Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Well Shoot, What Do We Do Now?

There's an old truism that runs "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." What do you think happens when all you have is a gun?

We live in a country that's founded on freedom, so naturally that means we have the freedom to go around splattering each other's brains on the wall, right? What about the freedom to go out in public and NOT have to worry that someone is going to find the slightest excuse to splatter our brains on the wall? If everyone has guns, whoever's fastest on the draw is free to loot the corpses. Whoever's most unflinching, most coldly and calculatingly willing to hold a gun to your head, take your own gun away, and have you at their mercy, will be free to do anything they want to you, just because they had a fraction of a second of extra warning that you were there before you spotted them. Guns make murder easy, and the threat of murder even easier.

Guns make it possible for people to kill who have not earned that power (whether there is any kind of killing power that is earned, guns certainly aren't it). Guns make it possible for the tiniest slip of the tongue to become fatal. Someone cuts you off in traffic? Blow their brains out. Someone's looking at your girlfriend? Shoot 'em in the balls. Boss passes you over for a promotion? Shoot everyone in your office who had the nerve to be better at their job than you. No matter how stable and well-adjusted a person is, they get angry sometimes, and if they have a gun in their hand, one second of anger is all it takes to initiate a killing spree. Which, once it's started, might as well continue, because they've ruined their life and are going to die or land in jail anyway, so heck, why not up the body count, since it just takes one extra squeeze of the finger to get rid of another person they don't like. And all this is aside from the issue of accidents. They say an armed society is a polite society; I say pleasantries extracted through the threat of murder aren't really polite.

They also say that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, and this much is true. So outlawing guns isn't really the solution. Not unless you outlaw the manufacture of guns. Not unless you police the entire world and carefully monitor the flow of resources necessary to make guns. You know, kind of the way we do for nuclear weapons. Nukes enable a few people to kill a lot of people, and guns are only slightly smaller in scale. Perhaps we ought to consider treating anything that can enable one person to kill two as serious as we do nukes and biological weapons. Perhaps we ought to try and shut down the entire weapons industry, which believe it or not could be done through peaceful means, just by refusing to sell food to anyone whose money has blood on it.

Or perhaps we should take the opposite tack, and instead of trying to stop guns from existing, just try to stop them from being useful. What would it take to make truly bulletproof armor? Can science find a way to invent padding which absorbs and redirects the kinetic energy of a bullet, so it just stops when it reaches the perimeter of your being, falls harmlessly to the ground without transfering the force of the blow and knocking you over? Could that armor then be made light and flexible enough to make into normal clothes, maybe even little helmets? Heck, maybe we'll accidentally make a cheaper and better space-suit in the process. I think this is a good research project all around.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could make the use of guns undesireable by actually educating people, indoctrinating them if need be, to understand intuitively and unquestioningly that violence is NEVER a solution, NEVER acceptible under any circumstances. Seems to me a fellow named Gandhi got pretty good results with an approach like that.

Whatever we need to do, it isn't to inform the rest of the world that they can pry America's guns from its cold, dead hands. Because they might just decide that this is a reasonable prerequisite, and proceed to complete the deal.

(Obligatory memetic exemplification of that last sentence.)

No comments:

Post a Comment