Today In Wyoming's History: February 28

Today In Wyoming's History: February 28: 1918  First train to arrive in Buffalo on the Wyoming Railway.

The Wyoming Railway was a shortline, running from nearby Clearmont to Buffalo, a distance of about 28 miles. At Clearmont passengers could carry on with the Burlington Northern.

Most of the traffic on the line was actually coal.  The coal mines near Buffalo went out of business in the 1940s and the railroad filed for bankruptcy in 1948.  The line was abandoned in 1952.

The Casper Daily Record for February 28, 1918. Four sleeping soldiers ordered shot.

Gen. George Patton famously got into piles of trouble, both with the public and the Army, for slapping two soldiers during World War Two.

Here we read about Pershing giving the go ahead to death sentences for four soldiers that fell asleep at their posts.

I don't know what Wilson did with the sentence, but I hope they weren't executed.

Lowell Thomas first photographs T. E. Lawrence. February 28, 1918.

Report from Vietnam. February 27, 1968.

110th Field Artillery, Col. N.B. Rebkopf, commanding, Camp McClellan, Ala., Feb. 27th, 1918

104th Motor Supply Train, Capt. R.B. Myers, commanding, Camp McClellan, Ala., Feb. 27th, 1918

Looking down Pennsylvania Ave. from 109th U.S. Inf., Camp Hancock, Augusta Georgia. February 27, 1918.

Lex Anteinternet: Observations on a Monday morning.

Lex Anteinternet: Observations on a Monday morning.: 1.  My house sounds like a respiratory ward. There's been some nasty bugs going around this winter, including the dreaded flu. So far,...

Uff. . the "this is just a scratchy throat. . . I'm not really sick" has gone to "I hurt everywhere".

Observations on a Monday morning.

1.  My house sounds like a respiratory ward.

There's been some nasty bugs going around this winter, including the dreaded flu. So far, I've avoided them all.

One of my co-workers fell ill a couple of weeks ago and was so ill, the week before we tried a case (last week) that he was out for a couple of days.  We both made it to the trial, however.

At the trial opposing counsel became sicker and sicker.

But I made it home okay.

By which time my daughter's cold had turned from bad to really bad.

I was still okay.

This morning I have a cough . . . .

2.  There was no heat in the office on Saturday, a day I worked.  It's really cold in here today an the heat hasn't made it back to my office yet, the last heat register, or whatever it is, in this 101 year old building.   This happens every winter and for some reason the building super never gets it fixed.

Come on man!

3.  On the way down here a car from Montana hit its breaks on ice simply because it saw a Ford Ranger stuck on a side street.  That's not a good thing if you are also on the same ice patch and behind the car.

4.  It's an odd experience in speaking to a receptionist in another state whom you can't understand due to her accent can't understand you due to your accent.

5.  Boots with really high heels are not a good option on a slippery day.  I don't know why women elect for that option.

Old news, or new? The Casper Record, February 26, 1918. And the Casper Daily Tribune.

In this morning's paper, for 2018, we read that an oil prospect is potentially going to be opened up in Converse County that's potentially massive in scale.  Over 5,000 wells could be drilled and up to 8,000 job resulting.

That would be another boom in Wyoming's boom and bust economy.

Indeed, it would be such a boom that I'll predict right now it'll shut down all conversation about "diversifying the economy" in really short order.

Will it happen? Well, only time, OPEC, war and the price of oil will tell.

War, but not OPEC, and the price of oil was the big news on this day in the Casper Record. Indeed, it was all oil on that day.  Even Colorado shale oil.

For whatever reason, the other Casper paper, the Casper Daily Record, wasn't focused on local petroleum on this Tuesday of 1918.

The war was.  But figuring in the center was the tragedy of a killing that was due to Prohibition, and a mistake, apparently.

Not national Prohibition, but Colorado's.  A Colorado police officer opened up on what he thought was a fleeing vehicle and a 28 year old man lost his life in the process.  The first of many, in one way or another, incidents involving booze, suspected booze, and official authority.

The Big Picture: 113th Infantry, Col. J. E. Woodward, commanding, Camp McClellan, Alabama, Feb. 26th, 1918

Michigan Lake Superior Power House, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. February 26, 1918.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for February, 2018

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for February, 2018: February 2:  Groundhog illustration added. February 2, 1918:  Cheyenne newspaper added with discussion on "Heatless Days".  D...

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago

An “Army” of Diet Experts Helped Ensure Victory in WWI

During World War I food in the U.S. was very expensive,. . . .

Blog Mirror: NPR; How Long Are You Contagious With The Flu?

 NPR Asks:

How Long Are You Contagious With The Flu?

Longer than you think.  Apparently.

Have the flu?

Take heed and stay home.  Please.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: France Memorial Presbyterian Church (Victory Baptist Church) Rawlins, Wyoming.

Churches of the West: France Memorial Presbyterian Church (Victory Baptist Church), Rawlins Wyoming.

This is the France Memorial Presbyterian Church in Rawlins, which was built in downtown Rawlins in 1882. The Gothic style church is still in use, but today is a Baptist church.  The substantial stone structure is one of the oldest churches in the state.

Huế retaken. February 25, 1968

The last Communist positions in the city of Huế were retaken by Vietnamese Marines on this day in 1968.

Marines in Huế.

In the United States the battle is associated with the U.S. Marines in the same fashion that many of the worst battles of World War Two are, and for good reason. The battle was a rare, hard fought, street to street, house to house battle.  Taken by the NVA and VC in the opening days of Tet, the city was recaptured only through hard fighting efforts by the Marines, Vietnamese Marines and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the latter of which has had its role in the battle somewhat forgotten.   The battle would result in the loss of 216 U.S. Marines lives and 452 South Vietnamese combatants.  Communist losses are unknown with estimates ranging from a low of 1,000 to over 8,000 killed.  Communist forces executed 4,856 South Vietnamese while in control of the city, something that is a basic hallmark of Communist forces everywhere.

U.S. Marine with M60 machinegun in Huế.

On this day, the last position in the city, as noted, was taken by Vietnamese Marines.  Outside the city a Communist position was taken by ARVN Rangers.   Mopping up operations would continue on for some days after the recapture of the city.

Charlotte, N.C., looking north, showing Camp Greene in the background on the left. February 25, 1918.

Germans take Tallinn, Estonia, and absorb it. Finland's civil war gets bloodier.

On this day in 1918, the German Army took Tallinn, Estonia.  This act overthrew the Estonian government, which had been in place for only one day, Estonia having declared Independence a century ago yesterday.  The territory was incorporated into the German Reich.

It was acts like this that depleted German military strength at a time it could ill afford that.

In nearby Finland, Finnish White military commander Mannerheim issued a decree that White officers could execute captured Finnish Reds at their descretion, an act which would lead to the ultimate death of over 150 such individuals in Finland's short but bloody civil war.

 Mannerheim, more or less about this time, seated.

Poster Saturday: Duct Amor Patriea

Auribus teneo lupum II

 You heard it here first:  The Troubled Marginalized

There's a category on this blog called "You heard it here first" and unfortunately, I guess, I can claim this in regard to an item I just read yesterday in The New Yorker from 2015. Our item would be this one here:

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

That post goes back to 2012.  The central thesis of the thread is that what we're seeing in the US in regards to the type of horrific violent act which we saw this past week in Florida is due, more than anything else, to the marginalization of a certain class of young male.  The New Yorker article, from 2015, which was written professionally by an author with more resources at hand than I, concluded the exact same thing.

What that article did, which mine did not, was to specifically name the affliction, although anyone reading our article would know what the affliction was or at least what ballpark category it was in.  Asperger Syndrome.  As one organization dedicated to addressing that condition relates:

Asperger syndrome is one of several previously separate subtypes of autism that were folded into the single diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with the publication of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual in 2013. Asperger syndrome was generally considered to be on the “high functioning” end of the spectrum.

Now, and I'll make this clear below, I'm not saying everyone with Asperger's is a danger.  But I am saying that we're ironically now in a point in time in which this condition, and ones close to it, can be identified, but we're actually handling those who have (and there's a wide spectrum there) about as poorly as we ever have.

I don't want to re-run again my original piece, but as I related there I'm quite certain that in prior eras these people were worked into society.  Now they're not.  They were awkward in the era before their affliction had a name, but they were part of a group.  Here's what I said at the time.

 No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment. 

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics.

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education.

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Niebelungenleid is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

The Conclusion and what to do about it.

That's where this seems to lead.  It's a long road, but it seems solid to me.  

The implements are not new.  But what is new is that we have a population that has nowhere to go, having a hard time fitting in, has a hard time finding meaningful work and which is spending its surplus time saturated in the glamorization of violence.

Well, what can a person do with that?

That's another question entirely, but the ultimate one.  What seems clear is that people who have pinned their hopes on a targeted solution will be tragically disappointed.  Banning one singular thing, even assuming that a statute was drafted by somebody competent to address the material items (which has so far proven to be completely the opposite of the case) would be at best a band aid approach and at worse actually do nothing at all. Indeed, if that approach failed, and it would be likely to, it would be very bad, as once any society tends to adopt a certain approach, they tend to follow that path in spite of failure.  The decades long "war on drugs" is arguably such an example.

What does seem to be the case is that we have a population we've really failed, but the failure is now so systemic that addressing the problem is massive in scope. But if we don't confront that now, the problem will grow worse and worse.  The difference between tolerance and acceptance needs to be reestablished, and the concept that a society must have standards does as well.  And that can't be foisted off on the school system.  And, while we now seem to accept that we've lost forever certain types of work, we must recognize that work, for some people, is much more than a career, but literally a life raft for them and us, giving their lives meaning.  Finally, while we're talking of banning things, we need to really look at violent entertainment.  Just as the argument will be advanced by those in favor of banning certain firearms that it doesn't matter that most of the owners of those arms will not misuse them, but that those who do, do so catastrophically, it is even more the case that some will be impacted by the glorious cartoon depiction of violence negatively.  And entertainment, at the end of the day, is just that.  There's little justification for highly glamorized sexualized violence aimed at teenage and twenty something males.

Right away, I'll note, there are going to be those who are horrified by this assumption, and will respond with the typical "well I know somebody. . .", or assertions that some people can and do good jobs with people so afflicted.  Yes, all that's true, but it doesn't change what we're basically seeing here (and its a blistering poor way to conduct any argument as you can literally say that about any problem whatsoever).  Almost all of the perpetrators of this kind of violence are young men who fit into this class.

And not only do they largely fit into this class, those identified with having it are often medicated with pharmaceuticals which either have dangerous side affects or for which the their side affects are not very well known.

