Murder Control
Several years ago I was involved in what I'll vaguely call a violent mass-casualty situation. There were a lot of weapons and deaths, even more injuries, post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. Understandably, the experience led many survivors to work with much energy to make the world a better place. For a great number of them, this meant fighting for more gun control.
This group did not include me. In small part for ideological reasons and in large part for practical ones; namely, that guns were not the weapon of attack to nearly kill me. Rather, the weapons that nearly destroyed my existence were already illegal; home-made jerry-rigged explosives and some good ol’ fashioned arson to boot. Gun control would not have saved me; it would have worked as well as the “explosives control” already in existence.
Still, when you’re confronted with that level of pain and death, you think a lot about the topic. I’ve thought a great deal about gun control at this point. And I think the debate we engage in is incredibly myopic and, perhaps, only exists as a way to divide us. The fact is, we were never guaranteed the right to bear guns, and when it comes to the right we were given--the right to bear arms--we all mostly agree with each other.
Bear with me. ....I'll pretend that pun was intended.
While I don’t know if it would do any good in real life, and I hope to never find out, I started studying some martial arts after the above incident. If anything, I could fight back in my nightmares, and that was more important than you’d think. But I have learned enough to know that if I use the right technique, I am capable of killing with my bare hands. With my arms. We can kill with sticks and clubs. We can kill with scissors. We can kill with the knives we use to cook food for our loved ones. Pens and forks can kill. These are ‘arms’. Hell, comparable or greater numbers of people have been murdered by "moving van" as by mass shooting. On the other end of the spectrum, ‘arms’ includes nuclear weapons.
'Arms’ is not a small spectrum. And quite frankly, when we look at the entirety of ‘arms’, we don't disagree much on what we have the right to bear, which is worth remembering when heatedly discussing the topic with your fellow human beings. The most ardent gun control advocates agree I should be able to keep my butcher knife and my vehicle, and even the anarchist gun rights advocates aren’t out there arguing for the domestic-disputing drunk out-of-control suicidal couple next door to have the right to bear full-strength nuclear weapons in their closet.**
While I’m not sure any of us want to admit it, we've all come to nearly the same conclusion– the only thing we’re fighting over is where that line between knives and bombs falls, and what’s more, perhaps illogically, most seem to conclude it falls somewhere within guns. Considering the size of the arms spectrum, that's actually a lot of consensus.
The two sides will never agree; the world doesn’t work that way. But I do think both could ask themselves better questions about that line.
If someone is pro-gun control, I’d want them to ask themselves why they don’t fight to prevent people owning moving vans and semi-trucks? They're weapons capable of killing members of a crowd at rates as effective as guns. Why don’t they fight cooking knives, that a serial killer could use to kill a large number over time? I’m sure many even enjoy fireworks, and those could do some deadly damage in certain situations. I’m not asking rhetorically; there are good reasons to allow these things. After answering, I think all of that same logic should be applied to guns.
On the other side, if you are pro-gun, as I am, we should ask ourselves; why are we not OK with our neighbor having a nuclear weapon or even many less powerful bombs? Where does your own cut-off line fall, and why? We should then apply those answers logically to other types of arms, to different types of guns.
Why aren’t we fighting so vociferously for the right to have explosives of the kind I encountered? There's no National Jerry-Rigged Explosives Association that I've heard of. Not many are passionate about that. Why can we say ‘oh, both these items killed 50 people, but one is shaped like a gun, and one like a Uhaul?’ as a criteria for which to ban? Really? Shape? If we say no bombs in Bob’s basement down the street, but a weapon shaped like a giant gun creates the same destruction, are we going to fight for the right to it simply because of that shape? Why aren’t we obsessed with the millions of other kinds of weapons out there, historical and modern, biological and chemical, acid and base, intended or creatively utilized?
I can’t help but think that at this point the arguments on both sides have stopped looking at the big picture, and somewhere along the way we’ve all started letting the details of that itty bitty tiny line in the giant spectrum be used to divide and distract us. To distract us from the fact that trends in violence, whether it’s car bombs in the middle east, mass shootings in America, acid throwing in India, or knife attacks in Europe, have much more complicated solutions than control.
*In Britain they are now working to control cooking knives, and owning your own vehicle is beginning to be under attack as well. I'm sure there's still some example out there relevant to my points.
**Yeah yeah, I see y'all. I think most of y'all are bluffing, the rest just don't have the mental capacity to see how that will play out. I promise it's not rocket science.