Gun Rights, 'Positive Good' and the Evolution of Mutually Assured Massacre - Talking Po... - 0 views
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Of course no country – not in the midst of endemic civil violence or civil war – has ever tried having totally unrestricted access to any number of firearms and any amount of ammunition either. We’re already in uncharted territory.
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The fact that Trump suggested this idea was entirely predictable. I would almost go as far as to say that it is the mainstream policy response from “gun rights” Republicans, which is to say almost all Republicans who are vocal on this issue.
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But it goes back further still, more than a decade to a largely discredited and significantly disgraced “gun rights” economist named John Lott. Lott wrote some foundation studies that didn’t withstand serious scrutiny. He also got in trouble for creating fake online identities to praise his work
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What Lott did was apply a kind of crude game theory to the gun question – call it Mutually Assured Massacre.
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if everyone is armed or any given person might be armed, you’re going to be a lot more cautious about going for your firearm and shooting someone. Because they might be armed too. They might shoot back.
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we can only understand this development by looking back to an earlier period of American history, particularly the last two decades before the Civil War.
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in practice, almost everything is wrong with this logic. It relies on an extremely crude version of economic rational action and an even cruder form of game theory. This is particularly the case when you realize that the fraught, angry situations where people impulsively kill other people are by definition not rational.
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This doesn’t even get into situations like school shootings where the assailant usually intends to die in the massacre. It also doesn’t get into accidents, misunderstandings. I
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the policy arguments from gun rights advocates mostly come back to John Lott: more guns in private hands means more safety. Same with open carry and a bunch of other parts of the “gun rights” agenda. It’s pervasive. It’s gospel.
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This spurred a basic rethinking of the matter for a simple reason based on human nature: no one wants to go into a critical argument with the basic assumption that you’re actually wrong. This was the spur for the so-called “positive good” theory of pro-slavery politics.
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This began to change in the 1830s and 1840s as slavery came under more genuine and immediate threat. There was more anti-slavery agitation in the North. Great Britain had begun a process of gradual emancipation.
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In the first decades of American history, there were many slaves and many slaveholders. But there were very few defenders of slavery per se. Virtually all respectable Southerners understood slavery as an evil, perhaps a necessary evil
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simply, far from being a necessary evil or a flawed and unjust institution slaveholders’ ancestors had saddled them with, slavery was not only a good thing but the only foundation of a just society. It was right that Africans should be slaves and that whites should be their masters. Full stop
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The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.
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Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
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Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
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In retrospect, this evolution seems inevitable. People can’t go to literal or figurative war with an ambivalent commitment. The need for a positive defense of slavery was critical.
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The NRA wasn’t always against all gun restrictions. In the 1980s and 1990s, it didn’t oppose some very limited restrictions. That changed over the course of the 1990s, for a variety of reasons.
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the main reason for this change is that as long as you recognize the basic reality that guns are dangerous, fighting even the most minimal kinds of restrictions is inherently difficult. You need to change the game. You need a theory that is coherent and in line with your goal.
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Lott’s theory created a logic for that. The problem with massacres isn’t too many guns. It’s too few guns. Guns aren’t the problem. They’re the answer. It was the NRA’s ‘positive good’ argument, comparable to the one pro-slavery intellectuals devised in the 1850s.
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if you look at the progression of gun regulation over the last twenty years, it is entirely in this direction. We not only have a dramatically higher number of guns in circulation today. We not only lack the limited protections from the 1990s. We have a whole movement making on-demand concealed carry the norm across much of the country. We also have more open carry laws. All public policy has moved toward more guns, not fewer and more freedom to bring them anywhere you want.
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This was the movement Lott, with his error-riddled study, was trying to advance: maximizing the number of people carrying a concealed weapon in daily life.
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Indeed, something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 is on the verge of passage in Congress today. That would force states with tighter gun laws to honor the licenses of the most permissive ones. In other words, effectively nationalizing the right of anyone without a felony conviction or a recent mental health hospitalization to carry a loaded weapon whenever and wherever they want.