Right away you will get a bunch of arguments that are largely ignorant, but are comparative.  One will be, "well, Canada and Australian don't have this problem, and they no doubt have the same demographics and problems. .  . so it's all about guns".

Nope, that doesn't hold up.

Lots of other Western European cultures no doubt have more or less the same percentages (probably) of young men afflicted with this condition as an organic matter.  But far from all of them restrict firearms the same way that Canada and Australia do.  Switzerland, for example, not only allows the purchase of AR15 type rifles but there's a special version made for the country just for civilians sales.  Spain and Portugal allow it.  New Zealand allows it.  None of these countries are afflicted the way we are with this problem.

So what gives?

Most nations don't dump their young.

We do.

The United States has always had a freakishly mobile society and that's always made our society comparatively violent.  We have, for instance, always been a more violent society than Canada's.  It has also meant that, more than most other nations, we're pretty comfortable with the young basically being abandoned, either by parents or by society.  That's been a feature of this problem as well.

The recent Florida incident featured a troubled kid abandoned by society with two dead parents.  The Newton incident saw a doting mother and a departed father.  You can find other instances.

Our society has encouraged a concept of personal liberty so vast that fathers can take off and mothers basically can if they choose to, at some point.  Piles of troubled boys are raised in households featuring only a female role model who eventually loses control over the subject.

And once these individuals reach 18 years of age, society no longer cares a whit what happens to them, if it ever did.

This was not always the case for us.  Society, both by culture and law, once very tightly compelled men and women to be responsible for their offspring, rather than just making it an option for parents.

That's the big difference right there.  In the other countries the societies are simply less mobile and there's more of a social structure even if standards of personal conduct have enormously declined.  Americans have practically prided themselves on tearing ours down.  This has become the trend in all Western European cultures in recent years and that has started to reflect itself back in violent ways, however.  In Europe, it's reflected back in European youth joining ISIL, which at least has standards, or being re attracted to the fascist left.  In our society it has reflected itself in other ways.

So, if we really want to get at this, that has to get these kids out of basements and off their computers and into useful work. In an era in which our supposedly brightest minds are running around destroying work, that's not going to be easy.

And that gets us back, I suppose, to where we started.  While we can now identify the condition, in prior years we simply thought these folks were a bit difficult or a bit odd. But there were useful places for them in positions which truly needed to be filled.  Now a lot of those occupations are either gone or the doors are closed to entry in other ways.

We live in an era now in which the Hyperextrovert is celebrated and everyone else is compelled to go along with it.  Network!  Collegiality!  Etc. Etc. are the rallying cries of the day.  If you are in business, you will get emails, wanted or not, on a nearly daily basis on "21 ways you can Network with the energy of a Chihuahua on meth!"  We are not so far gone in this direction that there's something called a Social Anxiety Syndrome for people who are probably just super shy.  That may not be a real condition at all but rather something that is identified as one as it's odd for the Super Extroverts that not everyone wants to be that way.  I suspect, quite frankly that Aspergers is sort of the same way and that it might actually simply be an extended end of the range of human organic makeup.  A minority, no doubt, of the human population but in the same what that other organic conditions are that impact a person's worldview.  

Whether I'm right on that or wrong. . .and moreover whether The New Yorker and I are right and wrong, which isn't wrong is that we have a population of young males, some of whom suffer from some pretty pronounced psychological conditions, who used to find employment on shop floors and laboratory tables and the like who now have nothing to do but focus on things that no human being should focus on.  The massive erosion of standards of morality starting in the 1960s means that much of them were raised in a narcissistic environment and learned that as the norm and in an era with cartoon violence in the form of video games and movies presents the mental image of those conditions in an era when most people in the Western World experience very little of the real thing.

None of that should be comforting to anyone.  What that means is that if this society really seeks to address this behavior it has to start undergoing and immediate rejection of the failed false anything goes ethos brought in by the Boomers and return to the eons old ones that preceded that and which even now is starting to revive in ways that "progressives" can't seem to grasp.  And as part of that, the return of responsibility, both societal and parental needs to come back in and frankly be enforced.  Parents can't live for themselves with children as exotic pets and as it takes two to create a child, that missing male needs to reappear, by force if necessary.

 21

One of the proposals has been, I'd note, to keep anyone younger than 21 from buying the type of firearms featured in this act and Florida is apparently going to pass such a law.  Congress might.

I don't know what I think about this.  I'm not totally opposed to it, frankly, but I also feel that the American age of majority is spastic.  If people who are 21 are not quite adults for some things, they aren't for anything.

You cannot buy a pistol until you are 21 years of age, on the logic that men (and yes, it's men) prior to that age are more likely to use one in a crime.  Okay, that might be true.

But you are capable of carrying weapons in war at age 18. 

That is, quite frankly, flat out weird.

I truly feel that if you aren't allowed to drink or buy a firearm, you really ought not to be regarded as suitable for military service.  If we raise the age for these firearms, we should be honest and bar military service to anyone who isn't 21.  We also ought to do away with Selective Service registration at age 18.  We should do away with that period, but the intellectual leap that says you can drive, but not buy beer, and not buy a pistol, but join the Marine Corps is, well, too vast.  Make everything 21, except for that driving a car, I guess.

Indeed, why can you marry without your parents consent, which is pretty darned dangerous, at 18, but not own a pistol?  Or buy alcohol? Weird.

There's not intellectual consistency to it at all.  Americans are fond of saying "you're an adult at 18" but lots of statutory provisions don't back that up.  You really aren't.  You can vote, drive, join the service, and enter into contracts, but that's about it.  Otherwise, you're in some gap generation where you have to wait for 21 for everything else.  If we're going to do that, let's just make it complete.

Of course, that would also require society and parents to play along.  Parents who now shove kids out the door at 18 couldn't.  They ought to be minors.  A school system country wide which ends for most people at 18 probably should be extended another three years by public funding, if we are to do that.  There's your universal post high school education right there.  It's only intellectually consistent.

But we're not going to do that.

Which still doesn't mean that this is a bad idea, or a good one.  It's just an intellectually confused one.

So what about those guns?

Yet another topic I've written about here before.

The media likes to call the class of weapons that show up in these matters "assault rifles" which they are not.  Assault rifles are selective fire weapons and while there are a few in civilian hands, there are very few and there's no reported instance of one actually being used in a crime.

So what we're really talking about is military style semi automatic rifles.

The oddity here is that semi automatic rifles have existed for over a century.  Mechanically there's nothing new about the ones around now and even the AR, which gets so much press, has been around for over fifty years now.

What this means is that something in society is making a rifle that was not used much for crime at all into one that is.  That's quite clear.  And that's addressed elsewhere in this post.

But, some will say, and they have a point, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do something about these weapons now as they are a problem now.

The problem with "doing something" is that the something is usually drafted by people who don't know anything about firearms at all, and as a result what they drafted has no impact at all or, worse, principally serves to go after something that has nearly no reported instance of abuse at all.  And that's why "banning assault rifles" won't band them and if a statute was broad enough to ban them it would likely be unconstitutional.

Which brings me to this.  The real change, if there is one, is that people who really aren't firearms fans have started to acquire this category of firearm as they're fascinated with a cartoon like concept of violence.  More on that in a moment.

Fascinated or not, most of the people who buy them for that reason will never use them violently, and some will go on to develop other interests in firearms.  But for those who are so fascinated, one thing that they do that their predecessors did not is to buy huge quantities of magazines.

One of the features of this class of arm, but not unique to it, is that they have quick detachable magazines.  That's a vital feature of a combat rifle.  But most civilian shooters really don't need more than a couple magazines, assuming they're competitive shooters.

Good magazines are expensive but cheap magazines exist and it seems that people in the class we're speaking of buy a lot of cheap magazines.  Magazines are cheap because they are not controlled the way that firearms are. But they could be.

Serial numbers could be required on magazines and they could be subject to the same Federal sales conditions that the rifles themselves are.  That might limit this a bit.  Beyond that, it could perhaps be the case that the number of magazines could be limited for any one rifle.  That is, if the number was restricted to two, that would seem to have an impact.

Assuming that's legal.

And it may not be.

The mere fact that I've mentioned this topic in this way, however puts me doubly on the outs with many.  For some, the mere suggestion that all semi automatics shouldn't be banned is unacceptable. For other, any restriction on the sales of magazines will seem unpatriotic.

So, that being the case, I may as well go on and offer more offense. What the heck.

And here it is, although it's also something I've mentioned before.  The fascination with this category of rifles is grossly overdone in the sporting magazines.  I'm not saying that there are no legitimate articles about ARs, but they have become such a big deal that they've sucked the air out of the room in the sporting press.  Lots of gun magazines are endless streams of AR articles.

The AR is frankly not that good of a rifle and it never was.  The sporting press fascination with it is really absurd.  As it is a weapon of war, it makes the focus on this area that of war.  That focus needs to be redirected.

Vets in Schools?

Geez, this is a dumb ideal.

I keep reading, often on facebook, that we should put veterans in our schools.

This is apparently based on the charming view that all vets are responsible highly trained combat veterans.  Not hardly.

Now, I'm a veteran, and so I know a little of what I speak here.  Let's start with the trained combat vets part.  Only a fraction of servicemen are in the combat arms.

Indeed, only two of the five services are really focused on individual combat that way to any extent, and that's the Marine Corps and the Army.  But even in those services there are vast numbers of soldiers whose daily duties are only remotely tied to carrying arms and combat.  Even in World War Two, the last really huge war we fought, most soldiers were not combat troops.  That hasn't been the case for the U.S. Army at least since World War One, if not earlier.

And two of the services are based on highly technical complicated machines on which only a few do real fighting.  The Air Force isn't made up mostly of pilots but mostly of people who exist to support the infrastructure that lets those pilots fly.  The Navy, which is freakishly the most hidebound of the service in regards to tradition is one in which the various positions are, as a rule, completely divorced from directly fighting.  Indeed, the Coast Guard is ironically the sea service that most closely resembles the direct fighting sea service of old, as its light vessels actually do routinely engage other vessels and its members actually do board other craft.

Beyond that, the reality of servicemen is a lot more closely reflected in the poem Tommy than by the meme's on Facebook:

I WENT into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, " We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, go away " ;
But it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, wait outside ";
But it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An 'Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

In other words, the ideas that servicemen are all heroes is charming, but it's not really true.  Indeed, just a few months ago we were all worried about Marines taking pictures of female Marines sans uniform, with it being understood that there was plenty of bad conduct by both male and female Marines in this category.  I'm sure that this exists in the other services as well, but it just hasn't come to light.

Suffice it to say, merely being a vet hardly qualifies you to be some sort of super sentry.

Relying on the police

One thing the recent event shows, and I've mentioned it here as well, that average citizens do, however, have real reason for not being comforted by those who always argue that the police are there to protect you.

