America’s Gun Problem: the Purposeful Killer – Muddle-headed Killer Choice
Published in Nanfang Daily
(China) on July 30th, 2012
by TanG Xuepeng (link to original)
Recently, the armed attack in Aurora, Colo., caused the tragic death of 12 and the injury of 58 others. The Aurora attack also reignited intense controversy in America over guns.
Many people have seen Michael Moore’s famous documentary “Bowling for Columbine”; he concluded that the attacks in schools and public areas were the results of American politicians’ permissive attitude towards guns and the National Rifle Association’s resistance on behalf of gun dealers’ profits. However, this conclusion is a shallow one, because most of the guns Americans can easily buy are handguns, which aren’t capable of continuously firing large numbers of bullets, and make up an extremely small portion of gun dealers’ profits. The biggest source of profits for gun dealers is still that kind of high grade, deadly weapon.
Thus, America’s guns issue is a contest involving tradition, culture and society. When the first group of Europeans arrived in America, they faced a tribal society. They had to face the wild beasts of the forest and the native Americans. From a certain perspective, guns could be seen as a tool for production; they could help in both protecting your life and hunting animals. So Americans needed to use guns, communication, cooperation and trade to create an ordered society when there were no laws. After forming groups of friends and communities, they formed a system of community militias. The Americans were able to overthrow the English colonizers because Washington unified the power of the community militias. Lincoln was able to win the Civil War because he used increased weapon production to sufficiently equip the northern militias. From this angle, letting the population have guns was the reason America was born.
After America developed into a mature, modern country, the population’s widespread possession of guns became less confidence inspiring. In the 1960s a large number of important people were assassinated: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and others. This resulted in the 1968 “Gun Control Act”. The Reagan administration signed the “Firearm Ownership Protection Act” in 1986, essentially destroying all the benefits of the previous act. Reagan himself had been hit by an assassin’s bullet, but seemed unmoved by his experience, showing the hardness of a conservative willing to defend his ideology with his own life. Reagan himself said that before exterminating the Jews, the Nazis implemented gun control, removing the Jewish people’s ability to defend themselves. So, not allowing citizens to own guns is a signal of a government that will do whatever it pleases. Of course, there is a flaw in Reagan’s reasoning. The Weimar Republic that preceded the Nazis already had strict gun control laws; Hitler strengthened them. After Reagan, only reforms such as background checks on gun buyers (such as the “Brady Law”) or ballistic “fingerprinting” systems to make guns “recognize people” could be implemented. It became impossible to implement comprehensive gun control.
Why is it like this? I think it’s in large part the result of a societal contest. Americans continue to believe that government is by its very nature “bad” and deserving of suspicion. The government is also unable to seize 100 percent of the guns. In the presence of globalization and an underground economy, anyone who wants a gun will be able to get one. That creates an unequal situation. In Martin Killian’s view, the greatest advantage of guns is their equalizing effect. In the era of fist fighting, physical advantages and disadvantages determined the outcome, but in the time of guns, a weaker person who finds themselves in danger can make a pre-emptive attack, thus a new equality has been “created.” Economist John R. Lott has taken an even more extreme step, writing a book called “More Guns, Less Crime.” His idea is that if all law abiding citizens had guns, criminals wouldn’t know who they could safely target, effectively making the collective body of law abiding citizens more menacing.
This logic appears sound. Certainly, in the American states with the most murders, the majority is states with strict gun checks, where most people don’t want to have guns, and the gun ownership rate is less than one gun for every 10 people. This means the collective deterrence power of the population is insufficient, and murderers are unafraid. However, “More Guns, Less Crime” applies for reducing crimes with a specific target – for example, premeditated murder-robberies. If the gun ownership rate rises, criminals would fear committing these crimes. It doesn’t apply for purposeless massacres, when the murderer just wants to kill people and isn’t killing a specifically targeted person. That’s because as long as they want to kill someone, all they have to do is pick up a gun and shoot. Since there isn’t a goal, innocent people can’t possibly anticipate the killer, so the deterrence effect is nullified. The Aurora case and the campus shootings are all of this variety.
Thus, gun control is really just a choice. If you think targeted crimes are more common, then legal gun ownership is worth it. If you think muddle-headed killings are more common, then gun control is worth it. Furthermore, if you think the first situation is the main threat, then as a law abiding citizen, your best strategy is to go buy a gun right away, because this will raise the community and city citizenship’s collective deterrence (counter attack) power. More interestingly, even if you are a believer in gun control, but you feel it’s very difficult to change the current situation, so temporarily it would be impossible to implement gun control, then you might consider that muddle-headed massacres are unavoidable, so it would be better to buy a gun immediately to take care of murders committing targeted crimes. Thus we can see, as long as the murder rate is rising, people have a motivation to buy large amounts of guns; now after the Aurora shooting, people are actively buying guns. This is the societal contest’s “deviation principle.”
