Gray Matters
Truck Captain Stumpy said:
another point I would like to have you consider... which rights are more important? which parents should have their rights revoked... ALL parents make mistakes. It is not the right of one to judge another or even consider themselves ABLE to judge another until they have lived the same life with the same hardships. YOU have been shot at, as have I... it is NOT a fun thing to have happen. Knowing that someone wants to kill you and is willing to try it... so we have had similar experiences there, but in NO WAY can I consider your experience the same as mine. Apples to oranges, right? Basically, I just wanted to point out that the Utopia of one person is the HELL of another... don't read anything other than THAT into the paragraph above, please.
Mistakes? I did some work, when I was a kid, with my father, that I would not have been legally allowed to do if he included it under the proper business. Had I fallen off a roof, mucked up a leg losing control of the rotohammer, or managed an electric shock, yeah, that would not have been good for his parental rights.
When I lived in Oregon, my girlfriend's family was a proper sort of libertarian troupe; people who actually believed in
everybody's rights instead of just their own.
Real liberty, not the sort of tripe pushed by the new Pauline Evangelism; not the sort of "libertarianism" that gets headlines in our political discourse.
There are many reasons, some of which probably suck. But, to the other, it's hard to argue with their disgust at having childrens' services crashing down on them because their nine year-old daughter broke her arm falling out of a tree.
Then again, I would also note that the father was one of the least responsible gun owners to ever use the phrase "responsible gun owners"; the litany is appalling. And he tells the sorts of gun stories that "responsible gun owners" seem to think hilarious unless someone like me relates it to them, and then they get all angry and defensive about how dare someone besmirch "responsible gun owners" by including this fellow, despite the fact that they would have simply laughed had
he told them the story.
But, yeah. All this is just sort of filler. In the end, it's hard to draw the absolute line in the sand; absolute lines erode more quickly than we might expect.
But at the point that one is putting an automatic firearm in the hands of a nine year-old, with the predictable result that someone dies, yes, the parents have unquestionably crossed that line.
To illustrate: Jailhouses are terrible places. They are designed specifically to be unhealthy and to foster more crime. There are plenty of ridiculous violations of human dignity in the standard American jailhouse; having never actually spent a night inside a
prison, I couldn't tell you how much worse it actually is. However, in these United States, gaolers who continue to use terms like "correctional" or "rehabilitative" or "peace" officers deserve the utmost scorn for the inherent lie. Our penal system is a growth industry intended to create more crime so that the burgeoning private prisons can make more money.
Still, though, is it
really torture to keep the lights on in the jail cells? Is it
really torture to set the climate controls to encourage microbial growth and infection? There are people in my political circles who will certainly make the argument that yes, this is definitely a form of torture. More realistically, though, what we can say definitively is that such circumstances not only do nothing to encourage correctional, rehabilitative, or peaceful outcomes, they also specifically encourage the opposite.
To the other, consider what we, the People, were allowed to see of what happened at Abu Ghraib, or what happens at Guantanamo. There is no question that certain of these behaviors and processes are torture.
And in between is this huge gray area wherein people argue and make excuses for violating even their own ethics, speak nothing of ethical convention.
And while torture is an inflated comparison to be certain, the inflation also allows us a better view of the gray area in an ethical consideration.
To wit, I can't tell you the dimensions of the gray area in parenting, but there comes a point at which something is observably beyond the pale.
I can stand at a land border between two political entities—cities, counties, states, provinces, nations, &c.—and while I cannot necessarily tell you when, exactly, you have left one place and entered another, there is also a point where I can say you are clearly on the other side of that border. You know, like if I'm standing near a border marker and require binoculars to see you standing a mile away. At that point, you're clearly in the next state, or some such.
So maybe I might say, "Why do you let your kids ride their dirtbikes on the street? Why do you encourage them to do so?" Setting aside the traffic laws, this would be one of those odd questions of, "Well, yeah, it's an inappropriate decision, but does it constitute disqualifying neglect or criminality?"
And we ask these questions about parents who let their kids get themselves killed.
Does my tween daughter really need a pilot's license? Even still, does she really need to be behind the stick of a FAR 103 aircraft? And, sure, my family is, among other things, a sailboat family, but we don't even send her out solo in Lasers or Sunfish. I can't imagine putting her at the helm of a proper sailing yacht for a long solo voyage.
These come up every once in a while. A few years ago, a teenager died when her Cessna crashed during a solo flight. Recently, a family lost its teenaged daughter, reminding, of course, that she knew the risks, when she set out on a solo trans-Pacific sail.
There is even a low-key debate going on in our culture about liveaboard parenting, and whether that is appropriate for the children.
And it just seems to me that there are some things we might do wherein the risks are so apparent that there is no real excuse for undertaking the endeavor.
Even with the differences 'twixt now and then—these days, you wouldn't take your twelve year-old son up on the roof to clean the gutters, at least not where I live—there are still gray zones in the ethical consideration. After all, I was allowed to walk on the roof of our house when I was eight, in part because my father needed someone to hold the tarpaper in place while he laid new roof shingles.
Setting aside the whole bit about trying to knock Bart off the roof, or Homer putting the claw into his eye, one of the interesting thngs about that gag in
The Simpsons Movie is that when I was a kid, there would be no question that it was okay for Bart to be up there with his father's permission and supervision, while that's the sort of thing that might get childrens' services sicced on you today.
Ethical gray zones.
What I don't understand in that context is how the idea of putting an automatic weapon in the hands of a nine year-old, under any circumstances save a war rolling down your street with no path of retreat, falls into any ethical gray zone.
On a barely relevant note, I think of young Mason.
Mason was featured on Penn & Teller's
Bullshit! program, in an episode that delved into the question of children, video games, and gun violence. The show called bullshit on the oft-asserted notion that video games are the reason children become violent criminals.
Mason was a young gamer, not even properly tween. His parents had no objection to the violent video games, and even seemed to encourage him to play.
Mason had never fired a gun before. With the parents' permission, P&T asked if he wanted to. He said yes.
They went out to a range with an instructor, who
bolted an AR-15 in place, demonstrated how to fire it, and then allowed Mason to step up and squeeze off a few rounds.
Everything went about as well as it could, or so it seems.
The episode continued, and at the end, Penn offered a special commentary coda, apologizing to the audience for not showing them what really happened. And then they played the tape.
Mason squeezed off a few rounds, stepped back from the rifle, removed his safety glasses, removed his earguards, calmly walked to his mother, fell into her arms, and bawled ceaselessly. That gun scared the holy living shit out of the boy.
Penn's last words for the episode: "Sorry, Mason."
I get why they wanted to do it. I get why everyone approved. And I get why, seeing what they had just done to this little boy's mind, Penn wanted nothing more than to undo what just happened. He didn't mean to hurt anyone, but he could not undo the absolute horror he had just seared into the mind of a nine year-old.
And in this comparison, yeah, even setting aside the safety considerations of the Uzi not being fixed in place, I still don't get how putting a fully automatic weapon in the hands of a nine year-old seems like any sort of good idea. That is to say, and perhaps this is just my ignorance, but basic
physics would seem to prescribe against putting an automatic firearm in the hands of a nine year-old.
And when we consider questions of which rights and which parents and which bad decisions, I don't see how this falls into a gray zone; it's
miles over the line.
But, of course, it's true, I'm not part of the gun culture, don't want to be part of the gun culture, disdain the gun culture in general, and thus can reasonably speculate there is something obvious and fundamental about the outlook of the gun culture and its constituents that I am missing.
