Political Culture: Chuckles and Cho, Part One

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Political Culture: Chuckles and Cho, Part One

I know I’m a few days late, but may I please be the one who gets to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands?

Forgive me if I decline to mourn last weekend’s passing of Charlton Heston. He was an occasionally decent, often ridiculous and altogether overrated actor. He marched with Dr. King and he headed the Screen Actors Guild, but then he wound up a despicable figure after marching the NRA into Denver for a national convention not a month after the Columbine shootings. Still, as I pondered this column’s publication date, which arrives about midway between the moment he shuffled off this moral coil and a certain upcoming, unhappy anniversary, I couldn’t help but mentally morph Heston’s chiseled visage into the face of this guy:

I’ll have much more to say next week about Seung-Hui Cho’s visitation of evil upon my hometown of Blacksburg, Va., last April 16. For now, I’ll say one thing about him: Without the Walther P-22 semiautomatic he bought over the Internet in February 2007; without the Glock 19 semiautomatic he casually picked up at a Roanoke gun dealer a month later (so much for the efficacy of Virginia’s one-a-month law); and without those 17 magazines of bullets (many of them hollow-point to allow for extra carnage)…

…without all that weaponry, Cho would have been just another loony toon hanging around the Virginia Tech dorms, and 32 innocent students and faculty would still be alive today.

Just as 6-year-old Chalris Fleming Jr. of Memphis would still be with us had he and a little friend not stumbled upon a loaded revolver while playing in an apartment bedroom last month. Instead, he became one of the nearly 1,000 Americans who will be killed accidentally by a firearm this year.

Here come the usual excuses: But Cho was insane, and the various authorities didn’t share information that might have turned up in a background check… and the owner of that revolver in Memphis (a 19-year-old who was in the next room at the time of the accident) should have put a lock on it, or at least left it unloaded… and anyway, more kids drown every year than are killed by firearms, so why don’t we ban swimming pools?… guns don’t kill people, people kill people…

And my new favorite: …if only some of those Tech students had been packing heat, too, one of them could have taken Cho out before he did so much damage.

The National Rifle Association was built on such excuses – and about $200 million in annual revenues. They’ve got an excuse for any type of gun death you can imagine, and will say anything they can think of to negate the relationship between laws that make it way too easy to obtain handguns and our obscenely high gun-death rates.

They’ll dream up fake statistics, such as a currently prevalent claim that Australian gun violence has increased dramatically since the enactment of strict gun-control laws in the late 1990s. (In fact, “illegal gun use” has risen dramatically since then – because a number of activities that were legal in 1997 are illegal today – but the overall number of gun-related murders and other firearm deaths is down dramatically.)

They’ll conflate overall crime statistics in other countries with those for gun-related crimes, to make U.S. gun permissiveness appear less lethal than it really is.

And they’ll credit increased firearm safety regulations in recent years with preventing some accidental gun deaths, particularly among children – as though any number higher than zero is acceptable, much less the 125 or so kids (estimating conservatively) who will die that way this year, safety locks or no safety locks.

One of the few statistics that truly matter is the comparison of American gun-related-murder rates to those of other industrialized nations with strict gun-control laws. For example, the U.S. gun murder rate is 8 times the size of Canada’s (and nearly 15 times higher when only handgun murders are measured), 16 times Australia’s, 40 times the U.K.’s, and about 80 times Japan’s.

John Kerry Still, such statistics are rendered meaningless by one other number: the NRA’s lobbying budget of at least $35 million annually, along with tens of millions more dollars with which the organization can bludgeon pro-gun control candidates each election season. The result – particularly after NRA efforts were seen as a key to Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 – has been the near-complete disappearance of gun control as an issue on the national political stage. Sen. Obama has been almost completely silent on gun issues over the past year, while Sen. Clinton – who in 2000 responsibly supported a proposal to license handgun owners and create a national registry of handgun sales and transfers – this year has rejected such laws and has pandered to the pro-gun crowd by touting supposed childhood hunting expeditions (presumably not in Bosnia) and bragging that she once “killed a duck.”

Of course, even sticking their heads in the sand (or parading around in hunting fatigues, like John Kerry did in 2004) only gets the Democrats so far, because there will always be some moron like Ted Nugent around to wave machine guns in the air and threaten them:

Ah, the wit and intellect of gun nuts!

Sometime around the end of June, the Supreme Court will hand down a ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, a case challenging Washington, DC’s citywide ban on handguns. It will be the first Court opinion in 70 years to directly address the scope of the Second Amendment — and considering the current conservative makeup of the court, the District’s chances of preserving the ban aren’t good.

