A Dark, but Amusing Gun Control Essay from Novelist Douglas Anthony Cooper — Examines Our Culture’s Infatuation with Violence — and My Comment about the Not Obvious Spiritual Thinking that the Social Contract Requires

© 2013 Peter Free

 

12 January 2013

 

 

Citation — to Doug Cooper’s futuristic vignette about gun violence

 

Douglas Anthony Cooper, The NRA is My Hall Monitor, Huffington Post (11 January 2013)

 

 

It’s worth reading — even if you’re a gun advocate (like me)

 

You will need an appreciation for the Absurd to like these extracts:

 

 

By all means let's put armed guards in public schools.

 

[T]his will be tax-payers' money, so let's be fiscally responsible. How about barbed wire? Barbed wire is cheap, and bad guys have a notoriously difficult time climbing over barbed wire.

 

What about guard towers? I ask you, which is safer: having armed goons wandering the halls, or trained snipers in towers?

 

The thing about guard towers is that you can take out the bad guys before they get anywhere near the school.

 

And let's keep an eye on the budget here: if you put a tower at each corner of the school, and have a swath of no man's land surrounding the structure -- a sort of dry moat -- then you can minimize the manpower required to keep children free and happy.

 

Searchlights! Searchlights are affordable, and night classes can be dangerous.

 

And what you really want is the very finest high-tech surveillance equipment. . . . Infrared.

 

© 2013 Douglas Anthony Cooper, The NRA is My Hall Monitor, Huffington Post (11 January 2013) (extracts)

 

 

Which brings us back to my practicality based objections to putting armed folks in schools

 

I addressed the shortcomings of Wayne LaPierre’s idea (from an experienced police officer’s perspective), here and here.

 

Putting armed folks in schools the way the NRA, and some influential government officials around the country, advocate will not reliably solve the problem — unless we actually do go off in the direction that Mr. Cooper satirizes.

 

The NRA’s armed school personnel idea is certainly understandable.  But, even if ultimately workable in the way that Doug Cooper portrays, it is socially undesirable — according to my perhaps too “liberal” societal perspective.

 

The whole point to coming together as a Society is that we modify some our personal behaviors and freedoms, so as to make the Whole, on balance, an improvement over the narrower possibilities afforded us as Individuals.

 

From a larger perspective, and relevant here, former Marine Corporal Joshua Boston’s well-crafted pro-gun argument to Senator Diane Feinstein confuses the primordial immorality of the battlefield with peaceful society.

 

 

Corporal Joshua Boston’s letter — as an example of arguably short-circuited social values

 

His philosophically representative letter reads:

 

Senator Dianne Feinstein,

I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own.

Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime.

You ma'am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.

I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.

You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.

 

© 2012 Joshua Boston and Editors, Marine Cpl. Joshua Boston to U. S. Senator Feinstein: "No mama" I will not register my guns nor give them up, Beaufort Observer Online Edition (04 January 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

I share Joshua Boston’s sentiments about freedom and the desirability of protecting ourselves.  But, apparently unlike him and his fellow travelers, I recognize that to gain Peace’s Potential for my loved ones and neighbors, I have cede the arguably less important bits of my personal freedoms.

 

We are not all combat capable.  And most of us, probably including Cpl. Boston, believe that Society should safeguard us against Perpetual Battle.  In this, I am not persuaded that there are enough Cpl. Bostons to go around, all the time, to protect the unarmed, innocent, and physically less capable among us from gun harms.

 

 

The NRA argument is not fully persuasive on at least two grounds

 

These are:

 

(1) More guns, on more people, are almost certainly not going to make people statistically safer.

 

For every hostile encounter in which a firearm saves someone, there will be several more in which the simple presence of the weapon killed or injured someone.

 

That, by the way, is the incontrovertible statistical reality today.

 

(2) The hypervigilant end result — of vastly increasing the armed proportion of our populace — is unlikely to make most citizens feel or be safer.

 

This is so, psychologically, because under “most everyone is armed” circumstances, there will always be some armed, quasi-kook taking part in ordinary encounters.

 

As an ex-cop, I remember how alert I had to be when encountering armed people.

 

My suspicion is that citizens who arm themselves for non-sporting purposes, in ordinary public activity, have more than one psychological screw lose.  They remind me of the “wanna be” cops, who virtually always brought some form of anti-social “insanity” with them to the police application process.

 

In sum, I see no societal virtue to forcing the anxiety — that eventually and predictably comes with having to be perennially hypervigilant — onto ordinary folk, simply because some of us like to be armed.

 

 

The moral? — Satire can force (the still quasi-sane among) us to think about the lunacies that we are proposing

 

Because Gun Nuts are, by definition, “nuts” — it is unlikely that Mr. Cooper’s forecasted Dystopia will ameliorate their balance of social values.  I am diseased enough myself to understand the Gun Lobby’s resistance to gun control.  But not so far gone, as to share their uncompromising ferocity.

 

I’m an ex-cop.  To me, violence is not an abstraction.  I grow tired of the Gun Nut Mentality, whose ideas about freedom and personal responsibility are no more concrete than the abstract philosophical dimensions of a video game.

 

That’s my claim to peace-minded sanity.  What’s yours?

 

Or will “you” begin to care about gun deaths, only after someone you love lies bullet riddled at your feet?

 

Once violent Death visits, for most people, it stops being a game.  And becomes, instead a long and un-ending descent into emotional Hell.

 

The ultimate question is:

 

 

Is my right to be armed at all times, with whatever I choose, equivalent to yours to retain an un-holed soul?

 

Fundamentally, it’s a spiritual question.