General and Particular
KitemanSA said:
Can you say "breaking and entering"?
Okay, at this point I'm willing to offer an observation about certain persuasive discourse—politics, sales, law—in which a pattern has long been apparent, but I think I can rephrase it in a slightly new form:
In controversial subjects, the more conservative view tends toward more immediate concerns, while a more liberal view looks at broader situational boundaries.
That is to say, you—whose argument falls on the conservative side of my American interpretation of the political scale—are offering a valid consideration of the moment.
The counterpoint, of course, is looking at the broader potential.
I completed my fortieth annum about two hours ago; the rest of the day will be spent, as you might expect, in various celebrations.
But I raise the point of having achieved my hilltop in order to point out that through the course of fourteen thousand six hundred ten days on this planet, I have had exactly
one occasion arise in which, maybe, "it would have been nice to have a gun".
Except that even if I had one, I wouldn't have been shooting back.
A friend wanted to mourn a suicide, so we went to a park late at night that he could wander off by himself and sit at the place where his friend passed. Apparently, this interrupted some nefarious business; as two of us were walking back down the hill toward the car, with the third still back at the suicide site, a white Cadillac pulled into the parking lot, slid sideways on the gravel, and then gunfire erupted. Sixteen plus one, nine millimeter. That's a long wait when you're on the deck behind a tree.
The thing is that they weren't really shooting
at us. I certainly could have asserted myself with a gun had I actually owned and carried one, but what kind of gun? I'm not walking around with a rifle slung on my back, and I can tell you this much, that the six plus one Sig .380 I once admitted to a friend I would carry if I ever discovered the need to carry a handgun simply wouldn't have hit the target from that range. In truth, my biggest danger from the Nine was an accidental hit; you can't sharpshoot anyone at that range with a handgun, even if you're not simply unloading the thing the hard way.
So, no, I would not advise, under such circumstances, returning fire. I had a slight elevation advantage, and could reasonably gamble that the houses behind the shooter would be safe from direct fire, but there is no way anyone could
guarantee collateral safety. Returning fire would have been a bad shot.
If we count the days, a gun
might have served me on approximately sixty-eight one-hundredths of a percent of my time on Earth, and that number will only be declining.
Meanwhile, in the last eight years, my daughter has reminded me repeatedly that I'm not hiding certain things well enough if I don't want her to see them. Indeed her mother kept the infamous handgun with which she threatened to shoot me in a lockbox that eventually got moved to the attic above the garage. Our daughter had the key, knew it went to the lockbox, and we were lucky.
To the other, the ammunition was stored separately, but still.
The firearm is no longer suitable for specific home protection, as it hides above the garage in a fireproof safebox.
If some future situation arises in which my former partner thinks she's being stalked or harassed, I have no doubt that she'll bring the gun down.
The
one occasion I have used my blade as a weapon, it was only for show, and only because I was
that annoyed with the guy, a crazy neighbor I've recalled here before—one punch to the upper left forehead, just in front of the temple ridge, would have dropped him into a coma; the knife was completely extraneous.
Still, though, in the last seven years—since my partner and I separated—my daughter has discovered my knife, marijuana accessories, and even personal recreation devices that I thought were sufficiently hidden.
And, yes, most of those discoveries came, blessedly, when she was three; her memory presently does not easily access those files, although the one thing she definitely remembers from that time is cornering the cat and learning that kitty claws are sharp and hurt very much.
In the meantime, though, I think back to my teenage years when our house painter got called off the job because his five year old son had been accidentally shot to death by some moron plinking in a field with a .22. Or, more recently, the spate of child deaths, including in the houses of law enforcement officers, when the youngsters found an unsecured firearm. The thing is that every "responsible gun owner" is a "responsible gun owner" until he or she isn't, and that threshold seems to involve grievous human damage. Indeed, I've had friends who argue the bit about not punishing responsible gun owners who will also tell insanely irresponsible stories about themselves and guns. My favorite is the tale of clubbing a two-legged buck to death with the butt end of a .44 revolver, but, as you might expect, other hunters who hear that story are mortified. Of course, that family of responsible gun owners was disrupted when another responsible gun owner admitted that he had the gun in his hand, didn't know it was loaded, and pointed it at his friend's chest, killing the younger son instantly. (Incidentally, the cash value of human life in Oregon under such circumstances was, in the early nineties, just shy of $1,150.)
My point being that when the moment comes, sure, maybe it would be helpful to have a gun on hand, but the ambient danger on the rest of those days ranges—perhaps depending on political persuasion—somewhere between disconcerting and outright insane.
There is, in fact, a solution that doesn't require heavy "gun control". Quite simply, make people criminally and civilly responsible for every round that comes from their firearm. I mean, we get it. Criminals at the door, and so on. But do you, for instance, in the act of firing a gun in order to avert a perceived threat to your wellbeing, have the right to "accidentally" kill an innocent person?
And what about these accidental shootings? When it's a black kid who takes his uncle's gun to school and hurts someone, the uncle is prosecuted. When it's a white kid in Oklahoma who finds his uncle's gun and kills himself, the sheriff's deputy uncle is protected by the idea of an "accidental" shooting.
So there is the essential proposition: No accidental shootings (
see #
130,
214).
No reduced charges. No accidents. Manslaughter, assault and battery, assault with a deadly weapon. No more of these "accidents" or "culpable negligence" sympathy charges. Heavy punitive civil damages. These people want to be responsible gun owners, then let them be
responsible.
We get the part about somebody banging down your door. What we don't get is the idea that responsible gun owners don't have any responsibility toward a device designed specifically for killing.
And when black or white, law enforcement or civilian, criminal or responsible gun owner, "accidental" and extraneous "self-defense" shootings are met with the full force of the law, that question will begin to dissipate.