I know I’m going out on a far-left fringe here, but I’d respectfully suggest that if we must choose between the two, we should keep the handgun ban and ditch the Second Amendment. It is, to be sure, our Constitution’s all-too-often fatal flaw.

Tags: Charlton Heston, damn dirty apes, Jon Cummings, Political Culture

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Current Events, Political Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1Py_Korry1

I think you forgot another tale from the gun culture that gets repeated: "No country will ever go to war the U.S. because so much of our population is locked and loaded and ready to rock-n-roll if anyone tries to invade."

JonCummings

There's a cooked-up corollary to that one, which is that home burglary rates are lower in the US (not actually true) because potential burglars have to worry about getting their heads blown off by a pistol-packing homeowner. A Harvard researcher did a survey of people who claimed they had used their weapons in self-defense, and found that the vast majority of them called it "self-defense" when an argument with a neighbor or spouse escalated to the waving of guns, or when a random nighttime noise caused them to briefly brandish a weapon, or some such event.

Back to your topic--one of the primary definitions of the word "state" holds that a governing entity doesn't rise to statehood until it holds a monopoly on the use of force within the area it governs. Heaven knows all the handgun packers out there--a large proportion of whom seem to distrust their own government to inordinate degrees--would have trouble organizing themselves enough to fight off Barney Fife, much less an invading force.

In fact, the scenario you note seems to apply perfectly...to Iraq. They sure were locked and loaded and ready to rock-and-roll when WE invaded...

Ms.

Uh-huh. The "castle doctrine" is said to be used as a defense mostly in the shooting deaths of INNOCENT people thought to be intruders. As far as shooting an actual intruder, you are extremely unlikely to go to jail for that.

Stephen B.

I think it's wishful thinking to say that Cho wouldn't have hurt anybody if handgun laws were repealed. I'd agree that without hand guns, crimes of passion and accidental deaths caused by guns would probably go down, but premeditated crimes wouldn't go down by much . Someone like Cho who wanted to kill on such a massive scale (and in such a premeditated manner) would've found a way, probably by using home made bombs with materials bought on the internet.

JonCummings

So, is the argument that we might as well give up on ending handgun violence because criminals will just use bombs instead? I don't buy it.

If you look at statistics across nations, our rates of various crimes are not significantly different from those in other nations--EXCEPT when it comes to the use of guns, and the carnage they create. In other words, our rate of robberies committed without the use of guns, or murders committed without firearms, is very close to Canada's or Britain's. It's the extraordinary difference in gun-related crime and murder that is striking.

The human impulse toward crime probably will never disappear; the difference made when a society rids itself of guns is in the potential for that impulse to result in death or grievous injury. Most of the civilized world is happy to point out that whether you're talking about fists or knives or even homemade bombs, it's a lot more difficult to mug a person, or rob a store, or (particularly) kill one person or 32, when you can't use a gun to do it.

Stephen B.

I wasn't trying to defend handguns or the laws as much as question your example. You used him as an example to say that in an alternate reality where we didn't have handguns readily available, the victims would still be alive. That's a huge "if" and when we're talking about someone who didn't just kill one or two people, but over two dozen, we're talking about a commitment to violence that's on a whole other level than many handgun-using criminals. This is someone who was committed to and planned on killing people on a large scale. If his ability to obtain handguns had been impeded in any way, who's to say he wouldn't have found alternate methods to achieve his goal? Your argument wasn't that it would be more difficult to kill people without handguns (which I would agree with), it was that a massacre of any kind wouldn't have happened without handguns, and I don't agree with that.
There was another college shooting last year committed by a guy (in Illinois maybe?) who was by all accounts not homicidal, but went off his psych medication, obtained guns and shot up a class room. If you had used that example I would be right on board with you. That's a prime example of the flaws in handgun laws: a normal man bought it, but a crazy man shot it, and they just happened to be the same man.
But Cho is different. He picked the easiest way, yes, but that wasn't the only way.

JonCummings

I see your point; thanks for the clarification. I do think, however (and not to open another can of worms, necessarily), that Cho's gun fetish was a huge part of his pathology. He liked the idea of the "power" he got from those guns to lash out, to take revenge, to get attention with those damn photos. Would he have gotten the same titillation; would he have felt the same power rush while committing his horrible act; would he imagine he was getting the same immortality, from planting a bomb or blowing himself up? I don't know, but from the look of those pictures I don't think so.

Stephen B.

