17 More Dead Kids

[Montmorency]

Reposting from ""F*** You, I Like Guns."" Mind the quotation marks.

I’ll start. I’m an Army veteran. I like M-4’s, which are, for all practical purposes, an AR-15, just with a few extra features that people almost never use anyway. I’d say at least 70% of my formal weapons training is on that exact rifle, with the other 30% being split between various and sundry machineguns and grenade launchers. My experience is pretty representative of soldiers of my era. Most of us are really good with an M-4, and most of us like it at least reasonably well, because it is an objectively good rifle. I was good with an M-4, really good. I earned the Expert badge every time I went to the range, starting in Basic Training. This isn’t uncommon. I can name dozens of other soldiers/veterans I know personally who can say the exact same thing. This rifle is surprisingly easy to use, completely idiot-proof really, has next to no recoil, comes apart and cleans up like a dream, and is light to carry around. I’m probably more accurate with it than I would be with pretty much any other weapon in existence. I like this rifle a lot. I like marksmanship as a sport. When I was in the military, I enjoyed combining these two things as often as they’d let me.

The fact is, though, when I went through my marksmanship training in the US Army, I was not learning how to be a competition shooter in the Olympics, or a good hunter. I was being taught how to kill people as efficiently as possible, and that was never a secret.

As an avowed pacifist now, it turns my stomach to even type the above words, but can you refute them? I can’t. Every weapon that a US Army soldier uses has the express purpose of killing human beings. That is what they are made for. The choice rifle for years has been some variant of what civilians are sold as an AR-15. Whether it was an M-4 or an M-16 matters little. The function is the same, and so is the purpose. These are not deer rifles. They are not target rifles. They are people killing rifles. Let’s stop pretending they’re not.

With this in mind, is anybody surprised that nearly every mass shooter in recent US history has used an AR-15 to commit their crime? And why wouldn’t they? High capacity magazine, ease of loading and unloading, almost no recoil, really accurate even without a scope, but numerous scopes available for high precision, great from a distance or up close, easy to carry, and readily available. You can buy one at Wal-Mart, or just about any sports store, and since they’re long guns, I don’t believe you have to be any more than 18 years old with a valid ID. This rifle was made for the modern mass shooter, especially the young one. If he could custom design a weapon to suit his sinister purposes, he couldn’t do a better job than Armalite did with this one already.

This rifle is so deadly and so easy to use that no civilian should be able to get their hands on one. We simply don’t need these things in society at large. I always find it interesting that when I was in the Army, and part of my job was to be incredibly proficient with this exact weapon, I never carried one at any point in garrison other than at the range. Our rifles lived in the arms room, cleaned and oiled, ready for the next range day or deployment. We didn’t carry them around just because we liked them. We didn’t bluster on about barracks defense and our second amendment rights. We tucked our rifles away in the arms room until the next time we needed them, just as it had been done since the Army’s inception. The military police protected us from threats in garrison. They had 9 mm Berettas to carry. They were the only soldiers who carry weapons in garrison. We trusted them to protect us, and they delivered. With notably rare exceptions, this system has worked well. There are fewer shootings on Army posts than in society in general, probably because soldiers are actively discouraged from walking around with rifles, despite being impeccably well trained with them. Perchance, we could have the largely untrained civilian population take a page from that book?

I understand that people want to be able to own guns. That’s ok. We just need to really think about how we’re managing this. Yes, we have to manage it, just as we manage car ownership. People have to get a license to operate a car, and if you operate a car without a license, you’re going to get in trouble for that. We manage all things in society that can pose a danger to other people by their misuse. In addition to cars, we manage drugs, alcohol, exotic animals (there are certain zip codes where you can’t own Serval cats, for example), and fireworks, among other things. We restrict what types of businesses can operate in which zones of the city or county. We have a whole system of permitting for just about any activity a person wants to conduct since those activities could affect others, and we realize, as a society, that we need to try to minimize the risk to other people that comes from the chosen activities of those around them in which they have no say. Gun ownership is the one thing our country collectively refuses to manage, and the result is a lot of dead people.

I can’t drive a Formula One car to work. It would be really cool to be able to do that, and I could probably cut my commute time by a lot. Hey, I’m a good driver, a responsible Formula One owner. You shouldn’t be scared to be on the freeway next to me as I zip around you at 140 MPH, leaving your Mazda in a cloud of dust! Why are you scared? Cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Doesn’t this sound like bullshit? It is bullshit, and everybody knows.

Yes, yes, I hear you now. We have a second amendment to the constitution, which must be held sacrosanct over all other amendments. Dude. No. The constitution was made to be a malleable document. It’s intentionally vague. We can enact gun control without infringing on the right to bear arms. You can have your deer rifle. You can have your shotgun that you love to shoot clay pigeons with. You can have your target pistol. Get a license. Get a training course. Recertify at a predetermined interval. You do not need a military grade rifle. You don’t. There’s no excuse.

Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s all an AR-15 is... Some people are good with this stuff, and some people are lucky, but those cases don’t negate the overall rule... Be honest, you don’t need that AR-15. Nobody does. Society needs them gone, no matter how good you may be with yours.

Another thought: Gun maximalists, as I said before, are more likely a threat than a bulwark to the commonweal in the event of government tyranny, but there's an interesting association. This type of person frequently denigrates the idea of civic engagement, civil disobedience, activism, and protest, as a process or response to the inaction or malpractice of the government. 'Those whiny libby libs? They don't know what they're doing, and fine for the government to suppress. Gun owners though, they're the heroes, the ones somehow keeping tyranny in check. You don't have to do anything in particular, or act exemplary and accountable to society, just be a badass gun owner and probably ready to shoot at the Feds once the UN troops have landed...'

I think you are underestimating the lethality of firearms available from the turn of the 20th forward, as well as explosives and other tools for killing en masse. The worst school killing was with explosives, not a gun. The Camden walk of death in 1949 involved only a handgun. The mobsters of the 20s and 30s had lots of automatic weaponry (suggesting that such could have been found. Yet the rash of mass shootings we now experience isn't simply a question of accessibility of semi-automatic weaponry. Such weapons have been available for the last 50-60 years. But only in the last 30 or so do we see these kinds of events becoming comparatively frequent.

Why now and not in the turbulent 60s? Why is 2001-2018 so much more rife with such events than was 1972 - 1990? Even if I grant that semi-automatic weapons are more accessible now than a century ago, it still does not address why it is more common now than it was in the 1980s? Your position on gun control cannot be the sole answer (setting aside the Constitutional issues currently under debate). There is more to it than that.


To be fair, the only colleague I have known personally to have been murdered was murdered by his ex wife. I was using colleague in the larger sense with my earlier comment. I did learn of three different graduate faculty (all STEM types) who were murdered by students after awarding them failing grades in graduate school. Two shootings and one death by ballpeen hammer.

Hold on, though. There's a clear difference in technology available, as mentioned earlier in the thread. Maybe not mentioned in the thread, but the 1930s were a strong decade for federal gun control just because of the prevalence of such weapons, and bringing up gang/Mafia shootings in their context is unfair - killing secondary to criminal enterprise is a separate issue.


As for why it didn't start or explode in the 1980s, I don't have a good answer beyond spmetla's: mass media making it look like a viable trope for whatever mental disposition(s) unite these people.