionally. One of then is stabbed to death with spaghetti noodles. The other three are tied up in the car and pushed off a cliff.

All of them are now dead.

The expression ‘gun death’ makes it sound like one of these things is not like the others. But to their victims the result is the same. Speaking for myself I'd rather be shot then drowned or stabbed to death with spaghetti noodles. But in any case the end result is the same: they are all dead.

If the overall homicide rate does not go down it matters not one whit that there are fewer gun deaths. If people are stabbed by knives or spaghetti noodles they aren’t relieved that it wasn’t a gun.

But in this state

One nonsense that is frequently peddled is that people compare statistics that use different levels for their results. So they might say ‘The state of Texas has gun laws…” and then point out a school shooting. But, news flash, guns aren’t allowed in schools. (Nor is murder, for that matter.)

For issues of guns protecting people, it doesn’t matter if they are allowed in the *state*, it doesn’t matter if they are allowed in the *county*, or even the *city*. What matters is are they allowed in the actual location where the shooting took place! No criminal ever said, “I’m not going to go shoot up that school because some of the teachers *have guns at home in a drawer*!

Which means that when you lump Chicago and New York, where it would be impossibly to even imagine large groups of ordinary civilians legally and casually wandering around the streets openly carrying firearms, you cannot count the street shootings into some kind of ‘US Gun Crime Statistics’. You need to go somewhere (and there are lots of places, I live in one) where you can count on every other male being armed. Legally armed and casual about it. And ask what the homicide rate is there!

Ownership vs carrying

Which leads into the next bit of nonsense… using ‘ownership’ as your statistic. It doesn’t matter one whit if someone in your community owns ten thousand guns, which they keep at their house, all in nice locked cabinets. (Except, perhaps, see the issues of government and foreign invaders below). For ordinary issues of guns the gun must be present, loaded, and available for use. In the location where the issue is. Not at home, not in a locker, not in a safe. It must be on your belt or under your jacket or in your purse where you are. And for most purposes of deterrent, it must be visible, and known to exist, or at least heavily expected.

‘Make my day’ and other American reactions

If a knife wielding maniac comes rushing into an elementary school and screams that he's going to kill all of the children and the kindergarten teacher calmly triple taps him in center mass, all red blooded Americans call that a happy ending. Kids alive, bad guy dead.

One huge problem with this debate is that the ‘gun control’ side often lumps these happy endings into ‘gun deaths’. And then calls our ‘gun deaths’ a problem. One reason for this nonsense is that to many Europeans (by which I include Canadians, Australians, NZ’ers but exclude Israelis and Swiss) the use of a gun to kill a criminal is considered a bad thing!

(At least theoretically. I note with amusement that US movies such as ‘Die Hard’, for which the ‘bad buy criminal gets killed by good guy, often with guns’ motif is rather prevalent, seem rather popular even in Europe.)

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

The use of statistics in this area is extremely problematic, for several reasons. Let me lay out at least two:

Defensive Gun use

A defensive shooting can vary wildly. It can mean firing in the air to scare off intruders or wild animals, it can involve actually shooting a wild animal, or actually shooting a home invader. And it may be preventing some other crime, or it may be preventing murder.

A society has to decide where its values lie. In the UK self-defence is now basically illegal.[2] For resisting a rapist with deadly force, you can go to jail. In many US states you are allowed to ’stand your ground’ and resist with deadly force.

But regardless of which way your society comes down, the simple fact is that if a gun is used as intended in the US to kill a rapist or home invader, that use does not become a legitimate argument for more gun regulation. If you decide that you society would rather have its women raped and murdered instead of being allowed to shoot their rapist, that does mean that our society has a ‘gun problem’.

See Gun no Crime

One area in which statistics are almost impossible to get would be the number of times that the fact of, or even fear of, gun carrying by ordinary civilians has deterred crime. We all know it deters crime when it is done officially… armed police or security standing outside some building. But there is no reason to doubt, and a lot of reason to believe, that known or suspected carrying by civilians also deters crime. I can’t find the study, but I read one a couple of years ago which compared daytime break in rates in the US and England. And the conclusion for the difference was that the US criminals were afraid that someone would shoot them!

Purposes of ‘gun ownership’

Self-defence and ‘levelling’

There once was a gun control advocate who made an ad to promote gun control. The ad showed a woman, alone in her apartment, and began with a guy coming and pounding on the door. The original add showed the woman going to the door and looking scared. The ad cut to black and we heard a pistol shot. Oh, no, poor woman, shot by a gun… call here to donate.

Then a gun rights advocate took the same ad and took a clip where the woman reaches into a drawer (you could just see her hand), and added it just before the ad cut to black. And the ending assumption changed to the invader being dead.

The point here is that guns provide a ‘levelling’ form of self-defence. The small woman cannot go ‘mano a mano’ with the large guy, but even a small gun in the hands of a small woman provide a certain equality to the encounter.

I believe that all of the purposes that I will discuss are important, but this particular reason involves the highest level of morality. I think it is immoral to leave people defenceless in the face of others. As the saying goes, if you criminalise gun ownership, then only criminals will have guns. Or, better, only criminals, police, other law enforcement, private security for the rich people, and the military. In other words, only normal people will be left defenceless.

Check on Government

Thomas Jefferson is said to have said, “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Now there is some question as to whether or not he (or some gentleman named ‘Barnhill’) said it, but there can be no question as to the facts involved. Government tyranny is only possible when the government holds more power than the people.

Indeed the case is stronger than that. The government must not only hold more power than the people, but they must hold enough power to make resistance or revolution unthinkable. The United States was a much smaller military power than Great Britain, but it still successfully rebelled.

A bulwark against foreign invaders

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is said to have said, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” Now there is some question as to whether or not he said it, but there can be no question as to the facts involved. Civilians in the state of Texas own more firearms than most armies in the world.[3] Civilians in Texas are estimated to own 51 million firearms. All the armies in the world, combined, are estimated to own 131 million guns. That means that, at most, two armies in the world could match or exceed Texas.[1]

Now that doesn’t mean that Texas civilians all by themselves could take on… hmmm… China? India? Russia? No, for that they would need the Texas National Guard and our share of the US Armed Forces. But I would pit us against anyone else, short of a nuclear exchange. I would certainly bet on Texas Civilians against Mexico or Canada.

And my point is that any foreign invader would have to count on not only the US military, but US civilians in large mass if attacking our country.

Conclusion

So just to reiterate, my basic position is that I believe that society is best served when there is open, casual, frequent carry of firearms by normal civilians. I believe that this is most important in any area where there are vulnerable people: such as hospitals, schools, etc. I am not interested in great debates on whether people should be able to buy cartridges that hold six or ten bullets, I believe that we should not only get rid of gun control laws but actively encourage, legally and socially, people to walk around demonstrably armed.

I believe that not only is this moral, but it is practical. That open, casual, carry of normal civilians will protect the innocent, deter the guilty, and keep our and other governments in check.

[1] The math involved: Suppose there are 51 million guns in the Chinese military. That would leave 80 million for the rest of the worlds military. So we will give 51 million to Russia. That leaves 29 million guns for all the rest of the militaries in the world… less than Texas civilians.

[2] https://thenewamerican.com/self-defense-in-the-uk-is-illegal/

[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/there-are-more-than-1-billion-guns-in-the-world-and-this-is-who-owns-them

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