On the Problem of the Automobile Metaphor, and Other Notes
Billvon said:
I bike to work. You might not be able to comprehend that that is possible, but I do it.
This sort of myopia is fairly common. What you're not seeing, or, at least, not accounting for, is that even if
you can bike to work, not everyone can.
Take the Seattle area. Most of the working people you will see in Seattle proper on any given day do not actually live in the city. Many simply cannot afford to.
In my youth, I lived on a hill above a town called Sumner, Washington. My father commuted to work in Federal Way, Washington. There was no bus service; this was not exactly a bicycle-friendly route, since you would have to ride down into the valley on winding roads, cross the valley, and then ride back up the other side. Depending on traffic, the commute took between thirty minutes and an hour.
A friend of my brother's, until the house was sold in a divorce settlement, commuted from Sumner into Seattle, at the base of Queen Anne Hill. This is a wicked commute. A friend who lives Seattle actually drives to south Pierce County for his job.
But think about it for a moment. People who have jobs that they don't necessarily like because it's what they can get cannot necessarily afford to live so close to where the jobs are. And those who get new jobs cannot always afford to up and move.
Furthermore, Seattle is a constant battleground over public transportation, with the compromise result being that we have mass transit, but voters really don't like it, don't want it, and don't understand why their barista doesn't just buy a car.
Or the single-mother who works behind the desk at the doctor's office.
Or even that really nice, super-cute bartender dude who taught you how to drink a Moneyshot.
Or your kid's high school teacher.
Furthermore, we have a constant battle going on up here about bicycles. To wit, when we installed the SLUT, the only place they could find to build it was right over the bike lanes. So then they delineated new bike lanes ... that obliged bicyclists to (A) weave across the street in order to (B) ride into oncoming traffic.
Personally, I live north of town. The buses up here are neither sufficient nor reliable. The roads in this area are hostile to bicyclists and pedestrians alike. I mean, as long as you're just going down to the shopping district, there are sidewalks, but there is no way in hell my kid is riding her bike to school next year. I've had to walk that road a couple of times, and I have both sympathy and
fear for the pedestrians and bicyclists I see every day trying to navigate the
state highway that is the town's central thoroughfare.
"I bike to work. You might not be able to comprehend that that is possible, but I do it."
Except for the fact that this is a town where people would rather not spill their drink, that's the sort of thing that would get your ass hauled out into the alley around here. People are
frustrated by the lack of transit and bike lanes around here.
Sure, one can actually make the trip from the edge of Sumner up to Seattle on bicycle without spending much time in traffic, riding alongside the infamous Green River, but it's a long trip unsuitable for bicycle commuting, and it's one of only a few reserved bicycle trails of any sort of use.
As
I suggested this morning in a related thread:
"How about a no accident policy for automobiles? Is anyone willing to make it a rule?"
Well, I think the functional problem there is that we've built our economy so that isn't feasible.
And there's also a question of the difference between effect and purpose. You might as well pass a no-accident policy for the tankless water heater.
It is a question of effect versus function. As nearly any firearm advocate will remind, virtually anything can be used to kill a person. But where a pencil is designed for writing, cars are designed for driving, eggs[sup]†[/sup] are used with the intention of being eaten, and telephones are intended to talk to people beyond unaided vocal range,
guns are specifically designed to kill.
And that is a point that the firearms advocates
seem to want us to ignore or
simply brush away:
"With the number of people killed each year & the number seriously injured & the enormous cost & the obvious fact that the vast majority of humans are simply not fit to drive safely, the original purpose is not very important. It is at least as serious & horrible as the gun problem yet it seems far fewer people think much of it."
(Note aside, when I read that bit, I think of Fraggle Rocker, who has in the past pointed specifically to things like cars and cigarettes as a comparison to TWAT. 'Tis a fine point, indeed. If dead Americans are the point, then what are we going to do about these other things? I would thus expect that, as a rule of thumb, gun owners and firearms advocates would reject The War Against Terror as extraneous, regardless of dubious efficacy. Strangely, however, things don't seem to work out that way.)