They are, but that doesn't mean they're all up to the job or that its their only job.

I also dealt with this a while back, but the television view of police, or at least the modern one, is really skewed.  The average day for a policeman, if we're to make reference to television, was more like that portrayed in Car 54 Where Are You than it is in Chicago Daily Disaster or whatever.  Policemen have so many duties that expecting them to be effective sentries is also asking for a bit much.

Indeed, this is another area where people who make comparisons to other countries routinely fall flat in what they're observing.  Continental European police forces usually (but not always) have a branch of militarized police.  We don't want that in the US, or at least we never have, but most European countries (but not the UK) do have them.  France, for example has both the National Police and the National Gendarmerie, the latter of which is part of the Armed Forces but which is under the Ministry of the Interior.  The Carabinieri fill that same role in Italy.  The point is that we don't have police like the Europeans often do who are actually soldiers with policing roles, and we don't want them either.

Indeed, it's worth noting that at least in terms of real effectiveness in a bad spot western policemen are more reliable than eastern policemen, in my view, as they're more used to having to act on their own and they're frankly typically a lot more familiar with their firearms.  The bigger a city's police department is the less likely that either of those things are true.

Which leads us to our next topic . . .

Arming Teachers

This is one of those areas in which discussion so devolves so rapidly that no air ever reaches the actual topic.   People are so viscerally against it or so irrationally for it that its never actually discussed. 

Let's start with a simple matter. The idea of "arming teachers" is a non starter if that means that every teacher must be armed.  That's a horrible idea and its just as bad, really, as the idea that veterans ought to be stationed in schools.  No, it's worse.

Making people carry weapons who don't want to, or who are afraid of them, is just flat out not going to work and beyond that has its own philosophical problems.

But allowing people who are willing to undergo the process to obtain a license to do so is another matter entirely.

I've argued this here before but I'm flatly of the view that a person who has gone to the trouble to obtain a modern concealed carry license is considerably more likely to be able to effectively use a handgun than the average policeman is.  Their focus on obtaining the license was single minded, they've gone to the trouble to obtain it, and they don't have to train themselves for the 10,000 other things the average policeman does.  

So I would allow teachers to carry concealed, as long as they adhered the philosophy of doing that, which is that the public should never know who carries concealed and who does not.  The real protective aspect of allowing for licensed concealed carry is that nobody knows who it does that. At some point, some people who do will end up having to use the sidearm, a horrible thing to face, but once that becomes a realistic possibility of semi common occurrence there's a true deterrent effect.  

Indeed, that's basically why policemen are armed in most nations.  It's not so that they can shoot at folks, it's to let everyone know that they can, if they have to. Policemen are still targets of violence, to be sure, but its not common.

Best Posts of the Week of February 18, 2018.

Best post of the week of February 18, 2018.  I didn't have a lot to say this past week.

The Central Powers Launch Operation Faustschlag (Fast Punch). The last Central Powers Offensive of World War One.

 

Laramie Boomerang, February 18, 1918. Exact same weather report a century prior.

It's been one cold and snowy week.

 

Estonia Declares Independence

Estonia declared independence on this day in 1918.

The State of Aviation in Wyoming

Jericho captured by the British. February 19, 1918.

Jericho captured by the British on this day in 1918.

The Carolina parakeet goes extinct

With the death of the last known example at the Cincinnati Zoo, the Carolina parakeet reached extinction.

Laramie Boomerang, February 18, 1918. Exact same weather report a century prior.

Today's weather report could have been a repeat of the one in this issue of the Laramie Boomerang from February 18, 1918.

Two draft evaders headed for Mexico?  Seems like a poor move.

The Central Powers Launch Operation Faustschlag (Fast Punch). The last Central Powers Offensive of World War One.

Austro Hungarian troops on the offensive.

The Central Powers, having determined that Trotsky's "neither war nor peace" was, in fact, war from their prospective, launched Operation Faustschlag on this Monday of 1918.  The Offensive captured massive amounts of former Imperial Russian territory but it also tied up resources and a combined 16 divisions sorely needed elsewhere.

German troops in Kiev. . .where their presence was considerably better behaved than it would be 23 years later.

The offensive did succeed in taking Russia out of the war in short order.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Meeteetse Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Meeteetse Wyoming:

This is St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Meeteetse, Wyoming.  While you can see them in this photo, it isn't obvious that there are currently a series of jacks supporting what would be the wall on the right side of the photograph.

This is by appearances an older church, but I don't know the details on it.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for February, 2018

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for February, 2018: February 2:  Groundhog illustration added. February 2, 1918:  Cheyenne newspaper added with discussion on "Heatless Days".  D...

Auribus teneo lupum

 

 I'm posting this here not for the store, but for the mural.

I was going to post a reply to an entry on one of the blogs that is listed on the right side of this blog, but it started read like a book and I thought better of it.  That's a species of blog hijacking, and that's not the right way to go about things.  So instead I'm just going to make an epic length post here, which is probably also not the best way to go about things. In doing that, I'm going to incorporate a lot of text that I've put up here before.

What these have to do with is a certain type of violence.

Before we start off on that I'll note that I posted obliquely on this yesterday. Very obliquely, in my post

Tolerance and Helplessness.

It was in the early 1990s, when my mother started to be harassed by a mentally unstable individual.

He was, ostensibly, a student at the local community college.  My mother's house wasn't far from the college, which is one of the reasons she liked the house.  She had an active mind for most of her 90 plus years and that allowed her to be close to the college to take courses if she wished to.  It was also close to the YMCA.  She could walk to either, which she did frequently, as she didn't drive.

It might not have been obvious that was what I was posting about, but I was. I posted much more directly on this some time ago in a thread called: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalists. 

I think I was right when I put up that post, and I still think that.

At one time, I used to bump up posts when there was a reason, but I quit doing that some time ago.  Therefore, I'm going to do something really unusual, and make this a truly book length post, and repeat the entire thing as a quote here.  And then, after I do that, I'm going to go on and quote some more.  Before I do that, I'll note that there's a lot to consider here, and I'm going to be noting that again.

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what caused it, and how to prevent similar tragedies from reoccurring.  A lot, indeed frankly most, of this commentary, and most of the effort in Congress to address this, is and will be ignorant.  I don't mean stupid, but ignorant.

Analysis doesn't seem to be the American long suit these days, and perhaps it never was. But here's a topic that cries out for really deep analysis.  Indeed, it cries out for deep analysis in advance of any action, as otherwise the action will simply be ignorant and ineffective, and then will be off on the course that so many other nations have taken on serious topics, which is simply to end in dead end, wringing our hands, trying what's failed.

I'm no more qualified than most to look at this, but I'm probably at least as qualified, by training I suppose, to try some analysis.  Something I haven't seen happen much yet. So let's take a look at this grim topic and see what, if anything, that tells us.

Is there really a new problem?

One thing that hardly anyone asks at all is whether we're seeing a new problem.  Nobody wants to ask this, as it is just too horrible to ask. But it needs to be.  If this problem isn't new, the solution on it will be different, presumably, as opposed to it being a new problem.  And maybe that helps us learn what the actual problem is, as opposed to merely supposing we know what it to be.

According to an article recently run in the Casper Star Tribune, mass murders, into which this fits, have actually been occurring since time immemorial. And, violence in America society, all types of violence, is on the decline. Its way down.   Oddly enough, this includes mass murders.  Mass killings in the US are way down.  They're actually way down in the entire civilized world.  To my huge surprise, the peak year for mass killings in the US was. . . 1929.

1929.  That's right.

That date isn't insignificant. That was the year the Great Depression started globally, and it started by surprise most places.  It was a year of peak economic despair.  We'll come back to that.

Does that mean we've been experiencing this horror for centuries, that it peaked in 29, and that it's been on the decline ever since?  Yes, it does. But that might not be the full picture.  What probably is unique is the setting and the victims.  I have no data on this, but most mass killings of earlier eras, I'm guessing, occurred in different settings with adult victims.  That tells us something about this story as well.

Is it an American problem?

If you listen solely to the news media, you will get the impression that this is uniquely an American problem.  But it isn't.  While the US has had its share of these in recent years, recent years have also seen mass homicides in Norway, the UK and Canada, at least.

Indeed, according to a recent article by a psychologist in the New York Times, the psychological profile of mass killers does not vary at all from those who do it in the name of terrorism.  If that's correct, and his article seemed extremely solid, to say the least, it's then the case that the US doesn't come close to being the mass killer epicenter.  Indeed, as political and criminal activity masks what is essentially the same homicidal impulse, mass killing that really do not vary, it motive by the killer, are much more common in other lands.  All over the Middle East, for example, the same motive is causing nearly identical killings.  We've seen them in Russia as well, and it may be the case that they're actually quite common in Mexico right now.

All this is significant in that it gives us a pretty big database about the type of person who commits these acts.

But wait, isn't it really the implements?

In spite of the fact, as we've seen, and will continue to see below, that this topic requires analysis, and obviously has some aspects to it that have been missed in the past, for much of the press and the public the discussion immediately devolved into one on "gun control."  

In recent decades in the United States there's been a decline in support for gun control and, as noted, there's been a decline in violence too.  Also, interestingly there's been a real increase in states that allow citizens to carry concealed arms. Finally, there's been some action by the Federal government that has allowed the carrying of guns in places that previously it did not.  So, as a statistical matter, not really open to debate, as guns have become more accepted in everyday life, gun deaths, of all types, have declined.

Immediately this will raise the hackles of some, but it's a simple fact.  It can be argued that there's no cause and effect. That is, it can be argued that he increase in guns has not caused the decrease in violence.  And there would be a basis to argue that as violent death has declined everywhere in the Western world, but that in and of itself would suggest that merely looking at the implements does not provide a solution to this problem.

Additionally, and very much missed by the press, none of the implements used in these crimes are new.  The semi automatic pistol first became common, and commercially available, in the 1890s, when they first became reliable.  One of the first, Mauser's 1896 pattern pistol, remained in production up into the 1940s, showing how reliable they'd become.  Various armies started adopting them in the first decade of the 20th Century, as did the first few policemen.  Concealed carry semi automatics entered the picture at that point too.  The semi automatic pistol was perfected by 1911.  While pistol shooters could debate the point, the arm has not really changed since that point in time.  Functionally, while there are some mechanical innovations, the semi automatic pistol has not changed for practical purposes since 1911.  If a person wanted to argue about "high capacity" magazines, they were introduced first time in 1935, when Fabrique National of Belgium used one for its High Power pistol. So, if a person wanted to argue about it, you could say that the high capacity magazine equipped modern pistol appeared in 1935, although it would seem that the 1911 date for the perfection of the modern pistol is a better argument.  Anyhow, semi automatic pistols have been around for decades. This would pretty conclusively demonstrate that their mere existence is not relevant to the problem we're discussing.

