Riddled With Bullets

5.56mm bullet

I go jogging every day for an hour and I sometimes listen to podcasts using a headset. With so many podcasts to choose from, I have narrowed down my choices to Marc Maron's WTF, Harry Shearer’s LeShow, which I listened to in the 90s on the radio (remember those things?), Al Franken, and the late Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast! I prefer listening to funny subjects while I jog, but I will listen to a serious discussion if the subject interests me. 

Sam Harris has a subscription podcast called Making Sense that I listened to once last year when his guest was Ricky Gervais and they were discussing the stupidity of Cancel Culture. A few days ago I downloaded a Making Sense podcast that was recorded on May 31, six days after the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas. It was a discussion titled “Gun Violence in America” with Graeme Wood. 

I started to jog while Harris somewhat solemnly explained why he himself is a gun owner. He detailed his justification for owning a gun quite unnecessarily in tones that seemed to me to sound like a kind of apology. I know very little about Sam Harris, but based on the subjects he chooses to discuss, he seems to be an intelligent, sensible person without apparent radical biases. Unfortunately, after listening to his apologia for being a gun owner for a minute or two, I had to stop listening to the podcast. I'm rather tired of people who feel they have to qualify their opinions. To his credit, Harris thinks acquiring a gun should be a draconian process, comparable to acquiring a license to fly a plane. But I felt that listening to him any further would've been like listening to two cokeheads talking about Mexican drug cartels. I switched over to an older Gilbert Gottfried podcast with Dick Cavett. Cavett sounds ancient – which, of course, he is. For the first time in my life I wanted to know what Dick Cavett thinks about gun violence in America and what should be done about it. 

I am neither a gun owner nor a gun advocate. To give the dead horse a few more lashes of the whip, the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution has been misinterpreted so many times in so many ways according to so many agenda, that at the very least it is in serious need of annotation. 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 

Twenty-seven words written by James Madison and incorporated into the Constitution in 1791, eight years after the Treaty of Paris, the formal "Cessation of Hostilities between the United States of America and the King of Great Britain." The Continental Army had been largely disbanded, so there was no standing army. This is hard for some people to believe, but until the 20th century most countries did not see the necessity of having standing armies at the ready all the time. Some countries still don’t. 

What the United States after 1783 had instead of a standing army was a “well regulated militia.” “Regulated” means what it has always meant: supervised, monitored, controlled. Since the Continental Army consisted of members of the civil population who fought for their country during the Revolutionary War, their de-mobilization was carried out with the proviso that they would be called on – as a militia – whenever the security of the state was threatened. The flintlock musket was the common weapon, which was easy to manufacture and acquire. 

Since 1791 the attitude of the civil population toward the government in America has gone through some alterations. By now, the government is regarded with either healthy skepticism or outright hostility. According to a November 2020 Gallup Poll on gun ownership, 32% of respondents claimed to own a gun, while 44% lived in a household in which a gun was kept. A citizen who is a registered Republican is twice as likely to own a gun as a Democrat, and rural and Southern states have by a wide margin the highest number of guns per capita. 

Returning to Sam Harris, he had expressed his opinions about violence and about guns long before Uvalde. In an article from 2013 called “The Riddle of the Gun” he stated: 

Most of my friends do not own guns and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put themselves and their families in danger. Can’t a gun go off by accident? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs. 

But, unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It is true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I have expressed my views on self-defense elsewhere. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics. 

I contend that physics isn't the problem - psychology is. Harris's assertions are part of my own argument against gun ownership. 13 years ago on this blog I wrote: 

If one listens to proponents of the liberty of gun ownership, it becomes clear that, to a substantial degree, their arguments are informed by a paranoid siege mentality. They often sound as if they are being hemmed in, not just by crime and criminals but by the government and the police. Crime is threatening their property – the age-old shibboleth – and laws and their enforcers are threatening their rights. 

I must admit that, if I lived in a society – or, more to the point, perceived that I lived in a society – in which I did not feel safe enough inside my apartment or going to and from work or shopping for groceries without having to arm myself with even a snub nose .22 caliber pistol, I would move somewhere else. I love my country, but not so much that I would find living in Canada intolerable. For all the mistrust and lack of confidence that gun-owners tacitly demonstrate in the ability of their government to make laws and in the police to enforce them, they might as well move to another country too. 

But there is another bone I want to pick. My father was a 31-year Army veteran and we didn’t have a flag in my household. I am a disabled military veteran and I don’t own one either. Yet my patriotism, like my father's  is unquestionable - especially by people who never served. People on the Right like to show off their patriotism at every opportunity. They enjoy waving American flags or wearing them sewn into their clothes or on ballcaps. Politicians like to wear a tiny American flag one their lapels. Yet those on the Right are the most vociferous proponents of the 2nd Amendment. I think it is a funny kind of patriotism that dismisses the role of law-enforcement entirely. And why do people on the Right talk about the “blue line” and use the asinine slogan, in direct opposition to Black Lives Matter, that Blue Lives Matter when they don’t even trust the police to uphold the law and the security of their households? Just look at how they treated the Capitol police on January 6, 2020, when the police were within their rights to form ranks, draw their weapons and mow down the insurrectionists like spring hay.