Author: Sebastian

Since news is relatively scarce, I’m going to start a recurring feature sharing things I’ve come to believe over the past decade. Thinking some more I realized how much my post the other day didn’t really include. Even if there’s no news I can probably think up something every couple of days for a while to fill space. I’ll start with a topic, then opine. Now, what I opine about in these might be bullshit, but it’s bullshit I think about. By all means, if you think I’m wrong, argue.

Today I’m going to talk about how we ended up with much of our current gun control. I don’t mean how we ended up with them politically. How we ended up with them politically is we lost the battle against the Gun Control Act and Brady Act. But there was a larger cultural framework that got us here.

There is a significant difference between rural and urban societies in terms of social trust. Social trust basically means whether you believe in “the honesty, integrity and reliability of others.” Rural populations have higher levels of social trust than urban populations. It’s been shown that rapid urbanization lowers levels of trust, and the United States experienced a significant urbanization, especially in the three decades that followed the Second World War. Moreover that urbanization coincided with a great increase in mobility.

As a society urbanizes and becomes more mobile, in high-trust societies like our own, there’s a tendency to formalize mechanisms of trust. In a non-urbanized society, or even in an urbanized but largely sedentary society, I know not to hire Joe because it is well known that Joe is lazy, his family is lazy, and generally no good. In an urban and mobile society, a process like hiring becomes more formalized. Joe Smith presents a resume. Maybe fills out a job application. He’ll be interviewed. Someone will ask for and check references, etc.

In my opinion, most of the gun controls of the 1960s up until the Brady Act has been driven by the inclination of an urbanizing people to formalize mechanisms of social trust. Social trust in urban or mobile environments can’t come from the fact that you generally know the people around you. I also believe this is why urban populations are more accepting of big government, because it is seen as a necessary agent of building social trust. I’m not saying the gun control advocates who pushed these issues were motivated by promoting social trust. Any successful social movement will pick up on social trends and exploit them. The question is what resonates with ordinary people not engaged closely with your issue? Sometime in the 1990s, the gun control movement switched to exploiting cultural condescension as a social trend.

Polls show that social trust is on the way down. While I think this is bad, because societies with a low level of social trust don’t tend to work very well, I’m not sure it will result in more gun control. It may actually result in less, and people feel less secure. But I think a desire of people to preserve social trust in an urban and mobile society explains much of our current gun control regime. I’m not saying it’s right, or effective, but I am offering an explanation of why we’re here.

I’m short on things to write about, probably because I haven’t been paying as close attention to the news. It’s occurred to me that there’s a lot of things I believe now that I didn’t ten years ago. Ten years is an awful lot of time to be immersed in writing about a single issue, and there’s not much I haven’t thought through, thought through again, then thought through a third time just to be thorough. Thinking about a list:

• The biggest threat to gun rights are from states like California and New York because for better or worse, these states control the broader culture and they’ve been very effective at stamping out their own gun culture. YouTube recently had a dust-up where ISIS videos were getting advertisers. After a backlash, they created a category of “objectionable content” to be starved of advertising. Unfortunately for us, they put gun videos in that category. And why wouldn’t they? Do you think very many New Yorkers or people in Silicon Valley, where most of these companies draw their employees from,  know many people who enjoy shooting? They probably know more people who disdain it.
• The primary motivation of most people seeking greater control over firearms is cultural chauvinism. Public safety is just how they justify it to themselves and others. But in reality it’s primarily, “I don’t like those kinds of people. I certainly don’t want them having guns.” Sometimes it can be “I’m afraid of those kinds of people. I certainly don’t want them having guns.”
• We’d all do a lot better to look after the gun culture in our local areas. These days I’m much more concerned about the future of the shooting sports in suburban Philadelphia than I am about the future of the shooting sports in general. Any time a club dissolves, a shop closes, or shooting programs stop for lack of places to shoot, that’s a resource that will never come back. The best antidote to the cultural chauvinism mentioned above is familiarity, and I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
• Social media is a vast wasteland and a huge waste of time. It’s not so much that people on Facebook disagree politically — I’ve never been able to get all that worked up that other people in my life don’t always share my opinions — It’s the fact that on Facebook, you see friends and family post ignorant, often vile, hateful things they’d never say to your face. I’ve been personally cutting back my presence significantly, and it wasn’t for the fact that I’m running my club’s Facebook page, the blog’s Facebook page, and that it’s Tam’s comment section these days, I’d probably just stop. Since giving up Twitter and cutting back on Facebook, I’m getting a lot more done.

Our side has our share of bullshit too, and I’ve come to acknowledge much of it.

• For an ordinary middle-aged suburban dweller, you’re more likely to die prematurely from cardio-vascular disease than you are to need your firearm. If you work in front of a computer all day like I do, that’s probably far more likely. People who choose not to carry a firearm are making a fine choice. You might look at the balance of risk v. reward and come to a different conclusion, and that’s fine too, but someone whose calculation thinks carrying a firearm is too much of a pain in the ass isn’t making a foolish choice.
• You don’t need to be the greatest gun ninja in the world to successfully defend yourself. Everyone should seek out some basic training, but I think beyond that it’s for fun. Like the link says, if you take care of the basics, you’re already way ahead of the curve.
• A lot of people out there who have guns are complete idiots who I’d feel much better if they did not own or carry firearms. The difference between me and a gun control person is that I don’t think that’s a solvable problem, and you’ll do more damage trying. There’s a lot of people I wish didn’t have drivers’ licenses too, but that doesn’t mean I get to dictate my preferences, or that there’s any such thing as an idiot test.
• There really are significant numbers of gun owners who support gun control. Even some of the very strict gun control you can find in the dozen or so bad states. Our side often likes to call these people out as false flags when they appear in media, and perhaps some are. But if you think they all are, you don’t spend enough time talking to other gun owners. This ties back into local engagement. There’s a lot of times I think New Jersey gun owners own a lot of the responsibility for their current sad situation.
• The Second Amendment is nothing more than words in a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. Those words are not self-enforcing. Their meaning might read plain as day to you, but you’re not a federal judge. The ghost of James Madison is not going to appear to make things right. Those words only mean something because people; people like you and people like me, have struggled to give those words actual meaning. That struggle does not end. In a way this should be first on a list of our side’s bullshit, because it’s the folly I run across most often.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot. But those are things I’m thinking about in terms of where I’ve come to with this issue in the decade I’ve been writing about it.