Well then, what about "assault rifles?"  They're new, correct?

The problem here is that it actually gets a bit difficult to define what's being discussed, as the term that's used in the news media isn't actually correctly used.  But we can work around that here.

Some people seem to think that the problem is the semi automatic rifle. But like the semi automatic pistol, they aren't new at all.  Semi automatic rifles made their first real appearance in the first decade of the 20th Century as a sporting arm.  The few early ones were actually surprisingly similar in some ways to the current "assault rifles" in that they were all relatively light in caliber.  Both Remington and Winchester offered them commercially before 1910, and in the Winchester offering featured a detachable box magazine, making it essentially identical to many common definitions of "assault rifles".  

These rifles were available for sale, but figure in crimes at  rate that isn't spectacular, although there are a few instances.  A Remington 08  was used in the notorious Spring Creek Raid in Wyoming, but then so were a lot of lever action Winchesters, so that doesn't tell us much, even if it did lead to the rapid discovery of the perpetrators.  Winchester semi automatics were used by at least one of the criminal gangs of the 1930s, but the same gang also used fully automatic weapons (machine-guns), so that probably doesn't tell us anything at all.

Indeed, if we look at it that way, it's really hard to see a connection between the existence of semi automatic rifles and these crimes in a causal fashion, and maybe there simply isn't one. But that would not fully look at the "assault rifle" aspect of it.

The rifles we're discussing probably wouldn't be recognized as an assault rifle by anyone, although a regulatory scrivener might include them accidentally.  When most people discuss "assault rifles", what they really mean are the M4 Carbine or, at least at one time, the AK47.

The latter two weapons are actually military weapons, under that designation, and in their military use they are "assault rifles". Assault rifles are a class of weapon that the Germans basically get credit for, although there were precursors going back as far as 1905, with the Russians getting the credit for being the very first army to have such a weapon. The true definition of an assault rifle is a selective fire rifle, filling the role of rifle and submachine gun in the infantry squad, which fires an "intermediate" cartridge.  As this isn't a tutorial in military firearms, I'll basically leave that definition there, but both the M4 and the AK47 fit that definition.

The first really mass produced assault rifle was the German MP44, which to a lot of people looks a lot like the AK 47 and which some claim, incorrectly, was the design basis for the AK 47.  The Germans also made a "battle rifle", which is a "full sized" selective fire rifle, during the war, and issued it only to paratroopers, sort of oddly, as it was extremely heavy.  "Battle rifles" became extremely common in Western nations after World War Two, and that's significant in that a lot of regulators confuse battle rifles with assault rifles, even though battle rifles are so enormously heavy and large that they are associated with almost no criminal activity whatsoever.  Indeed, most, in civilians hands (and they're becoming quite rare in military hands) go no further afield than the range, being as big as they are.

Assault rifles, by the military definition, are not offered for sale to civilians, as they are selective fire. That is, they can fire fully automatically, like a machinegun. But they have been offered for sale in semi automatic configurations.

This is significant for us here as what can be noted is that, starting at some point in the late 1960s, civilian variants of this class of military weapon were offered to civilians for sale. Can they really be distinguished from the earlier semi automatic rifles?  Well, sort of.  The principal means of doing so, however, would mostly be visual, as unsatisfactory at that would be. The first one to be offered in the US was the AR15 in semi-automatic, a rifle that had just been adopted as the M16 by the US military.  It is a distinct looking weapon.

To be fair, battle rifles were probably in civilian hands earlier, in their semi automatic variants, and some armies actually adopted them in semi automatic rather than selective fire.  I think perhaps Belgium offered the FAL for sale at some point in the late 50s or 60s, but they didn't really take off as a civilian arm at that time.  The Army itself released a very few M14s, the U.S. Army's battle rifle, into civilian hands for target shooting in the 1960s.  That rifle became commercially available in the early 1970s, where it was sold mostly to high end target shooters, who remain its principal market.

Later in the 1980s AK47s became available as various nations that had made them started offering them for commercial sale and they became more common in the 1990s, as various Soviet client states came out of Communism.  You don't hear much about them in the press anymore, and it seems to be the case that they aren't imported like they once were.  Anyhow, they're distinct looking also.

Since 2001 the U.S. Army has gone from the M16A3 to the M4 carbine, basically the same weapon, but with a much shorter barrel. Somewhere in that time frame Cerberus, the investment company, bought up a bunch of firearms manufacturers and united them, and that resulted in a tremendous spread of the AR15 type design as companies that had not offered one started to in their market niche.  Anyhow, after the war in Iraq and Afghanistan started, the M4 carbine type rifle, as a semi automatic, became extremely popular as a civilian arm.  Most of these are used for range plinking, for the most part.  But their visual impact apparently appeals to those who are inclined to commit the type of crime we're discussing, as does the appearance of similar looking arms, as military looking "assault" arms, even if not really military arms, have featured in some of these recent tragedies.

That's pretty long winded, but what we can, maybe, take from that is that the design of firearms hasn't changed enough over 120 years to have been the cause of what has been occurring. But what we can also take away from that is that, oddly enough, the appearance of these arms is unique, and they seem to show up in these horrors as a rule.  What that tells us is that it isn't the mechanics of what is used at all, but that the attractant here is a psychological one. And that tells us something about the shooters.

Who does these things?

It's pretty apparent that you could go to the average gun owner, and actually equip him with a machinegun, and he'd never do anything with it.  It's also apparent, from a recent mass killing in Casper Wyoming, that if you arm some people with medieval implements, they'll use them for murder.  That's correct; recently in Casper Wyoming, there was an event that fit this pattern that was committed with a bow and arrow and a large knife. Grisly, to be sure, but telling.  It isn't something new in the arms that's causing this, it's something new in the mind. But what?

I'm not qualified to be a psychologist at all, but I am trained to observe human behavior and to analyze it, and there are certain things that seem quite connected here, but which are ignored.  These are the things that need to be looked at prior to our doing anything, as the solutions are to be found here.

What we're seeing in many of these murders is that the killers are mentally unstable in a truly insane sense. The attempted assassin of a politician in the US seems to fit this category.  Others, and here's where the New York Times article is helpful, are not so much insane, but they fit into a category of people who, by some means, are subject to a personality disorder that renders them socially marooned, and it would seem, it renders them also incapable of empathy, but fully capable of despair.

Some of these individuals are quite smart. The recent killer in Newton Connecticut, apparently afflicted with Aspergers Disease, seems to fit this category.  The killer in the Denver theater shootings also very clearly had some sort of personality disorder and was very well educated and intelligent.  Others are not so smart, but a consistent strain of some sort of very pronounced personality disorder runs through these stories.  The killer in the Casper Wyoming murders was self-diagnosed with Aspergers, and based on his personal history, I suspect his self diagnosis was correct.

Does this mean that everyone who has these conditions is a time bomb waiting to go off?  Absolutely and clearly not.  And, if we assume (perhaps quite incorrectly, however) that incidents of these conditions are not increasing in frequency (which they very well may be), what that tells us is something else.  If we've always had people who have been so afflicted, but haven't had this particular set of problems, something else has changed. What could it be?

First, before moving on in this, however, what is it about these conditions that make them unique. That's important. What we know is that the conditions make these people socially awkward. In some cases, they divorce them of empathy.  That seems to be all the more to the conditions that we can discern, that's relevant here.  But, as the vast, vast, majority of people who have these conditions also have moral standards, and usually go on to live fully productive lives, it tells us something is also wrong at the societal level, and not as much the individual one.

Maybe the violence has been masked.

Once again, before going on to really analyze what's different, maybe we ought to attempt to determine if anything at all is different.  Is it?

Maybe not. As noted above, all types of violence are going down in the Western world.  But that means that there was once a lot more violence. And a lot of that violence was committed by "average people."  But that may mean that there was a lot of violence committed by our target population here that just went unnoticed as unique.

I suspect that there's more than a little truth to that.  Going all the way back in history we can find examples of violent people who probably fit into the group we're looking at.  Viking Berserkers, for example, just strike me as homicidal youths with severe personality disorders, recruited for cannon fodder by Scandinavian raiding parties.  Indeed, I suspect the whole "glorious" example of Berserkers celebrated in Nordic sagas is a whopping fraud, probably done for recruiting purposes, and that the true story probably involved the gang encouraging poor Sven to go mad and charge into the English, so he'd get killed but take out a few Englishmen with him.  Coming more recently into time, Billy the Kid probably fits this group.  Same type of deal, I'd note.  He was a killer, but a killer whose talents were useful in the Lincoln County War, until they no longer were, at which point his status as a homicidal maniac were finally noted.  John Wesley Hardin might.  The whole James Gang might for that matter.  Celebrated to this day, the entire group may have been a group of misfits who proclivities came to light in the Civil War, and just continued on until finally a cousin took out Jesse James.  Entire groups of people at war might.  For example, while many of the Nazi mass murderers were average men caught up by evil, I'd guess that a few were people who fit into our target group here.  And we can find plenty of examples of German battlefield executions that have to raise this question in our minds.  It's not a comfortable one, quite frankly.  But maybe part of the answer to the question, regarding mass killings of the past, when stated "How could average people do this?", is "they weren't average people."

I'll leave this part of the analysis here, as I'm not sure what we do with it.  But it might very well be the case.  Maybe we've always had these killers, but couldn't recognize them as unique until this era of relative non violence.  Maybe Viking Berserkers, Moslem Assassins, William Bonnie, the Dillinger Gang, SS Guards, would be school killers today.  

Certainly the New York Times analysis would support this.  I suspect, to more than a little degree, these people have always been with us.  Maybe what has changed, has been what has changed from time to time.  For most of human history, and in most societies, people are taught a set of standards that discourages this behavior.  From time to time, however, certain societies encourage and glamorize it.  The Crusader era Moslem Assassins encouraged suicidal behavior.  Al Queda encourages it today.  The Viking raiders encouraged young men to go shrieking into the enemy.  Quantrell encouraged killing, looting and burning.  The Nazis glorified violent death, and the infliction of violent death.  When those things are taught as virtues, some people who are otherwise troubled will pick up on it.

Maybe we're tolerating the behavior

Anyone who is old enough to remember back into the 1970s would be aware, if they're observant, that a great deal more is now tolerated in terms of bad behavior of all types than once was. This may very well be a factor in this.