Do you understand that the longer these questions stand without address, the longer these challenges press without society being
allowed to respond, that people care less and less about what some two-bit gun owner thinks about the Second Amendment?
It's like firearms advocates are rushing to the Apocalypse in order to say they told us so.
Funny how religions do that.
No. Your reward for allowing other people to have rights you don't understand is that they allow YOU to have rights they don't understand. It's part of the contract that every American participates in.
Then can you please help us understand why the right to keep and bear arms must necessarily include the right to inappropriately kill another person?
No accidents. Even the NRA used to push that point, taught from the outset of child indoctrination, as one of their merits. But when it comes time to put their responsibility where the law is, gun owners
always balk.
Look at our neighbor Iceaura. It is unfortunate that people's disagreements so often define their relationship; I would hope this occasion doesn't. However, I find his outlook inexplicable, and nothing he's offering is helpful toward resolving that problem. I mean,
really? We're down to rejecting
"sensible" laws because one doesn't like the senator whose name is on it?
No, seriously:
Holy shit, really?
That, right there, is indicative of the problem.
Okay, let's reduce that to a functional effect, and, I don't know, perhaps he'll choose to clarify:
How many women have to die because Iceaura doesn't like Amy Klobuchar?
And it doesn't have to be Ice. I'm sure he didn't
intend to sound that cold and arrogant, verging on sociopathic.
But
holy shit. This is what it comes to?
You want to talk about a slippery slope? I mean, we can't possibly have "smart" firearms that are restricted to their proper owner, because that's the beginning of the end for guns, right?
The idea of smart gun technology is really appealing to two types of people. The first type is gun safety advocates who see it as a way to cut down on accidental and illegal shootings. The second type is gun rights advocates who see it as a way to appeal to safety-minded people, to get them to embrace gun ownership. This is a very neat pairing, since it seems like it would draw together both sides of the safety debate. There's just one problem: The second type of people aren't people — they're unicorns; they do not exist.
Chris Hayes is very good at what he does. Chris Hayes found a unicorn. He found Andy Raymond. Andy Raymond is a Maryland gun dealer who was excited about smart guns. He was excited about selling them to people who might not otherwise want to buy a gun. “If this gets them into shooting, then I'm all about it. I'm all about it. That's an awesome thing,” Raymond said. “And everybody who is pro-gun should be all about that because if that gets people into the range and shooting and loving guns, that's an awesome, fricking thing for us, but instead they're talking trash.”
At the time, though, he didn't care what his critics might think—not even the NRA:
ANDY RAYMOND, GUN DEALER: This is all about freedom.
HAYES: Right. It really is, man.
RAYMOND: So even when the NRA, who's the bastion of great freedom, and they sit here and say this thing should be prohibited, how hypocritical is that?
HAYES: So — so you know what's funny?
RAYMOND: They are bowing down to fear, bro. It's cowardice. They're afraid. So they bow down to that, and that's cowardice. That is not what people who stand for freedom do. You stand up, and you fight for what you believe. You do not bow down.
Twenty-four hours of intense hostility — including death threats — were enough to change his mind. Though, to be fair, there's no reason to think that personal safety was Raymond's main concern. He was in a partnership, had employees and had broader personal and ideological commitments that he cared about deeply.
Nonetheless, intimidation worked where reason failed. Threats of gun violence worked to whip Andy Raymond back in line. That's America's "gun debate" in a nutshell: We've got the guns. What debate? The tyranny they fear in others lives instinctively in every fiber of their beings.
Afterward, Hayes reported, “Andy Raymond says his stance resulted in death threats, and he slept in his store Thursday night out of fear it would be burned down. In an emotional video after the backlash, he asked for forgiveness.”
Welcome to America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
____________________
Notes:
[sup]†[/sup] No, really. How many times do I get to use the phrase, "cloacal velocity"? And note the separation between effect and function.
Works Cited:
Rosenberg, Paul. "Chris Hayes' biggest win yet: Exposing hypocrisy and cowardice of NRA and gun lobby". Salon. May 16, 2014. Salon.com. July 3, 2014. http://www.salon.com/2014/05/16/chr...hypocrisy_and_cowardice_of_nra_and_gun_lobby/