Call from arms

The "debate" over gun control does have a lot to do with mental health, but not for the reasons most people think.

If you listen to the essential pro-gun argument, it boils down to this:

"I would rather live in a society where self defense is active, not passive, and is my sole responsibility. I understand that making guns available for this purpose also makes them available to be used against this purpose but it is my firm belief that:

A) Criminals are necessarily less adept at using firearms than non-criminals. This is due in part to the class (possibly even race) of person who I imagine to be a criminal and also in part to the notion that criminality is lazy and indicates an intellect incapable of becoming skilled in firearms training.

B) Criminals will always be able to obtain firearms, regardless of their scarcity, and that laws regulating the sale of firearms only affect lawful actors.

C) The best, and at times only, way to resolve a threatening situation is to actively neutralize the threat using deadly force.

D) If I entrust my defense to others, I will necessarily live with the fear that they may prove inept/impotent or even malevolent.

And so, in the same way that I accept vehicle fatalities in exchange for the personal freedom and self-reliance of car ownership, I accept gun fatalities in exchange for the perceived security and self-reliance of firearm ownership.

Furthermore, It is my personal experience that any effort to limit my access to resources has been to the benefit of those who collect power, money and influence and not to the benefit of any humanitarian effort."

You'll notice I've done pro-gun activists a lot of favors in making their argument organized and articulate. It may be a composite of many different pro-gun ideologies but you would have to do a lot of work to propose that what I've constructed here is a straw man. That said, it still doesn't stand to reason.

Examining belief A) Leaving aside any blatantly racist versions of this idea, there's no reason to believe that criminals are lazy or unintelligent, as comforting as that might be. Even if you believe that criminals are less intelligent than lawful citizens (if it's even appropriate to draw such a distinction given the construction of our laws and efficiency of the criminal justice system), it doesn't necessarily follow that they would be bad at using a gun. In fact, if the picture of society that best serves this model is correct (that there is a significant majority of lawful citizens who are routinely victimized by relatively few criminals) then criminals should be consequently more practiced at using firearms in live exercise. Furthermore, any criminal that you encounter has, on average, survived more of these encounters than any lawful citizen. Training alone cannot guarantee security, only numbers.

Examining belief B) Evidence to the contrary of this idea abounds. The amount of gun crime in countries where guns are difficult to legally obtain is consistently lower than in more permissive countries (basically just the US). Also, the idea that restricting the sale of guns will have no affect on the illicit gun trade is under-cooked. Any successful measure to restrict the sale of firearms will, by definition, shrink the sales of firearms, ideally removing entire demographics from the market including  inept, reckless, violent and criminal actors. This will decrease the market demand for firearms and thus, eventually, the supply. If your model of society is correct and criminality is indicative of laziness and stupor then criminals are unlikely to manufacture dependable firearms and ammunition in clandestine laboratories. If you're wrong about criminals, then having a firearm won't assist you anyway.

Examining belief C) Most criminal actors do not want to kill you. Firearms, used by domestic criminals, are mainly weapons of intimidation. With few notable exceptions, a criminal would rather commit burglary than murder. In the event that the criminal actor is a violent psychopath, it may be true that disabling them by force is the only way to end a dangerous situation, however the statistics (and we necessarily have plenty of them) strongly suggest that the risk to bystanders is far greater in a gunfight than in a mass shooting. Turning a mass shooting into a gunfight should be the last resort.

Examining belief D) It may very well be that responsible citizens should be prepared to seize their government by force in the event that their fundamental rights are persistently threatened. It's also demonstrably true that the law enforcement professionals to whom we entrust our defense currently appear to have inclinations to criminality and violence at least proportional with the rest of society. Unfortunately, decades of unmitigated military spending and the resulting surplus market have armed our government and law enforcement organizations with firearms, munitions, technical assets and intelligence technologies against which no citizen or modest collective of citizens could possibly defend. There is no assault rifle with which you will win a shoot out with our military men and women or the men and women of law enforcement in the event that you've been targeted. The men who wrote into our nation's founding documents the case for militia had barely won their own insurgency with the help of competing nation states and an entire dividing ocean. They couldn't have imagined the threat a citizen might face now in the event of fascist rule. I suspect that the same document written today would call for freedom of information, rights of citizens to collect and analyze intelligence, and communications neutrality; These are the weapons that precede physical violence and the tools of our subjugation when we cease to understand and control them. We surrendered the fight for destructive parity with our government when we built the world's most advanced military.

Obviously, mental health is an important aspect to overall health. It's poorly understood, institutionally undervalued, and plainly degrading under the radical shift of human experience that we undertook a century ago. But the mental breaks and psychotic behavior that underlies many (but not nearly all) mass shootings are the result of a much larger and more sinister mental health crisis that dwarfs the extreme cases seen in mass murderers. Decades of political and commercial influence have embedded in entire communities a deep-seated fear of assault. Whether the assault is from tyrannical governments, drugged out hippies, crack dealing gangsters or just plain "crazed jiggaboos," the fear is the same and is used to manipulate these communities for political and commercial gain. It's not just the consequence of a backwater ideology, as many in the left believe, these communities did not get themselves riled up to this degree. Millions of dollars are spend every year to create the environment that spawns school shooters and Unibombers. It's politically advantageous for people to be afraid and subsequently willing to spend their wages on the defense industry. This is the mental health crisis that most intimately relates to firearm legislation and it's the one that most exacerbates the problem.

If you are a radical defender of 2nd Amendment rights, I implore you to deeply consider who benefits from your support because I propose that it isn't you and it isn't any free citizen. Your steadfast belief that your defense is your own responsibility and your distrust of your fellow citizenry is relatable, understandable and also the logical conclusion of someone who has been consistently gas-lighted by the wealthiest and most powerful actors in their culture.

More than any gun, I submit that free citizens should demand:

- competent and compassionate law enforcement
- a considered and consistent criminal justice system
- a modest and strategic military
- a competitive and effective educational system
- fearful and subservient civic leadership
- smaller and better diversified corporate actors
- access to effective (and, fuck it, cool looking) less-than-lethal arms for defense against petty criminals
- transparent, multi-partisan and high-turnover government

If a tenth of the money and influence that is used to keep guns in our closets was steered into these principles, we would see a decrease in violence that would make us truly the greatest nation and envy of the modern world.

-North