Prior to the 1980s bad behavior by children in school simply wasn't tolerated.  It wasn't tolerated by the schools, and it wasn't tolerated by other children either.  The concept of "take it outside", which would now be regarded as actionable in a school, was the rule. As late as the 1970s I can specifically recall being the witness to a teacher's order that a brewing altercation, by a bully against another student, be "taken out into the hall" for a fight.  I remember it, as I was the student.  The teacher didn't attempt to order the bully to stop, and there was no effort to counsel anyone. Rather, the teacher simply ordered the brewing fight out of the classroom.

The degree of social control of this type was quite high, and while it sounds shocking, it was amazingly effective. There were always kids who were problematic in school, but there was also always no doubt that there would be action.  In some classes, such as Physical Education, the action would actually be teacher imposed. That's correct, I can also recall a PE teacher taking a swing at a student, which impressed the students, but which didn't seem inappropriate to any of us.

When a student simply couldn't be tolerated, they were not. This meant some were farmed out of school directly to trade schools and others to institutions. This is now all a thing of the past.  In the 1980s it was determined that all of this was cruel, but perhaps there's a lesson here in this.  Up until that time, there was a concept that if a person couldn't accommodate themselves to a set of standards, they'd be hit by the system and society.  Now, this is simply not the case.

Indeed, it is now the case that even the dangerously insane are generally not addressed at all, unless they harm somebody.  For at least a period of a decade here, an insane man wondered the streets threatening people with a cane.  He never hit them, but he came close to looking like he would.  I haven't seen him around for some time, so perhaps he did. But up until that point was crossed, nothing was going to occur.

This last item is particularly misguided.  There's a concept that leaving people alone in their insanity is kind. But to be insane is a particularly hard cross of misery to bear, and that misery is always there.  Allowing the misery to be violently inflicted on others isn't doing anyone a favor or kindness.

Anyhow, there's at least an argument that, up until the 1980s, there was a set of standards that existed which people, particularly the young, were expected to adhere to, with consequences if they did not. There was no effort to insert those who could not, through no fault of their own, into the main body of students, and there was a point at which those who would not comport were disciplined or removed.  

None of this is to suggest we need to return to the "take it out in the hall" type of mentality, which wouldn't be a good idea at all.  But, perhaps that teaches us another lesson here.  We may have, through our attempts at being enlightened and tolerant, failed to teach a certain population that there's a standard to which they must comport.  Probably all the "take it out" type of behavior did was to reenforce that, in a fairly crude manner, the basic lesson being that there is a standard at work.

But what is that standard?
Maybe the standard was destroyed

There's been a lot of commentary the last few years about the lack of prayer in school, and as recently noted on the Ramblings of a Teacher blog, there's been an email and Facebook item circulating that promotes the return of daily prayer to public schools.  Like the author of that blog, I think that idea misses the mark.

What I do think, however, is that we've seen an evolution from a loosely recognized general standard, which was frankly religion based, into the concept of "tolerance" for other ideas, which has now slipped into complete moral relativism that lacks any standards at all.

This is, I think, fairly demonstrable by history and the result isn't good.  A brief look at that history is instructive.

This is not to suggest that the country had a uniform Christian history and that this suddenly fell apart recently, that wouldn't be true.  And it wouldn't even be true to maintain that the country has been uniformly religiously observant throughout its history.  What would be true, however, is that a loose set of Christian standards was generally recognized, even by those who were not religious, or even a-religious, and even though the degree to which people closely identified with religion has changed varied enormously over the country's history.

Early in the nation's history the country was almost uniformly Protestant, although there was more than one Protestant church that was present in the country, and the doctrinal differences between them were in some instances quite pronounced.  It would be false to claim that they all had the same theological concepts, and indeed some of them had radically different theologies.  Indeed, even those several Protestant faiths that were present in North America had acted to strongly repress each other here, on occasion, and had been involved in some instances in open warfare in the British Isles..  Catholics, and Jews, were largely absent from the early history of the country, except with Catholics nervously present in some very concentrated regions.  The Catholic presence in the country really became pronounced first in the 1840s, as a result of the revolutions in Europe and the Irish Famine.  This actually created huge concern amongst the Protestant sections of the county, who were often very anti Catholic.  This started to wane during the Civil War, however.  Jewish immigrants came in throughout the 19th Century, some from Europe in chief, but many from Imperial Russia, where they sought to escape Russian programs.

The purpose of this is not to do a treatise on religion in the United States, which would be a massive work and which, at this point, would pretty much cease to be illustrative of anything relevant to this discussion, but rather to note something else.  Even though the degree to which the American population was adherent and observant of their Faiths, and even though the country has had, at various points, very strong doctrinal differences in the population, to the extent that it impacted public policy, the country had a culture that loosely recognized a very loose set of Christian principals as social principals.

This was so much the case that everyone, even members of non-Christian faiths, and even those who were members of no faiths at all, recognized what the standards were.  Interestingly, up until quite recently, people who chose to ignore those standards, and in any one era there are plenty of people who do, often recognized that they were breaching the standard and sometimes even that doing so was wrong.  To use a non-violent example, people generally recognized that cheating on a spouse was wrong, even if they did it.  Most people were a little queasy about divorce even if they divorced and remarried.  Nearly everyone regarded cohabitation out of wedlock as morally wrong, even if they did not attend a church.  Sex outside of marriage was generally regarded as wrong, and indeed even the entertainment industry used that fact as part of the risque allure when they depicted that scenario.

The point of this isn't to suggest that various topics regarding marriage and non marriage are somehow related to this topic. Rather, the point is to show that there was more of a concept of such things at work in society, and that's just an easy one to pick up on, as the changes in regards to it have been quite pronounced.  But, if the argument isn't to be extremely strained and fall flat, other examples would have to be given.  So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

The point of this is that, even though there were multiple Faiths, and people of no faith, there was a general concept of a set of standards that were almost universally accepted and they had roots that went way back into the country's early history..  Included in that set of beliefs was that you didn't harm others.  It isn't that people didn't do it, it's that they knew it was wrong to do it.

Starting in the 1960s, however, American society really began to break a global set of standards down.  The concept of "tolerance" came in. Tolerance means to tolerate, not to accept, but over time the two became confused, and it became the American ideal to accept everything.  Even people with strong moral beliefs were told that they must accept behavior that was previously regarded as morally wrong, or even illegal in some places. There are many present examples of this that a person could point to.  The point here is not that toleration is bad, but rather that confusing tolerance with acceptance, and following that a feeling that acceptance must be mute, probably isn't good.  Toleration sort of presupposes the existence of a general standard, or at least that people can debate it.  If they can't openly debate it, that' probably is not a good thing.  If self declared standards must be accepted, rather than subject to debate, all standards become fairly meaningless as a result.

The overall negative effect this has on a society would also be a major treatise in its own right and I'm not qualified to write it..  Most cultures do not experience this, as most are not as diverse as ours. Whether any society can in fact endure an existence without standards is open to question,  and the very few previous examples that creep up on that topic are not happy ones.  It is clear that most people do in fact continue to retain  bits and pieces of the old standard, and perhaps most people are very highly analogous to our predecessors who lived in eras when standards were very generally held, and there were decades of American history that were just like that.  But for some people, who are otherwise self-focused, and with problems relating to other people, the weak nature of the standard is now potentially a problem.  Unable to relate, and in a society that teaches that there are no standards, they only standards they have are self learned, in a self isolation.

But what are they learning then, and how?

No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics.

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education.

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Niebelungenleid is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

The Conclusion and what to do about it.

That's where this seems to lead.  It's a long road, but it seems solid to me.  

The implements are not new.  But what is new is that we have a population that has nowhere to go, having a hard time fitting in, has a hard time finding meaningful work and which is spending its surplus time saturated in the glamorization of violence.

Well, what can a person do with that?

That's another question entirely, but the ultimate one.  What seems clear is that people who have pinned their hopes on a targeted solution will be tragically disappointed.  Banning one singular thing, even assuming that a statute was drafted by somebody competent to address the material items (which has so far proven to be completely the opposite of the case) would be at best a band aid approach and at worse actually do nothing at all. Indeed, if that approach failed, and it would be likely to, it would be very bad, as once any society tends to adopt a certain approach, they tend to follow that path in spite of failure.  The decades long "war on drugs" is arguably such an example.

What does seem to be the case is that we have a population we've really failed, but the failure is now so systemic that addressing the problem is massive in scope. But if we don't confront that now, the problem will grow worse and worse.  The difference between tolerance and acceptance needs to be reestablished, and the concept that a society must have standards does as well.  And that can't be foisted off on the school system.  And, while we now seem to accept that we've lost forever certain types of work, we must recognize that work, for some people, is much more than a career, but literally a life raft for them and us, giving their lives meaning.  Finally, while we're talking of banning things, we need to really look at violent entertainment.  Just as the argument will be advanced by those in favor of banning certain firearms that it doesn't matter that most of the owners of those arms will not misuse them, but that those who do, do so catastrophically, it is even more the case that some will be impacted by the glorious cartoon depiction of violence negatively.  And entertainment, at the end of the day, is just that.  There's little justification for highly glamorized sexualized violence aimed at teenage and twenty something males.
Epilogue:
Since I first wrote this, a couple of news stories, based on statistics have run which are interesting in the context of this story, and perception.
The first one was the release, by a proud New York City, of the hugely dramatic decline in homicide in New York. That data revealed that not only had homicide declined massively, but that almost all homicides in New York involve parties who have been convicted of prior felonies.  That is, almost all homicide victims are the associates of felons.    In other words, people who get murdered tend to be involved in criminal activity themselves.  Almost all of the remaining homicides, a very small number, are domestic incidents.  So, the threat to the general public is almost non-existent, and the recently enacted firearms provisions in New York will have next to no, and may no, effect on anything.
The second news story was just released, and it reveals that death by gun homicides has declined about 40% in the US since 1990, and is now at something .like 3.4 deaths per 100,000 people.  Of note, if you remove certain cities, indeed cities with gun control provisions, the homicide rate in the US is very small.  That would actually suggest new laws may actually be counterproductive.
Epilogue posted on May 8, 2013
Epilogue II:
This topic has been back in the news again, so I'm bumping it up.
One of the things that strikes me here is the degree to which there's no original thinking on this topic, and that the same old supposed solutions, which are nearly wholly devoid of any analytical thought, are dragged out every time something occurs.  There seems to be no appreciation that at a time in which overall violence is decreasing, these stand out because they are anomalies, and anomalies with distinct patters, the most significant of which is mental illness.
When we consider that, and that we consider that recent statistical data demonstrates an increasing dissociation and dislike by Americans for their employments and careers, we have a dual disturbing trend of being unwilling to address a disturbed person until that person acts out, and having an economy which increasingly suits the personalities of fewer and fewer people.
Epilogue III
And I'm bumping this up again.
One thing I'm increasingly inclined to emphasize on this story is the media's role in feeding the mentally in regarding this.  That may seem extreme, but truth be known, violence of all types, including of the type that hits the news, is on the decline. Yet the news makes the opposite seem so.
When news was more local, the violent acts of mentally ill people stayed local for the most part.  While there's no ready way to sensor the news in this day and age, some responsibility in reporting is in order.
Additionally, there's something about social cohesion that's lacking, it seems to me, that is feeding into this. Whether it be the actor in Oregon or ISIL proponents in France or the East Coast, its increasingly obvious how these acts are perpetrated by people who have dropped out of society and have nothing to rely on.  Arms in the hands of such individuals are no more advanced than they were a century ago, so its an evolution in something else, and this seems to be part of this, that helps perpetuate violence.

