A reader familiar with the three-axes model asks,
The oppressed would seem to be victims of violence, but wouldn’t that make criminals the oppressors? How do hunters, recreational shooters, and the NRA end up being the bad guys?
1. The progressive model requires a villain who belongs to some sort of privileged class. Criminals do not fit the bill.
2. Hunting and recreational shooting are not approved activities for city-dwellers. Rural folks need to start acting like normal people and taking Zumba classes, going to restaurants run by celebrity chefs, and spending more time on smart phones.
Point 2 seems uncharacteristically uncharitable for this blog. It might not even be correct: it certainly doesn’t match the conscious thinking of gun control advocates I talk to, and the burden of proof for even reasonable-sounding “here’s what your subconscious is really thinking” theories ought to be pretty high.
Point 2 seems pretty accurate to me. I move freely in both camps; but that is pretty rare, as there is a significant cultural disconnect. What I mean by that is not that they cannot understand what the other group does, but that it is impossible for them to understand *why* anyone would want to do that. There is no conceivable motivation within the average SF inhabitant for getting up at 4am to stalk, kill, and gut a deer. There is just no slot for that to go in. Same for the average guy in rural OK and the thought of a Hookah bar.
I don’t want to inject religious overtones, because this is merely cultural not religious, but it is nearly as much an “inside/outside” kind of divide as how the modern, post-religious sorts tend to look at religious practices. They are quaint and interesting sometimes as a kind of show or historical artifact, but you wouldn’t want to be around someone that *believed* that stuff.
I’ll bet it goes beyond that for some. For some one the left, hunting is an act of exploitation of the animals being hunted. It puts the hunter in the oppressor class. You’ve heard the slogan “meat is murder,” right?
I think it’s more a matter of progressives suspecting the intentions of people who are skeptical of the government’s intentions. Government is the one institution powerful enough to take on the oppressors (mostly corporations, it seems). Who would oppose it? People who are crazy or evil. Crazy or evil people shouldn’t be allowed to have guns; they’re dangerous.
This is why progressives (and centrists) are sometimes adamant about the importance of the Second Amendment . . . to hunters and target shooters, and it’s also why they go to such pains to distinguish evil guns (“assault weapons”) from good guns, even though the differences are arbitrary and cosmetic. They want to take guns away from crazy and evil people; there’s no need to disarm hunters.
Both of Arnold’s points seem to be imprecise and jaded. I think roystgnr above put it well.
A summary of the pro-gun control arguments I hear from my friends is:
1. Guns make it easier to kill people. Sometimes from criminal acts, sometimes accidentally, sometimes for suicides, and sometimes in mass killings.
2. We need to remove the power to kill so easily from those who would use it
3. It is hard to predict who would abuse the power of guns
4. There is an assumption that the number of people killed by guns by accident is greater than the number of people saved by using guns for protection
To fit it into the oppressor/oppressed model:
The oppressed are all of those killed by guns
The oppressors are directly the killers, and indirectly, those who insist on maintaining the right to own guns for hobby or protection, even though it allows violent users to ALSO own guns. Therefore all who support the freedom to own guns are oppressors in an indirect sense.
Those same arguments could be used to argue for the banning of automobiles. How would you justify banning guns but not automobiles if protection of innocent life is the goal?
Good point. My first thought is that a gun is a weapon. I don’t think anyone would have a problem banning extreme weapons. Eventually you have a to draw the line at which weapons are allowed to be popularly owned, and which aren’t.
Problems: Who is ‘you’? What is the meaning of ‘extreme’? Do those enforcing the line use the weapons banned from ‘popular ownership’?
Guns are designed specifically for killing quickly and easily. Whether it’s people or animals, that is their only use. I don’t think they can realistically be compared to cars, which, if used properly, don’t kill anyone. That’s not what they’re made for.
Additionally, there are a number of sensible regulations in place to make cars safer. You must pass a test and get a license to drive one. You must regularly renew that license. Cars must be registered. All cars come with locks to prevent them from falling into dangerous hands. There are limits on speed in order to keep people safe.
If you want to compare cars and guns, then why don’t we enact sensible gun regulations to keep people safe as we do with cars? Why not require all people to have licenses and permits to own them? Why not require them to take practical and written tests in order to get a license, and renew that license regularly? Why not limit the “speed” with which guns can kill people by banning high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons?
Personally, I think the comparison between cars and guns is absurd, but if you want to talk about it, then let’s at least compare them properly.
Fair enough, but how do these arguments fit within Arnold’s ‘3 axis’ framework? Firearms can also be analogized to tools. What would you say to someone who argued (from the liberty/coercion axis) that the freedom to own tools is more important than preventing, through use of coersive regulation, the relatively limited risk of death by criminal use of said tool?
I agree that the comparison between cars and guns is absurd, but for a different reason. This says why better than I can: http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/blog/item/we-need-to-regulate-cars-the-way-we-regulate-guns
I’m not convinced that this is a charitable post.
This post may not be charitable, but it is exactly right.
The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to bear arms. Has any law ever been so ambiguous? What are arms? What does it mean to bear them? At least with the first amendment we know exactly where we stand: Freedom of speech. It couldn’t be any clearer. But, the right to bear arms leaves the second amendment open to different interpretations. We need gun permits to carry a concealed weapon. Do we need knife permits? No. Yet both can, and often do, cause death. We can own a gun, or a rifle, or a sub-machine gun, or a machete, and dozens of other tools to kill, even our own bare hands. So, gun control is a debate in our country that makes no sense unless you broaden the ban or acceptance to include all instruments of death.::
Warm regards
http://homeimprovementstuffs.com/