Mass Shootings: Part 5 - The Guns

Now what of the guns?

As the mass killing of strangers has become more routine, it’s become customary for the media to greet each event with a lament about the number and availability of firearms in the United States. The case is basically that guns are too easy to acquire, especially the scary long guns, and that if you were to remove these from the equation you would not have the high level of bloodshed.

The United States is and always has been a nation armed to the teeth. Throughout much of our history, this has been either an unremarked upon feature of normal American culture or a point of pride, an armed and self-sufficient citizenry being one of the most stark dividing lines between the heritage American population and the stratified and generally disarmed serf societies of Old Europe. This attitude persisted in mainstream American culture at least through the 1950s, when it was still common for boys to brings their father’s rifle into school for Show-and-Tell. Like with so many things, the turn began in the 1960s, as the urban-rural divide grew more pronounced and the Roosevelt Democratic coalition fractured - its rural, more gun-friendly constituencies went Republican while the Democrats focused their demographic energies on urban centers and soon-to-be exploding numbers of non-European immigrants. The rise of the federal bureaucratic state flowed from there, and within a few decades there was a vast state apparatus (FBI, ATF etc) tasked with disarming the more problematic holdouts from the old Frontier America. The more fringe elements saw themselves targeted first — Richard Weaver at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Dividians at Waco — but recent years have seen the rhetoric from the regime and its urban power centers turn much more overtly antigun. They’ll still sometimes dress their language up with a focus on “assault weapons” (which by their technical definition are already illegal in the United States) and other scarier guns, but it’s clear to anyone paying attention that the Leviathan’s ideal scenario is a disarmed population, especially in the more rural holdouts of anti-regime political power.

It’s worth noting that the current media and legislative campaigns purportedly aimed at reducing gun violence are explicitly political. Their sights are set on the mostly rural, mostly white, and mostly conservative populations the current regime sees as its political adversaries, and the proposed solutions do pretty much nothing to address the true locus of American gun violence — black populations in the cities. The massacres at schools and concerts shock the core, but if you’re coming from a gun control perspective rooted in lowering violence, the rivers of blood are flowing from the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia, not the suburbs or the hinterlands. This violence is overwhelming black-on-black, and it is overwhelmingly conducted with handguns, usually obtained illegally. City governments lack the will or motivation to do what must be done to crush the gangland violence, which accounts for the vast majority of what the CDC labels “mass shootings” (meaning events with 4 or more victims). Urban crimes waves in the 70s and 80s were quelled for a time by harsh tactics from police departments — including the infamous “stop and frisk” ghetto disarmament strategy, and federal measures such as Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill — and for a time places like New York City appeared reclaimed from the decay. That decay has returned, and there is neither the political will nor the motivated law enforcement to push back this time. The future on this front, at least in the near term, is bleak.

__________

Many sincere advocates of stronger gun control — not the system functionaries with their eyes set on problematic demographies — seem to think that disarmament in America would look much like it did in Australia. Following a massacre at Port Arthur in 2003, in which Martin Bryant used the infamous Colt AR-15 among other small arms to kill thirty-five people, Australia passed far-reaching gun legislation that removed firearms from most of the population. This took place peaceably for the most part. Australians came to a national consensus that the “frontier” days of the nation were over, and it was worth it to give up their guns in order to lessen the chance of something like Port Arthur happening again. But Australia never had the depth of gun culture that America has had, nor has it gone through horrific civil war or nurtured such a deep-seated distrust of centralized government. Australia has also had (until recently) a highly homogenous culture — ethnically, religiously, culturally. This homogeneity contributes to a high level of social trust, which is needed to implement far-reaching forfeiture of preexisting rights.

Such an effort in the United States would likely look more like what happened in Brazil, a similarly “diverse” nation with high crime and low social trust. That country’s gun reform in 2005 meant that law-abiding citizens were relieved of their firearms while the gangs — which the police had little interest in dealing with — were left with a permanent firepower advantage. Violent crime spiked, which hastened the flight of any citizens that could afford it to the walled-off communities that had their own police force (who of course were armed). These “alphavilles” are a feature of Brazil’s social landscape, and you can find aerial photos of fortified and glistening compounds with pools and tennis courts and guard towers surrounded by the dilapidated favelas where the gangs rule the streets. Brazil rolled back much of its gun control legislation after the crime wave rolled into the financial districts and started affecting tourism, and which embarrassed them during the 2016 Olympics. The homicide rate dropped after gun laws were relaxed.

The reality is that there will be no serious wide-scale gun control in the United States, at least not without a top-down federal intervention the likes of which would likely kick off a civil war. There is too much social fracture within the country, too much distrust not just of authority and institutions, but of each other. Voluntary disarmament is not possible in such a low-trust society, as all the game theory mechanisms render such forfeiture insane. This will become even more true as law enforcement efficacy in the country degrades. Society has become unable to speak plainly about who commits crime and where, and so “equity” initiatives result in misallocated resources and aggressive political agitation that does nothing to decrease the violence. Add in the fact that activist district attorneys in many American cities are conducting systemic campaigns to not keep violent criminals in jail or even prosecute them, and the average civilian is provided ample incentive to keep every weapon they have, and to acquire more if possible. Hence the spike in gun purchases in liberal areas following the chaos of 2020.

In this sense, what happened in Uvalde, Texas, is one of the more powerful testaments in favor of civilian armament. The entire police force in that town has now been disbanded for its cowardice during the massacre at Robb Elementary School, during which twenty-one people were murdered, most of them young children. The police sat outside the school for more than an hour while Salvador Rolando Ramos shot kids at point-blank range inside a classroom, and even arrested parents who tried to rush inside the building to save their children. In the end Ramos was brought down by off-duty Border Patrol agents who ignored police orders and went in anyway.

The event is one of the most striking abdications of civic responsibility in recent memory. It surely happened for a variety of reasons — institutional incompetence, fear of lawsuit, plain old human cowardice — but such a profound failure on the part of the power structure we are to assume will protect us if we are not armed erodes the foundation of any honest gun reform conversation. Ask the people of Seattle, where the police department now has what they call a “Z” protocol wherein 911 dispatchers will silently disregard crime reports that aren’t deemed critical, including things like robberies, assaults, and even rapes. The caller will not know of this classification — the police just won’t show up. Most other cities haven’t been stupid enough to make this process so formal, yet more and more they do the same thing to their citizenry as crime rises and police walk off the job. People are left with nothing to trust but themselves.

__________

Technological advancements in armament may make events like what happened in Uvalde more lethal, but given so much time, Ramos could likely have inflicted just as much damage with a handgun. Recall that many of the deadliest massacres involved the use of handguns or simple shotguns to do most of the killing — Luby’s Cafeteria, the Edmond post office, and Columbine High School. And to zoom out to a more general view of American crime, rifles kill less people annually in the United States than fists and knives. And that is still to focus too much on instrumentation, which befits a modern technocracy staffed with “experts” who believe to path to a socially engineered utopia winds through the proper crunching of data bits.

As I’ve already said, America was always a nation armed to the teeth, while mass shootings are a modern phenomenon. There is something else going on, something beyond legislation and education and data sifting. Something has happened to the soul of the society — sapped it, degraded it, rendered it desperate. And the shouts against the void sometimes come with blood.