Now that I've done that, and I hope that if you are following this you've read this far, I'll summarize something that I'm sure I have summarized in more recent posts.

The United States, and the world, is getting a lot less violent.

But these acts keep happening. And they're happening because starting some point after World War Two we started producing a selfish society that valued only money.  Following that, we told people that there were no external values at all, only the values that they themselves defined.

Both of those things were pathetic lies.

And then following that, through our technology, we marginalized those in society who were marginalized to start with, and then we salved ourselves by pretending we were not doing it and that everything can be okay for everyone.  People who once had some value in society no longer did.  And those people often live in isolated desperation.  Worse yet, they live in isolated desperation surrounded by fantasies of violence this culture has, in recent decades, wallowed in.

This brings me to the blog item I was going to post on.  I'll quote in here in its entirety.

Thoughts after yet another school shooting 

By leann28 on February 16, 2018

As a public school teacher for 15 years, and now a parent, it occurs to me that what we think is normal and what our children are growing up with as normal is not, in fact, normal. It is not normal for students to have to think about how to evade a shooter. It is not normal for them to be concerned about what to do if something is happening in their school and where they would go. It is not normal to have to think about throwing something at a window (provided you have them in your classroom) to break it to get out. It is not normal. IT. IS. NOT. NORMAL!!!!!!

I remember as a kid in a public school that we would practice fire drills, but that was really it in terms of emergency preparedness. And it was generally if the fire was in the school building somewhere, how would we get out? What was the exit we were supposed to use? Where did we line up outside? And we do practice fire drills. But we also practice things like lockdown, modified lockdown, shelter-in-place, etc. We regularly practice these kinds of drills and work to improve all the time, even having police and other emergency personnel helping us know what we should do to get better to prevent something from happening and protecting our students.

And I hear stories of the teachers and other school staff that shielded their students from bullets, sacrificing themselves. And I think to myself that I would totally do the same thing. If it came down to it, I would absolutely shield my students, stepping in between them and whatever the weapon is. My own son is growing up in a world where this seems to be normal and that when he gets older will think about his mom as a teacher and what that means in these kinds of school situations.

I know exactly what to do for a lockdown, modified lockdown, evacuation drill, etc. I have a folder in my room to remind me in the moment in case I forget. This folder has the directions for each of the different kinds of drills, with class lists, etc. I know I have to close the blinds for my exterior windows, close the blinds on my door to the hall, lock the door, get extra kids/adults out of the halls, etc. and into the closest room, put a poster on the bottom window to block visibility into the classroom, turn off lights, have my students move and be absolutely silent, and act as if every drill is real because in the moment, we won’t know if it is just a drill or if it is a real situation. Being prepared is good.

But let’s be honest, when it comes down to it, there is a significant problem that these kinds of situations have become normal. We have to do better for ourselves, but most especially for our children and students. We can’t continue to let this happen, send thoughts and prayers, and forget in the next few days about this until the next one happens. We must call on our legislators at both state and national levels to do something about this. I am not saying take all guns away. I am not even saying take most guns away. I am saying that there is nothing that a regular, everyday citizen needs an automatic assault rifle for. ABSOLUTELY ZERO reason. Those weapons are not used for self protection but for mass casualties.

I agree that this is not normal.   Not normal at all.  Now, let's consider the last paragraph, which I will repeat.

But let’s be honest, when it comes down to it, there is a significant problem that these kinds of situations have become normal. We have to do better for ourselves, but most especially for our children and students. We can’t continue to let this happen, send thoughts and prayers, and forget in the next few days about this until the next one happens. We must call on our legislators at both state and national levels to do something about this. I am not saying take all guns away. I am not even saying take most guns away. I am saying that there is nothing that a regular, everyday citizen needs an automatic assault rifle for. ABSOLUTELY ZERO reason. Those weapons are not used for self protection but for mass casualties.

I think her view is common, and it has to be answered.  Indeed, I've heard that very view amongst people that I know well and admire and more.

Now, let me start off and note, as I have elsewhere and did above, that actually semi automatic rifles have changed very little over a century. So something else has.  What that something else is, I set out mostly above, but I've also commented on it here before myself, and I'll therefore set out my prior comments again.

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

I've been writing a lot, in contravention to our recent focus on 1915-17 in a distinct, sometimes daily, way, about the Vietnam War.  Indeed, it's always been an interest of mine and I have have several other threads in the hopper.

This one is one that I've hesitated to write about as I'm well aware that its really controversial.  So much so that it sparks rage in some people on both sides of a debate that rapidly become so vitriolic that they aren't part of a debate at all.

I speak of the AR15 rifle.
Long winded vitriolic introduction

 Paratrooper in Vietnam armed with M16A1 rifles.  This trooper seems to have a cleaning brush sticking through the front swivel.  That's something I've never seen a photo of before, but in some photos you can see the assembled cleaning rods, designed to be carried disassembled in the stock, sticking through the ventilation holes of the front grip to be used an emergency ramrod in case the weapon jammed.

Now, let me note right away, this isn't a debate about gun control or "gun violence" (that odd newspeak category of violence).  If you want to read my views on that you can read my several other threads that touch on it.*  No, this is about the law of unintended consequences.

Eh?
Yes, exactly.

And for that, we need a little background about the AR15 and the M16, one of Robert S. McNamara's gifts to the military that just keeps on giving.

And if a person wonders what I mean by that, I don't like the M16.  And yes, I have personal experience with the M16, or rather I should say a variety of those jamming plastic and steel direct impingement second rate assault rifles, if that's what it is, the M16A1.**

 Me, with one of the several M16A1s I carried at one time or another doing stuff similar to this. This photograph was taken in South Korea.  This M16A1 was not made by Colt.  It was made by General Motors Hydramatic Division.  It was one of the better ones I used over the years and I can't recall this one jamming.

Now,  just saying that in that fashion will send some people into cardiac arrest.  The "American Rifle", or whatever its being called today, has come to absolute dominate a large section of the rifle market.  And I think it's junk.  Well, if not junk, it has problems.

And I don't mean in a "they should be banned" sense.  I mean that in a "they don't like to work" sense.

Vietnam War Era manual for the soldier on the M16A1.  This manual was still in use in the early 80s when I was in the National Guard, but it was being phased out at that time by a less teenagerish version.  This document is interesting in that the Army thought it had to publish a cartoon book in order to get soldier to read the manual.  It's also interesting in that it was drawn by famous cartoonish Will Eisner, who had military experience, but who used the stock grizzled sergeant as a stock character. By this time during the Vietnam War a lot of Sergeant E-5s weren't much older than the privates.  The actual book itself featured a cartoon buxom female character was was drawn as if she was right out of Terry and the Pirates, which probably wasn't too relevant to a generation that thought Jane Fonda and various Playboy victims were the model of feminine beauty.

This was well known in Vietnam and it's the fault of the design, contrary to what latter day legions of apologist say about the rifle.  One of the best minor monuments of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the war, in my view, came when Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave called it a piece of junk.  It was still well known in the 1980s when we lubricated the weapon with gallons of banana scented Break Free to make sure it'd work.  And it's been a consistent complaint about it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's the reason that piston variants like the HK416 show up in special use and the gas system weaknesses are why nobody else in the world attempts to field an assault rifle that features that gas system.

 Philippine Army soldiers armed with a HK416, a piston using variant of the AR that cures its feeding problems. This version was designed by the German firm of Hecklar & Koch and has been widely used around the world, including by the United States in the hands of special troops.

We ought to replace it.

But we don't.

And yes, none of that is what I'm writing about here, although its related.

Part of the reason, I suspect, that we don't replace the M16/M4 weapons is that the service buys them.

Well of course, you say, how else would they get them?

Well, prior to the M16A1 the service's standard rifles weren't purchased, as a rule, usually. They were made by the Government. And that's what the point of this post is.

And its an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences.  Maybe.

Bear with me, I'm getting there.

A civilian item has to be marketed.

The M16A4/A5 and M4 carbines the Armed Forces use today came about as developments of the earlier rifles, the most significant of which is the M16A1. The M16A1 was a Vietnam era corrective improvement of the design of the M16 most significantly featuring a big plunger that allowed a soldier to jam the bolt home when it jammed as one more shot is better than none at all.

The M16 was a military selective fire variant of the AR15, sometimes inaccurately called the "Colt AR15".  The AR15 itself was a 5.56 (or .223 if you prefer) development of the AR10, the original design.

 The original variant of the AR10 with wrapped fiberglass stock and realty weird flash hinder.  The AR10 has seen a revival after having truly been dead in that it has come back into the service as a designated marksman rifle.  While I do not like the ARs, this makes a lot of sense as its very similar to the rifle otherwise in service and it is quite accurate.  "Joe Loong - originally posted to Flickr as DSCF1108 CC BY-SA 2.0 File:AR-10 in the National Firearms Museum.jpg."

The AR10 was the brainchild of Fairchild engineer Eugene Stoner.  Stoner was out to design an assault rifle that could be manufactured cheaply using the newest in World War Two technology and Fairchild was looking for ways to exploit that technology.

Yes, its' that old.

 Stg44 (or in this case a MP 43/1) using optical sight, which most did not, and featuring stamped receiver and in some instances a plastic butt stock.  Almost everything about this World War Two era German assault rifle was every bit as modern as the features of the AR15/M16.  CC BY-SA 3.0 de File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-118-55, Infanterist mit Sturmgewehr 44.jpg Created: 31 December 1942

Anyhow, Stoner's idea was to make a cheap assault rifle out of stamped steel and plastic.  It these regards it wasn't really revolutionary as the world's first assault rifle, accepted as such, ultimately came to do that as well.  Stoner's design also omitted any sort of advance gas system, such a a piston or block, and simply blew tapped gas back on a cup machined on top of a bolt carrier and then vented into the action.  In this fashion it wasn't revolutionary either, as a semi automatic rifle used by the Swedes during World War Two (in which they were neutral) also used it.  Like the M16, it had performance problems.

