(Unrelated, just to continue the fire analogy-- yesterday the NRA was making noises about arming/training school personnel. Not only a grand scheme of slamming the global barn door after the global horse is out (another reactive rather than systemic approach) but plods on in this intellectually bereft idea that the way to counter guns is with ...more guns! -- an approach that, just by amazing coincidence happens to benefit the gun industries that fund the NRA (completely coincidental, I'm sure) and which has aptly been compared to trying to extinguish a fire by dousing it with gasoline)
I would like to engae on this because I think there are a few misnomers here and that the idea of having people armed can and does counter criminals and insane people. I think the major misnomer here is the statement:
“the way to counter guns is with ...more guns!”
That is a false statement. There is no ‘counter’ to guns as guns are not doing anything. The gun control advocates often use this statement (and it has worked as it bled into your arguments here) to place the focus of the conversations on guns rather than the problem: criminals and crazy people (and I understand and agree with the culture aspect but we are looking at the near term in this instance). The counter here is good guys countering bad guys. As the saying goes: the only thing evil needs to triumph is for good people to do nothing. When the criminal is armed, there is nothing that an unarmed person can do to stop them. Nothing. That is why the police (the good guys hopefully) are armed. When people call the police, that is why they are doing it. Others need to obey, they have the force in law, arms and numbers to make that happen.
Armed citizens are, indeed, the absolute best counter you can have against an armed bad guy and, as we have already established, there are going to be armed bad guys. If everyone was armed, there would be virtually no crime (now don’t jump on this yet, I have more)
The problem with that is, of course, not everyone is capable of handling a weapon, capable of killing another human (something that you HAVE to accept you might do as long as you are armed) and most importantly, not everyone is responsible and cool headed enough to carry a weapon. In that light, I don’t want everyone to be armed BUT I certainly have no problem if those that are responsible enough are armed.
The NRA’s ‘solution’ is not a bad one. There is nothing wrong with school personnel being armed. This is a case where it would have made a difference in sandy hook. Gun registries would have done nothing, assault weapon bans would have done nothing, outright weapon bans would have done nothing and virtually every single proposed ‘fix’ that has went to the legislators would have not stopped Sandy Hook. One person armed in the school would have.
Does it address the underlying problem? No but as stated and agreed on in this thread, there are no solutions to that. It takes time and individuals to make that journey down another road to actually change societal morals and culture. Right here, right now there is little that we can do and this IS one of them.
There are some caveats here though that I think should be mentioned because, again, I don’t actually support any of the NRA’s solutions. I don’t think that forcing anyone to be armed is a good idea. These people are school officials and as such, they are not primarily protectors but rather teachers. They do not need to be required to have weapons or even pressured into it. As I said before, I only want responsible people to be armed and I think that such a decision is best reached by individual people. Further, I don’t see the advantage in armed guards (unless the school wants them but that is never for mass shootings, it’s for crime) because advertising guards and/or an armed faculty does nothing other than protect the local area and move the targets elsewhere. To put that in scenario, in Sandy Hook, if the faculty was armed (and such was known because it was through force of policy) and there were armed guards there our crazy shooter would have just hit the bus that picks the kids up. Or the local park. Or any other place that children gather.
The reality is that we cannot place guards everywhere. We are not a police state. What we can do however is shit can the failed idea of a ‘gun free zone’ where targets gather and allow good citizens to make the choice of concealed carry in places like schools and virtually everywhere.
Lastly, you are discounting the NRA mostly because the moneyed interests that you see in the NRA’s donor list. I feel that is a terrible way to look at things. The NRA has a goal and what they claim needs to be viewed in that light BUT an argument is valid weather or not it is promoted by the gun lobby or the green lobby. Attack the MESSAGE, not the messenger and you are on good footing.
You do not counter guns with more guns. You counter armed bad guys with armed good guys.
Actually I think the way you summed up the last sentence makes my point, if I can explain it...
First, I agree with the end part that teachers (or whoever) should not be forced to arm themselves. For one glaring reason, maybe, like me, they don't believe that approach is constructive, but
destructive.
