People behave differently when they believe a task is nearly completed. We give one final push, one final try to get everything over the finish line. If it looks like its all over but the mopping up, we might relax a bit and make sure all is correct, no sloppiness, everything tied up in a bow. But if we believe it might all slip away if we don't capitalise on this chance, we get a little crazy. We take risks, we pare everything down to essentials. Get all the kids to high ground, even if some knees are skinned and tears shed in the process. Push through blizzard that last half hour, even when visibility is ridiculously bad.
If we are tired and have invested a lot of effort on this try we could even get a lot crazy. We play rough, snap at the others, refuse to listen. This where the idea that we will not rise to the occasion, we will revert to the level of our training comes from. We will be temporarily braver, but our independent judgment will be more random.
This is part of the ongoing discussion about gun control. You will see statistics posted that Europe - by which they mean Western Europe - has far fewer gun deaths than the US, and also has stricter gun laws and less gun ownership. It is hoped that you will conclude without questioning that the latter has caused the former. In Europe, it didn't, it was the reverse. Violent crime had already diminished over the centuries, as Steven Pinker documents in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Access to "firearms," including bows and crossbows had been steadily restricted to property owners. This reversed some as gradually less property was required for permission in the 17-1800s, but firing anything in an urban area was likely to be trouble. Only a Lord could do so. After the English Civil War there was real movement to keep the poor from having many weapons. Insurrection was seen as a problem, but so was poaching on the squire's land.
Notice the cultural distinction between hunting for food and hunting for sport, even way back when. You will see this again.
Violent crime continued to go down, but in the 20s and 30s, because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the wide circulation of firearms after WWI, Europe got quite spooked about the poor owning guns, even though there was no crime increase generally. There were, however, separatist movements everywhere. Governments did not want them to have guns.
After WWII Europeans moved to more clearly defined ethnic concentrations. Germans went back to Germany, Slavs went home, minorities staked out concentrated areas. Jews were mostly gone. So within borders, violence went down even further. People told themselves they were sick of war, and guns, and violence - and that was not untrue. Yet it obscured the fact that groups had huddled together more. Separatists wanted their own boundaries as well. There was a fondness for symbolic solutions, as there usually is. The UN would finally rid us of war. Though mass shootings were rarer than in the 20s and 30s, each one shook a nation that now had better communication. The urge to clear out the stragglers by making guns ever-harder to acquire happened in nation after nation.
As city people moved to suburbs, and rural people moved to cities, hunting for food became less and less common. Only the very poor in isolated areas had to do it, and it became more unfashionable, something that only older, uneducated people did. The rich who shot wildfowl for sport became unfashionable for opposite reasons, and their shooting estates were resented.
Thus the only people to want guns were the toffs, the ignorant poor, and the violent separatists. Criminals went to other weapons, mostly knives, from Norway to Italy. Time to clear out the stragglers, and if we get a little crazy getting over that final hump, so be it. Okay, a lot crazy. We're so close, mate.
Yet notice that "crime" in the usual sense was almost none of the problem. That was the excuse. Changing the culture, punishing the unfashionable, hoping to contain the separatists were the real motives. OTOH Americans became rich more quickly, and upward-mobility fashionableness in the US and Canada was accelerated.
In North America hunting for food versus sport was much less clear. More people hunted for food they needed, and even now hunt for food that they use. As a result, more of the population had parents or grandparents who hunted and remain sympathetic to the idea even if they don't hunt themselves. (Poor people still fished for dinner in the 1960s and still enjoy it even now. Trapping and harvesting are less common in all regions.) But there are cultural parallels in the growing unfashionableness - either the wealthy with private preserves (there is a large one even in NH) or the less-educated rural folk. You don't want to be like them, ooh, ick. An argument still made frequently is that it is "gun culture" that is the problem in America. But gun culture has very low crime rates. Drug culture, territory culture, and revenge culture have high crime rates.
Guys love to talk about gear, whatever gear they are using: tools, camping, fishing, woodworking, and guns are no exception. Gun guys love talking about guns. To those overhearing who have convinced themselves that gun culture is what is responsible for school shootings, it seems frightening. My brother has repeatedly said after any shooting "I don't even want to live in a society where someone would want to have that many guns." When the incident is arson, or a bombing, or someone driving a van into a crowd he finds some other way to blame right-wingers. But the main danger you have from gun guys, like any gear guys, is that they are going to bore you to tears if you don't share the interest. However, they more often vote the wrong way and just don't get it that it is their culture that is killing children...
So it's time to clear out the stragglers. The proposed legislation we see over and over is directed at firearms that sound more dangerous, not ones that are. It is for making it hard for you to get bad things, because those are what make you a bad person. If we can just get guns themselves to be hated as much as they should be those Others will become safer, less violent, and America will become a City of a Hill. Like, um, London. Or Paris. Or Belfast.
1 comment:
Well said.
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