If you think, gee, that's going to get things pretty dirty, you'd be right.

Anyhow, at some point this branch of Fairchild, Armalite, separated from Faichild and the company went about trying to market the AR10 with limited success after entering the competition for a new battle rifle for the United States and not prevailing in it.***  Some were in fact purchased and even used in combat in distant regions of the globe, with the example of Portuguese paratroopers in Angola perhaps being the most significant.  It might be noted that the Portuguese have always shown an affinity for eclectic weapons choices and, at the same time, their officers were carrying Luger's in combat, which would make most people knowledgeable about modern weapons gasp.

Anyhow, also in the 1950s the United States was also experimenter with .22 caliber rifles, which things chambered in .222 and .223 are.  Not .22 LR, of course, which is the most common little tiny cartridge on earth, but centerfire .22 caliber weapons.  

It was an experiment.

At the time the US had just adopted the M14 rifle, which it made.

And that gets to one of our first really big salient points.

The government had designed and made the M14.

 Paratrooper in Vietnam with M14 rifle.  While its seemingly been forgotten, the US Army was equipped with the M14 at the start of the Vietnam War, as were the Marines.  The Air Force was still equipped with the M1 Garand, as was the Navy.  The Guard and Reserve was completely equipped with M1 Garands.

We're in the late 1950s at this point.  But let's explore that, as that's a hugely significant point in our essay of today. The government had made and designed the M14.

Indeed, the U.S. Government had made every principal standard longarm it had equipped its military with since the foundation of the country.  That was the system.  Longarms, such as rifles and muskets, were made in government arsenals.  They were usually, indeed almost always, designed by government employees.  In the rare instances in which they were not designed by government employees, such as with the Krag series of rifles and carbines, the U.S. Government bought a license to produce them and then made them, itself, under license.

The only exceptions to this in any form came normally during big wars, or with small purchases.  So, for example, prior to the Civil War you will find that the Army bought small lots of Sharps carbines.  Small lots.  During the Civil War the Army bought everything going, but the Civil War was a really big war.  During the Indian Wars the Army bought small lots of experimental weapons, but didn't adopt them, and then the Navy and Marine Corps bought relatively small lots of Remington made Lees at various points up to and during the Spanish American War (the United States, not the United Kingdom, was the first nation on earth to equip itself in any fashion with a Lee rifle. . . take that SMLE fans).  During World War One the Government contracted for huge lots of M1917 Enfields and bought small lots of Mosin Nagants (that had been rejected by the Imperial Russian inspectors, who must have been delusional given the circumstances their nation was under).  

And so on.

But for long arms, the big story was Springfield Armory. To a lesser extent, and at different times, the story was also Rock Island Arsenal and Harpers Ferry Arsenal.

Now, if this is a bit shocking in our super glory of the free market era, we should note that this wasn't unusual at all and wasn't limited to longarms.  The government also manufactured artillery (it isn't like there's a big civilian market for it, after all).  It made saddles by the thousands as well, for which there was a big civilian market, and all sorts of tack.  Prisoners in Ft. Leavenworth made bad footwear for the Army for many years.  At one point between World War One and World War Two the government manufactured 6x6 trucks. . . nobody else was making them and the artillery branch needed them.

 Cavalrymen at Ft. Riley Kansas, 1940.  The pack and riding saddle that are in this photo were both types manufactured by the government itself.

It's also worth noting that there were certain things the government didn't make, and some of them were surprising.  The government quit making handguns sometime prior to the Civil War.  The introduction of Colt revolvers seems to have caused that to come about. Whatever it was, they had made them, and they just quit.  And the U.S. military actually uses a surprising number of handguns.  The U.S. military also never made very many machineguns, which is odd.  It did try to come up with one during World War Two but a production goof made that example lousy, and it had made a few prior to World War One.. The one and only machinegun it ever tried to field that was its own design was the M15/M14E1, a light machinegun variant of the the M14, and it wasn't very good.  The M14 was excellent, but the M14E1 wasn't.

During this entire time the US never made a really bad longarm.  It made some that didn't quite pan out, such as the Krag, and some that were so so, like the trapdoor Springfield's, but it never made a really awful longarm, which is remarkable.  And when things didn't quite pan out, because they made them, they usually reacted pretty quickly as a rule, although the long history of the trapdoor runs contrary to that. 

And then came the AR15 and Robert McNamara.

 Robert S. McNamara.

When the US entered the Vietnam War, it sent its troops in with M14s, which were just coming into service. They were so new, and there were so few, that the National Guard never received them.  And they worked fine.  

We were, as another thread explores here in depth, also supplying our ally, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, with weapons.  The ARVN didn't get M14s, they got, and had been getting for some time, M1 Garands (another great U.S. arsenal design) and M1/M2 Carbines (a World War Two design by Winchester that was in fact acquired by contract from civilian manufacturers and which was, in fact, not a very good military weapon).

And then came in the USAF.

From 1948 when it was created up until, well, forever, the USAF has had sort of weird price of place in military acquisitions.  The Air Force generally, but not always, gets what it wants.  And it decided that airmen would have been way too burdened to guard air bases in Vietnam equipped with M1 Garands (which is what they would have had, M14s wouldn't have caught up with the Air Force yet) and therefore it would buy the new, super sexy, AR15 in a selective fire form.

 

World War Two vintage poster depicting tough combat infantryman with an M1 Garand.  The Air Force didn't want the M1 to do its talking in Vietnam.

Which takes us back to the AR10 and the .223. 

The experiment I noted above resulted in various entities, and Springfield Armory, coming up with .223 designs to be tested. Winchester made a rifle that was based on the M1 Carbine, which is a fairly lousy military weapon but which does function fine.  Its product was a lot like the later Ruger Mini14.  Springfield Armory again adapted, albeit half halfheartedly, the Garand action that was used for the M1 Garand and the M14 to the .223 and also came up with a weapon that bears a strong resemblance to the later Ruger Mini14.  Armalite adapted the AR10. As Winchester later lamented, the AR15 looked "sexy".

The Army yawned and the halfhearted effort of Springfield Armory showed that it never thought the .223 was going to go anywhere anyway, but the Air Force said "Golly Gee Bob!.  Look at that nifty thing". and adopted it.  As Armalite's production capacity was nonexistent Colt, taking a gamble as it was really a pistol manufacture, bought the rights to Stoners design.  So Colt fell into a military contract in 1963 when the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Army, bought AR15s to equip its men in Vietnam with.****  Right around the same time the Secret Service also bought AR15s.  Indeed, if you look closely at the famous video footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination, you can see that a Secret Serviceman in the car behind Kennedy's is carrying an AR15.
Now, the real irony of this is that the Air Force is the service that's least qualified to decide anything about small arms and in truth perimeter security in Vietnam would have been just as readily served by men carrying M1 Garands.  Heck, it would have been better served. The Air Force didn't need M16s and it shouldn't have received them.  It was patently absurd.  Compounding the problem, however, the Army's Special Forces took some M16s and heaped lavish praise on them, the recipients of the praise forgetting that special troops are notoriously able to make use of weapons that regular soldiers cannot.
This combined result then operated to convince William C. Westmoreland, whom we've recently otherwise read about, to urge the ordering of what had then been adopted as a limited standard as the M16 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  There was some logic to his decision.  For one thing, the ARVN soldiers were tiny.  The M1 Garand which they were supplied with by the United States was huge and the alternative M1/M2 Carbine was ineffective.  The M16 seemed just the ticket.
The ARVN was not impressed.  While Americans have heaped condemnation on the ARVN for decades many ARVN troops saw years and years of combat and they weren't actually asking for new small arms.  When they received the M16 they were amongst the first to discovery that it jammed, and jammed badly. They were convinced that the Americans were giving them junk that the Americans themselves weren't using. That was soon to change.

 ARVN Rangers during the Tet Offensive.  Some ARVN units fought well throughout the Vietnam War including special units such as this.  By Tet, the ARVN on the whole was fighting well and most of its troops were equipped with M16A1s, although you still find examples of them carrying M1 Carbines right to the end of the war.

Coincident with the first ordering of the M16 there were teething problems with the production of M14s.  In retrospect they weren't all that bad and even recent US military history at the time should have revealed that.  There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well.  Production capacity limits meant that the M1903 never was fully replaced during World War Two in spite of a massive effort to manufacture M1 Garands.  During World War One production limits had lead to the as many M1917s being made as M1903s. So this wasn't really new.  More than enough M14s existed to equip the active duty Army and Marine Corps, even if the reserves did nto receive them. But they were practically new.  Nonetheless McNamara had the production of M14s stopped.
This was a monumentally boneheaded move and this alone deserves to rate Robert Strange McNamara as a Department of Defense disaster.  Springfield Armory dated back to the early history of the country, and now it was idled and no M14s were being made.  M16s, on the other hand, were coming in from Colt and would soon be licensed by Colt to other companies as production for the Vietnam War heated up.  It was soon decided to equip US soldiers in Vietnam with the rifle.

Problems rapidly developed, although they were problems the ARVN was already aware of.  The gun jammed and people were getting killed.  The immediate solution was to come out with the A1 variant of the rifle, the M16A1, which featured a large plunger that struck the bolt to close it in an emergency.  This didn't solve the problem but it did mean that there was at least the hope of not getting killed if the rifle jammed up in combat.^

 Paratrooper cleaning an M16 in 1966, at which time it was still an experimental arm.

The M16A1 was not well received.  Marine Corps units avoided using it as long as possible  by shifting M14s to units in the field and M16s back to the rear. This went on until the M14s had been withdrawn and they just couldn't get away with it any longer. The Army, being larger, never had that opportunity and so it went right into front line units  The initial results were disastrous as the new weapon locked up like a drum in combat.  People with long memories recalled after the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division ran into trouble with the weapon at Ia Drang in 1966 that the same regiment had experienced fatal weapons jams nearly a century earlier at Little Big Horn due to the copper cartridges used by the Army in the action sticky trapdoor Springfield at that time.
New orders requiring "Tiger" to prodigiously clean the weapon constantly, prodigious lubrication and a switch in powder for ammunition partially alleviated the problem but it's never gone away.  Oddly, the current M4 Carbine is reported to jam more than the M16A5, showing that they both jam, but the carbine inexplicably jams more.  But the M16 has kept on keeping on.
That was in part because in 1968 the Secretary of Defense had Springfield Armory closed for good.
Springfield Armory had been mounting a rear guard action against the M16 ever since it had been introduced.   The M16A1 was standardized in 1967 and the M16 had been ordered to replace the M14 by McNamara at least two years earlier.  So the United States lost a manufacturing capacity for small arms, by the military itself, that it had since 1777.
A private industrial concern
The closing of Springfield Armory, the replacement of the M14 by the M16, and the utilization of a private contractor for the first time in the nation's history to supply all of the nation's small arms need created a situation that was unprecedented.