Back to the top of your post -- I sense that you're nudging toward the "guns don't kill people" mantra, concentrating on the gun itself. I have to admit I've never understood the meaning of that argument on semantics. We all understand how gunshots work; nobody's suggesting that guns get up and fire themselves. When I write "the counter to guns" that's a shorthand for "the counter to a bad guy with a gun" -- in other words the only situation where a gun is a threat. We already agree that a gun by itself without a shooter operating it is not in itself a threat. I put in that shorthand so that I can keep the snarky sentence short: "the counter to guns is ... more guns!"
What's supposed to be the obvious greater point there is not about guns; it's about violence. What I'm getting at is (again sarcastically put)- "the answer to violence is ... more violence!" If the folly of that satirical statement is not immediately apparent, then we have much work to do.
Answering violence with more violence, whatever form it takes (guns or otherwise) only reinforces the message that "you had the right approach, you were just outgunned-- bring more firepower next time". It validates the idea of violence before the violence even starts. It encourages the violence to start, much as Prohibition encouraged bootlegging.
I just don't believe psychologically that humans are deterred by an opposing force. If anything it makes some more determined to resist that force. I've already postulated that these mass shooters when they snap are compensating for some personal loss of power by rendering their victims helpless -- now, knowing that maybe some school official is armed, it just becomes that much more of a challenge: "if I can take out the guard and then start strafing people I'll be the most powerful ************ in the room!!"
So what I'm getting at here is the concept of
escalation. Basically I'm trying to boil it down to, you don't counter a negative with more of the same negative. This gets back to the whole false dichotomy of "good and evil" I guess. I simply don't believe that either "good" or "evil" can ever prevail
by force. Either one will be resisted; not because it's the force of evil or good, but simply because it's a
force. Here's where I reference your last line, the one that assumes "bad guys" and "good guys". Not only is that hopelessly simplistic, but everybody with a gun is the good guy in his own mind. If he didn't believe in what he was doing, whether that's offense or defense, then he wouldn't be doing it. Human nature is just not that simple.
I'm getting way down to my Taoist philosophical roots I guess but I just don't believe anyone is deterred simply by knowing that what they're about to do will be resisted. That's like the cheap door lock that keeps the honest people out. If anything a determined person is instead motivated by it. Just as we keep noting a gunner determined to get an AR-15 will find a way whether it's legal to do so or not.
It should be obvious that you don't extinguish a fire by dousing it with gasoline. Put a couple of CC holders in the theater in Aurora shooting back at Holmes, and you have not only a shooter
more determined, since he's now engaged in self-defense, but you also have a room full of innocent victims caught in the crossfire as well. That's escalation. And that's what the NRA proposed this week-- to
escalate school violence pre-emptively. Completely wrongheaded.
As far as the NRA, yeah I can't help noticing that what they offer of late involves adding even more guns that the absurd number we already have (as a nation), and putting them into the hands of people who may (a) not believe in the concept and/or (b) see it as counterproductive and even dangerous for exactly the reasons I just laid out -- we haven't even mentioned the scenario where the school firearms get stolen or commandeered by an instantaneous maniac, who now has firearms he didn't come to school with (what could possibly go wrong there?).
So whether the NRA propose what they do because it makes more money for their underwriters or not, it's still a solution that bites the big one, as it only exacerbates the underlying atmosphere of "gun culture". It rubs salt into the wound. That may be the corruption of their funding sources, or it may be their own myopia, but either way the NRA is doing absolutely zero to address the underlying gun culture.
So ultimately this point goes right back to the culture and value system, and the idea that violence is the way to
impose a moral society by force. I believe that value system is entirely bogus, doesn't work, never has worked, and will never work.
As another poster on this board put it, "I don't want my son going to school in a war zone". We've gone to great lengths to supposedly live in a country of peace. It boggles the mind that having achieved that, we then want to throw that concept away, as this latest NRA wet dream would have us do.
We should have a society that lives in peace because it
desires peace -- and not because "if I disturb the peace I'll get shot". That's not peace; that's a silent war.