American gun control is doomed to remain unsolved. After massacres occur, people get excited for a while. As soon as the commotion is over, the level of attention paid to the gun problem drops. Once these kinds of societal game rules have been established, they are very hard to change.
Many people have seen Michael Moore’s famous documentary “Bowling for Columbine”; he concluded that the attacks in schools and public areas were the results of American politicians’ permissive attitude towards guns and the National Rifle Association’s resistance on behalf of gun dealers’ profits. However, this conclusion is a shallow one, because most of the guns Americans can easily buy are handguns, which aren’t capable of continuously firing large numbers of bullets, and make up an extremely small portion of gun dealers’ profits. The biggest source of profits for gun dealers is still that kind of high grade, deadly weapon.
Thus, America’s guns issue is a contest involving tradition, culture and society. When the first group of Europeans arrived in America, they faced a tribal society. They had to face the wild beasts of the forest and the native Americans. From a certain perspective, guns could be seen as a tool for production; they could help in both protecting your life and hunting animals. So Americans needed to use guns, communication, cooperation and trade to create an ordered society when there were no laws. After forming groups of friends and communities, they formed a system of community militias. The Americans were able to overthrow the English colonizers because Washington unified the power of the community militias. Lincoln was able to win the Civil War because he used increased weapon production to sufficiently equip the northern militias. From this angle, letting the population have guns was the reason America was born.
After America developed into a mature, modern country, the population’s widespread possession of guns became less confidence inspiring. In the 1960s a large number of important people were assassinated: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and others. This resulted in the 1968 “Gun Control Act”. The Reagan administration signed the “Firearm Ownership Protection Act” in 1986, essentially destroying all the benefits of the previous act. Reagan himself had been hit by an assassin’s bullet, but seemed unmoved by his experience, showing the hardness of a conservative willing to defend his ideology with his own life. Reagan himself said that before exterminating the Jews, the Nazis implemented gun control, removing the Jewish people’s ability to defend themselves. So, not allowing citizens to own guns is a signal of a government that will do whatever it pleases. Of course, there is a flaw in Reagan’s reasoning. The Weimar Republic that preceded the Nazis already had strict gun control laws; Hitler strengthened them. After Reagan, only reforms such as background checks on gun buyers (such as the “Brady Law”) or ballistic “fingerprinting” systems to make guns “recognize people” could be implemented. It became impossible to implement comprehensive gun control.
Why is it like this? I think it’s in large part the result of a societal contest. Americans continue to believe that government is by its very nature “bad” and deserving of suspicion. The government is also unable to seize 100 percent of the guns. In the presence of globalization and an underground economy, anyone who wants a gun will be able to get one. That creates an unequal situation. In Martin Killian’s view, the greatest advantage of guns is their equalizing effect. In the era of fist fighting, physical advantages and disadvantages determined the outcome, but in the time of guns, a weaker person who finds themselves in danger can make a pre-emptive attack, thus a new equality has been “created.” Economist John R. Lott has taken an even more extreme step, writing a book called “More Guns, Less Crime.” His idea is that if all law abiding citizens had guns, criminals wouldn’t know who they could safely target, effectively making the collective body of law abiding citizens more menacing.
This logic appears sound. Certainly, in the American states with the most murders, the majority is states with strict gun checks, where most people don’t want to have guns, and the gun ownership rate is less than one gun for every 10 people. This means the collective deterrence power of the population is insufficient, and murderers are unafraid. However, “More Guns, Less Crime” applies for reducing crimes with a specific target – for example, premeditated murder-robberies. If the gun ownership rate rises, criminals would fear committing these crimes. It doesn’t apply for purposeless massacres, when the murderer just wants to kill people and isn’t killing a specifically targeted person. That’s because as long as they want to kill someone, all they have to do is pick up a gun and shoot. Since there isn’t a goal, innocent people can’t possibly anticipate the killer, so the deterrence effect is nullified. The Aurora case and the campus shootings are all of this variety.
Thus, gun control is really just a choice. If you think targeted crimes are more common, then legal gun ownership is worth it. If you think muddle-headed killings are more common, then gun control is worth it. Furthermore, if you think the first situation is the main threat, then as a law abiding citizen, your best strategy is to go buy a gun right away, because this will raise the community and city citizenship’s collective deterrence (counter attack) power. More interestingly, even if you are a believer in gun control, but you feel it’s very difficult to change the current situation, so temporarily it would be impossible to implement gun control, then you might consider that muddle-headed massacres are unavoidable, so it would be better to buy a gun immediately to take care of murders committing targeted crimes. Thus we can see, as long as the murder rate is rising, people have a motivation to buy large amounts of guns; now after the Aurora shooting, people are actively buying guns. This is the societal contest’s “deviation principle.”
American gun control is doomed to remain unsolved. After massacres occur, people get excited for a while. As soon as the commotion is over, the level of attention paid to the gun problem drops. Once these kinds of societal game rules have been established, they are very hard to change.
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