CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--I sometimes think about writing a series of 49 cent books to explore the thought -- or lack of thought -- that goes on in public discourse.
One subject that continually goes through my mind is the way we take wholly incorrect things for granted.
Here's one example. Back in the 1970s, Edward M. Brecher and the Consumers Union published a book titled Licit and Illicit Drugs. It's a little out of date at this point because we have gone through a cocaine epidemic and more recently an epidemic of opioid-related deaths. Still, those epidemics were predictable if you had read the book back in 1973 or anytime since. Why? Well, the take home lession that I got was that prohibition doesn't really work. If you suppress one human need by banning some substance or practice (low dose amphetamines or liquor by the drink) something else takes its place.
I read just yesterday an account of somebody who used to work in some labor-intensive but episodic job where the workers used the "nutritional supplement" called ephedra to stay awake and keep going. By now, everyone knows that ephedra has its own risks such as heart failure, and a few years ago it was banned from being sold over the counter. As the correspondent explained, when ephedra was outlawed, the workers turned to methamphetamine, but this has lots of problems of its own, including addiction. So the message, eerily familiar, was that by playing whack-a-mole with ephedra, the authorities had created another, much worse, problem, at least in that particular industry.
But our society continues to pretend that total drug suppression works better than a modest level of drug regulation. It doesn't, other than to guarantee continued employment for a lot of police and federal workers, while meanwhile there is an epidemic of drug overdose deaths because cheap fentanyl replaces more closely regulated opiates for people who are stressed and depressed.
Popular accepted assumption: Strong drug suppression is a workable strategy
Analysis: We have a huge trove of data going back to the early twentieth century, and it contradicts this working assumption. Yet politicians have -- with the conspicuous exception of marijuana legalization, which became too popular to stave off -- continued to hold to pseudomoralistic and pseudoscientific notions so as not to contradict their most conservative constituents.
But what about guns and gun control?
Here again, we certainly have lots of recent data which can be summarized briefly: This country has a lot of guns, a lot of gun owners, a lot of deaths due to firearms, a few mass-murder incidents over the course of time, a large number of sportsmen who don't seem to go on mass-killing sprees, a firearms industry, and dueling political points of view.
But what, I ask myself, is the working assumption set that governs our current political discourse? This question took a bit more time to consider, and the conflicting answers are troublesome to say the least.
Let's start out with the working assumption on the part of the so-called gun control advocates. Their assumption is that something can be done about the level of firearms deaths. We can come back to that question on another day, but it is the anti-gun-control advocates that is in question here.
So, what is the working assumption of the pro-gun advocates?
Based on what they do as well as what they say, I think it becomes obvious:
The underlying assumption of the gun lobby is that a certain level of firearms deaths -- including mass murder incidents -- is acceptable.
It is quick work to get to this conclusion.
What does the gun lobby say each time there is another mass killing? "This is not the time to have this discussion." It has a superficial ring of truth to it, implying that we are all so shocked and drenched in grief that we have to allow a decent time for mourning. It's as if we couldn't hold an inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic or the explosion of the Space Shuttle because there needs to be time to hold the funerals. But we also know that those inquiries were eventually held, whereas two weeks from now, after the dead have been buried, there will be no such discussion if the gun lobby has its way.
For our purposes, the gun lobby includes -- and this is the sorry part -- a substantial fraction of the U.S. congress, including one southern senator who pointed out that people also die in traffic accidents. Hmmm. I need some kind of transportation to get to work, but I probably don't need to carry a semiautomatic rifle with a large magazine into the supermarket.
(Aside: Our country has dealt with a large number of automotive maimings and deaths by mandating the installation of seat belts, collapsible steering columns, and other safety advances. We also have a system for licensing drivers and taking licenses away. Obviously the arguments of the gun lobby are not accepted when it comes to traffic fatalities.)
The rest of the logic is at junior high level: If a crazy guy can buy and own an AR-15 and lots of ammunition (with or without a background check, with or without a longer waiting period), then he can carry it into a supermarket or a bar or a Las Vegas hotel.
The excuses for doing nothing get more and more ridiculous
The latest party line is that we don't have a problem with guns, we have a problem with mental health.
Maybe the average junior high student doesn't have the background to deal with this argument, but it's not difficult for somebody who's been to college or even for somebody who has seen mental health problems in his/her own family.
Briefly: It has been possible for a lot of other countries to control access to semiautomatic weapons. It has never been possible for any country to find all its mentally disturbed people (even if it were to want to do so) and it is less possible to cure them.
Some countries lock people up or confine them to some sort of asylum. We have a few facilities for mentally ill people who have demonstrated their propensity (sometimes by killing people) for engaging in violently antisocial conduct. All this shows is that there are such people here, as in any human society, and does not imply that we catch any substantial fraction of them. We understand this latter point every time there is a mass shooting by somebody who was not previously identified and incarcerated.
But after the Boulder killings, we got a chance to hear a conservative spokesman reciting once again the party line that we have a mental health problem. You can fill in your own joke in response to that statement, but the illogic is clear -- a "problem" that is ill-defined and impossible to define much less to solve is just an evasion.
So why don't we as a society be clear and honest about at least this one issue: The policy of the conservative side of the aisle -- the same policy as the gun lobby's -- is that some fairly large number of firearms deaths are acceptable in order to protect gun ownership in this country. Additionally, the policy, now well established, is that a large number of mass shooting deaths are acceptable in order to preserve the right to own semiautomatic rifles and large-load magazines.
It's really that simple.
By the way, I don't think that the bulk of rifle owners, and even the bulk of AR-15 owners, really want to see these mass shooting events. But when we hear from the more outspoken among them, we hear about their fear of having their guns taken away from them. They really do understand the inherent logic of assault weapon ownership: If anybody can have one, then some few of those anybodies will do something stupid, and the result will be bodies all over the floor.
And lastly, I would like to deal with one more argument that is used in the more juvenile level of discussions. It goes something like this. The pro-gun ownership person is advised to show pictures of various guns including rifles that don't look like military weapons but do the same thing that an AR-15 can do. The naive viewer won't be able to identify the latter as "assault weapons," and the gun advocate has won his "gotcha" moment. Similarly, the pro-gun advocates at this more juvenile level will point out that the anti-gun folks don't understand all the details of what is a clip vs. what is a magazine, etc etc ad infinitum. The answer of course is that it isn't necessary to be a firearms expert to understand that a system for delivering large number of lethal objects into large number of people in a matter of a few seconds is something to be concerned about, whatever you call it and however it looks.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