That's actually a good point, and one I hadn't thought of. I still think he would've been a killer, but maybe of the unabomber or serial killer variety. But you're right about the titillation he got from all those "Oldboy" poses and such. I'm sure the handguns gave him some kind of adrenaline.

David_E

Said it before, but it bears repeating: Ted Nugent shit himself for a week to get out of going to 'Nam. He can pack all the heat he wants – doesn't make him any less of a coward.

eric

What is the level of "acceptable losses" we are willing to endure to preserve the freedom to easily access firearms to defend ourselves, or for practical purposes like hunting? Isn't this the essential question?

The question is similar to that surrounding any useful but potentially deadly technology. What is the trade-off between speed limit and traffic fatalities? How many deaths from the side effects of a drug should tip the scale toward banning the drug?

These are questions of judgment and individual values. Naturally, there won't be perfect agreement between people. My bias is to lean toward maximum freedom for the individual. If you want to take a risky drug, fine, why should the FDA be a grandma and say you can't. You want to play with pointed sticks? Fine, but you may poke your eye out. Your choice.

Instead of dealing with the real question, you pull out the wacky antics of Nugent or the mentally disturbed as props to dramatize the issue. You pull out the most extreme examples as ammunition. Haha. But as we all know, hard cases make bad law.

There is inherent truth in the proposition that people kill people, not guns. To illustrate, in Switzerland, every household has a gun. Their murder rate is half of ours. To quote Heston, "It's PEOPLE!" We simply have too many scummy people who want to kill other people. Whether we respond to that by the nanny state taking away the guns, or giving individuals the choice and means to defend themselves (and their neighbors) is largely a matter of values, and a question acceptable losses.

Don't tell me you don't believe in acceptable losses, or you'd be wanting to ban hospitals and automobiles, both responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths annually. Freedom, including Second Amendment freedom, has a price. It appears that in America, we value that freedom very highly, in spite of the risks.

Disclaimer: I probably have enough firearms to arm every home on my block, though I haven't shot a gun since I was six years old. It is an inherited collection. Still, I value my freedom to own them. And I vote accordingly.

JonCummings

I personally don't believe that one single death, accidental or intentional, is "acceptable" in order to preserve the right (which never should have existed, as such, in the first place) to easily access handguns, whose only useful purpose on the planet is to kill or maim people. (Though I'm sure they look real pretty in your gun case. I sincerely hope you never have reason to regret having them around.)

Instead of swimming pools or bathtubs, you make comparisons to driving, hospitals, and medicinal side effects. Don't you see the difference? Your car doesn't sit in the driveway all night waiting for you to get inside and fulfill its mission of mowing down pedestrians--it was built (and cars are used by practically everyone, every day) to help you get from point A to point B and back. Hospitals around the world are crowded with sick people who trust them to help make them well. Pharmaceuticals are manufactured, approved and sold (and then used by millions every day) to treat, comfort and heal people, not to kill them. A handgun, on the other hand, has no real use except to send a bullet flying at its target in order to inflict damage on that target--and every improvement made to handguns is designed to make them more effective in damaging just one type of target--human beings.

If you want to argue cost-benefit analyses of handguns vs. cars, pharmaceuticals, hospitals or swimming pools, the results aren't going to come out as you'd like them to.

I believe that hunters and recreational shooters should have the ability to procure tightly-regulated rifles and the ammunition for them, of a type and in a quantity as needed to serve their recreational purposes while posing the absolute lowest possible risk of "collateral damage" to other humans (Dick Cheney's aim notwithstanding). But if the Constitution is required to guarantee the ability to take a small arsenal of semiautomatic pistols to a shooting range, I say get a frickin' bow and arrow. They may not give the same rush of violent power, but they require more skill.

I don't know how to explain the Swiss' remarkable restraint when it comes to the number of firearms there--though it's worth noting that only some army officers (not enlisted men) are issued handguns and that ammunition is tightly regulated. The gun culture they've cultivated is obviously very different from ours, but I reject the idea that "we simply have too many scummy people who want to kill other people." Which people are those? Are you saying we are a scummier society than the Swiss? Can you prove that with any real evidence other than our obscene gun-death statistics?

Even if we could both agree that the Swiss have a more prudent gun culture than ours--and the Swiss can't even agree on that, since there's an active (and sometimes successful) gun-control lobby there--then we should also be able to agree that our own gun culture, starting with the Second Amendment and the gun lobby's absolutism regarding any limitations to it, simply doesn't work. Where to go from there should be the question we're working to solve.