Every time there is a tragedy involving a gunman shooting innocent people, whether at a mall in Omaha or a Mega-church in Colorado, the ensuing commentary offers a rehashing of all the usual, tiresome debating points that we have all grown accustomed to. The debate remains stuck. Those who filter the tragedies through anti-gun eyes take it as evidence that we need either more, or stricter, gun laws. The Second Amendment absolutists will brook no erosion of the Right to own a gun. When debating positions fail to move despite evidence that might well be thought informative, deep emotions are usually involved. At the same time, it is worth wondering if the debate has stagnated not only for emotional reasons, but for cognitive reasons.
The Cognitive Scientists define metonymy as:
"the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity ... [it] is one of the basic characteristics of cognition."
For cognitive purposes our minds organize data in categories. Words are symbols for the things they represent. The ways in which such words are encoded and the various meanings contained in them determine how we think of the things the words signify. For most liberal Americans, and especially for Western elites, guns have long since left the realm of "tools" and entered a realm of signification which has overwhelmed our discussion.
For someone who grew up in a suburban Northeast population center, from the post-war years on have been a time where several ideas have been growing in strength and rarely questioned. Throughout school, we were taught that all disputes could be mediated through words alone. We were taught that fighting was never an acceptable response to any provocation short of an outright assault. (More recently, the idea that an assault could be grounds for a violent response has even been brought into question; this is especially so in Europe, perhaps because they are so much more civilized than America.) This has been codified in the liberal idealization of "gun control", something I alluded to in a post on Liberal Dis-Armament:
One of the core beliefs of liberalism is gun control. In their lexicon, guns kill people and access to guns must be controlled so that murders, suicides, and accidental deaths from firearms can be minimized. The core fantasy is that once all gun ownership is strictly controlled, only the police will have guns and we will all be safe. The model for gun control has always been the Europeanized societies of old Europe and Canada, of which my home town of New York is a fine example, where the citizenry not only has an extremely limited right to firearms but has a very limited right to self-protection. If I am ever threatened, I am enjoined to call 911 and wait for the police to arrive. I do not think I need to point out that there are certain flaws in this line of reasoning. Perhaps if we had a police officer on every corner, we could have some confidence that the police could protect us in an emergency; however, to have a police officer on every corner would mean that we would be living in a totalitarian society, and then who would protect us from the storm troopers?
Once the idea of gun control had been firmly established in liberal political thought, the obvious next step was to work toward mental disarmament. Once the tools of aggression are controlled, the expression of (male) aggression became stigmatized.
The tension between the unquestioned support of gun control and the reality of a dangerous world in which defenseless people must rely on others to defend them, often in situations where such others are not nearby, leads to curious reporting decisions. In the New York Times, it is only in the 11th paragraph of the story, after reporting such vital information as that the founder of the Mega-church had resigned in disgrace over a year ago when a relationship with a male prostitute was revealed, is the salient fact noted:
The Colorado Springs chief of police, Richard Myers, said that after the parking-lot shootings the assailant ran into the 10,000-seat church with his high-powered rifle, and was confronted by an armed church security guard, who shot and killed him. Neither the gunman nor the victims in Colorado Springs were immediately identified by the authorities.
Others, Michelle Malkin prominent among them, have noted that the heroism of the guard (who she reports is a woman) could well be the main story here, yet the MSM will always minimize such news for fear of giving support to those who believe that an adult populace, seeing themselves as responsible adults, might take seriously the idea of self-defense from the predators and psychopaths who are inevitable even in the most highly civilized culture.
The idea of "guns" conjures up Dodge City shoot outs on he subways of New York and rampaging murderers such as the Virginia Tech killer. "Guns" has become such a supersaturated idea that those who fear them cannot even recognize their failures of logic. Those who would go on a rampage and murder innocents will never be deterred by rules and laws; only the law abiding are deterred.
In the 1970s, the PLO attacked a school in Israel. Twenty-two children were murdered in the Ma'alot Massacre. The Israelis decided that their schools would no longer be "gun free zones" and that teachers would be allowed to bring their weapons to class. There has not been another such attack. After Beslan, a good case could be made that such a response would be advisable for all potential targets of the nihilists who wish to kill in the name of Islam yet to even contemplate raising the suggestion in New York is to recognize the significant risk of being labeled a crack pot or worse.
After 9/11 every man, woman, and child in America became a suspect. As one writer noted when discussing the TSA and airport security, the Israelis look for terrorists, we look for weapons. The vapidness of the process is revealed every time an elderly grandparent takes off his or her shoes.
Our approach to guns is to treat everyone as a murderer who must be kept from possessing a gun. This alleviates the responsibility for identifying actual murderers but is also leaves our population peculiarly vulnerable to the worst among us.
It is long past time when we began to educate ourselves that guns are not the problem, it is evil people with guns who most endanger us.
Addendum: Ed Morrisey suggests a novel approach to one aspect of our gun problem.
Do Gun Free Zones Create A Legal Liability?
Not being a lawyer, this question will exist more as a philosophical one, much as we treated it on Saturday's Northern Alliance broadcast. Mitch Berg and I debated the efficacy of gun-free zones in the wake of the Omaha mall shooting that left nine people dead, but before the two shootings at New Life church facilities that left eight dead. In at least the first shooting, the perpetrator conducted his murder spree in a commercial facility whose owners had marked it as a gun-free zone, a designation that keeps concealed-carry licensees from bringing their weapons into the building. We both wondered if that decision opened the owners to legal liability for forcing people to disarm themselves without having enough security to protect them.
The risk of mall attacks, attacks on religious institutions, schools, and other "soft targets" will be with us indefinitely. I do not take great solace when I go to the mall in knowing that the only people there with guns are those who carry them illegally.
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