Prior to the M16, the US had never had to rely solely upon private industry for the supply of muskets or rifles.  Privately produced longarms had existed before, of course, but never without the Government itself making the established standard longarm.  Privately produced longarms were the exception to the rule, sometimes a huge exception to the rule, but an exception.  As noted, this wasn't the case for handguns and that would soon prove to be the model for what would next occur.
Just as it had never been the case that the nation had been without a longarm manufacturing arsenal, it had also not been the case for years that a major private manufacturing plant was left making a military model of weapon with only one customer, the military end user.  It had happened before during wartime of course.  Various companies had made M1903s, M1s and M1 Carbines, amongst other weapons, for the U.S. Government during wartime.  But the last instance of this happening had been during the Korean War when contracts for M1 Garands had been put out. Granted, that had not been a long time prior.
Colt, for its part, had a spotty history with longarms and was really a handgun manufacturer.  It had tried to introduce longarms from time to time but rarely with any kind of success.  Suddenly, however, in the early 1960s it found itself owning a longarms that was in sudden demand by the US. Soon thereafter, it owned the rights to what was now the standard US rifle, the first time in history that a private company had been in that position, although it must not have been a sole manufacturing right given the later history of what occurred.  The M16 would prove to be an economic boon to Colt.
Colt had always had the policy of selling the same models of pistols it manufactured for the Service to civilians. This had long been its custom. And indeed, it was often the case that a newly adopted military model was available to civilians slightly before it was delivered to the military.  With that being the history, it's no surprise what happened next.  In 1964 Colt started manufacturing the rifle for civilian sales as the AR15 Sporter.
That shows how vast the production capacity of Colt really was at the time.  Colt was fulfilling military orders for the M16 and yet was still able to manufacture AR15s for civilian sales.  Having said that, the AR15 received a bit of a mixed civilian reception at the time.
It had been a very long time since a major American firearms manufacture had offered the pure military version, nearly, of a military longarm for civilian purchase and it had never been the case that an American manufacture had offered what was the primary military longarm for civilians sales. That's a bit nuanced, however, as Springfield Armory had been the manufacture of that weapon since 1777 and it had done that on a periodic basis.  Springfield Armory offered a customized sporting version of the Trapdoor Springfield rifle to soldiers (officers were the primary customers) in the 19th Century and it had sold M1903s to civilians in various versions from 1903 until 1939.  Target variants of the full military M1903 were the most common to be sold by Springfield Armory to civilian customers but actions were also commonly sold for sporting rifles.  This, we should note, mirrored the sales of DWM in Germany which sold full military G98s, as well as a lot of sporting variants, to target shooters throughout the long history of the production of that rifle.  Following World War Two, when the M1 Garand became required for National Match shooting, it sold accuraized M1 Garands, as well as conventional used Garands (and other older rifles) to civilian customers.  When the M14 was introduced it sold a very few National Match M14s to civilian customers.
But there had never been a time when the primary military longarm was solely being manufactured by a private concern and that private concern offered the rifle, almost, for civilian sales. That was new. The closest thing that had occurred prior to that was military versions of longarms made by private manufacturers that were not official US weapons, such as musket versions of the Sharps .45-70 rifle, but which were sometimes adopted by states for their National Guard (New York in that case) or, more recently, private manufacture of M1 Carbine versions after World War Two (and up to the present day) by small manufacturers.
When Colt introduced the AR15 Sporter, as noted, civilian shooters were mixed in their opinions about it, and this continued for an extremely long time. There was no obvious use for it other than it being a giant plinker, which is the primary use it received.  At the time, the .223/5.56 cartridge was not legal for big game in very many places and the AR15 did not have a reputation for accuracy or reliability.  One of its primary drawing points, frankly, was that it was a military weapon and it appealed to individuals (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this) who liked military style weapons.  Even at that, however, quite a few true rifleman shunned the weapon and associated it with poor design and questioned whether a weapon that was a semi automatic variant of an assault rifle was really a rifle.
It dominated the .223 field however until Ruger introduced the Mini14 in 1973.  Even that event, however said a lot about how the AR15 was viewed, as Ruger chose to  introduce a rifle that looked, and was named, a lot like a miniature version of the beloved M14 rather than one that looked like the Stg44.  The Mini14 nearly supplanted the M16 in the Marine Corps, however, as the Marines, which never liked the M16, took a serious look at replacing the M16 with it.*****  As a commercial offering Ruger, however, reflecting the views of its owner, refused to offer the firearms with more than a five round magazine, in spite of losing sales on larger magazines to after market manufacturers^^
The M16 wasn't replaced, of course, and is with us still.  Accuracy of the rifle improved enormously with later variants and it isn't the rifle it was during the Vietnam War in a lot of ways.  And the AR15 is still with us as well.
At some point, the M16 went from being the only thing in its niche to absolutely dominant in the American firearms world.  How it happened isn't really clear, but it's happened.  Even though the rifle has never been reliable it's now enormously common and it virtually sucks the air out of the room to a certain degree.  Whereas in the 1970s a firearms store that sold Colt handguns would have one AR15 in the rack, now nearly any sporting goods stores selling firearms has rows of AR15 type rifles, although they aren't Colts.  Colt has been troubled for years and it no longer offers civilian AR15s for sale on a exclusive basis. There are leagues of other manufacturers and Colts are by far not the most common.  The rifle not surprisingly entered the target world when it was finally required to be used for standard National Match over the M14, it no longer being possible to pretend the M14 was the service rifle, but it has also entered the game fields in large numbers.  The process is mysterious, but very real. A person can't pick up any of the gun magazines without having to thumb through pages of M4/M16 knock offs in the advertisements and articles.
Now, saying anything bad about the AR is dangerous.  One writer lost his employment when he criticized the AR in 2007, stating the following:

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them "assault" rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them "terrorist" rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are "tackdrivers."

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I've always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don't use assault rifles. We've always been proud of our "sporting firearms."

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries [sic] and woods.

Now that writer probably hadn't thought out what he was writing at the time (and note, I'm not endorsing it) but his opinion was a lot more widespread than people might believe.  Back in the 1970s, before AKs (other than Vietnam War prize rifles, which did in fact exist at first) were around, older riflemen expressed similar views.  My own father was of the opinion that the AR15 was for one thing and one thing only, "killing people" and disdained them.  A career Army man who in retirement worked as a highly knowledgeable gun salesman locally openly disdained the AR15 and discouraged people from buying the one his store was required to carry in a the rack, a view that was followed by everyone else in the store including the owner.  Something really changed in regards to the AR following the 1980s, and I'm not sure what it was.

 U.S. Marines training in Iraq in 2004. This Marine is armed with the M16A2, a version of the M16 that was designed by the Marine Corps itself and then adopted by the Army.  The rear sight is completely different from that of the old M16 and M16A1 and the forearm is much stiffer. The barrel is also much heavier.  The M16A2 came about after the Marine Corps determined that Ruger could not supply it with adequate numbers of Mini14s and that it was stuck with the AR.  It is a hugely improved version of the M16 and is really the rifle people think of today when they think of the M16.

Other than that with the M16A2, a Marine Corp designed version, the rifle actually became truly accurate.  Indeed, for the type of rifle it is, its highly accurate.  Nearly all of the AR fans who decry other .223 semi automatic rifles for being inaccurate only have experience with the M16A2 and later versions, rather than the M16A1 which had lackluster accuracy and was flimsy. The M16A2 was a huge improvement and the manufacturers of AR type rifles followed suit.  That surely explains some of it.
Beyond that, however, it must be the old Winchester noted "sex appeal" of the rifle that drives at least a fair amount of sales and its unacknowledged but clear status as the king of the range plinkers.  M4 carbine variants are all over the place even though the military problems with the M4 are legion.  Indeed, the service has been struggling with how to replace the M4 with a larger caliber rifle for years, and its only a matter of time before it occurs.
No matter the problems, there are seemingly endless varieties of M16 and M4 knockoffs now.  Even Ruger, Bill Ruger now long gone, offers a M4 type rifle along with its Minis.  Every gun magazine features page after page of AR type rifles now chambered in big game cartridges in what is sort of the return and revenge of the AR10, even though going afield with a rifle as cumbersome, complicated and bulky as that when after a  member of the Cervinae genus is really not the best choice.  And even now and then some kid shows up with a AR look alike for a 4H .22 shooting practice until the awkwardness of the design for that replaces it with something more conventional.
So, after all of this, am I endorsing the view of the writer above and demanding that sportsmen turn in their ARs?  No, I"m not.  Indeed, National Match shooters can't, even as they find themselves repeating history by shooting a target variants of a rifle that' no longer the combat standard, as the M4 is (and can't be made into a target rifle).

 U.S. Army soldier armed with the M4 Carbine, which has replaced the M16A5 as the frontline longarm.  It's still an AR, even tall tricked out with optical sights and doodads.  Oddly, the M4 jams more frequently than the M16A4/A4 although nobody has ever been able to determine why.  It's also less effective with its shorter barrel.  The adoption of it as the standard combat longarm is due to pure fadism in the service and nothing else.

But I am noting a few ironies, and do have a bit of a plea that will be like casting dust to the wind.
The irony is that the M16 as originally introduced was junk, and now its much improved junk.  It only became what it was as a Secretary of Defense who was wrong about nearly everything gutted the Army's ability to produce rifles for itself, and when that occurred it left manufacturing of the new service rifle with Colt, which had always had a business model of also offering for civilian sales whatever it was making for the service.  If the traditional model had been followed, the service would have acquired full rights to the M16 (and it must have acquired some) assuming we adopted it, and Springfield Armory would have been making them by 1968, along with supplemental civilian purchases.  It's somewhat doubtful that, if that occurred, any civilian manufacturer would have been allowed to introduce the AR15 or anything like it.  Indeed, I highly doubt it.  And given as it took years and years for the AR to take on the dominant status it now occupies, that may very well have never have happened.  Indeed, I doubt it would have. Today Springfield Armory would stil have been making M16s in something like the M16A5 variant, I doubt the M4 would ever have occurred, and maybe the Government would have licensed somebody to make a National Match variant, or maybe not.
So, in a weird way, the Vietnam War created the current situation in which a substitute for Air Force perimeter guards in a rainy Asian land became "America's Rifle" and the subject of some raging debate.
And my plea, or comment I guess, is that frankly, the ARs, to include the M16 and the M4, just aren't all that.  They're a problem weapons that has managed to really stick around, just like the the Trapdoor system of the late 19th Century but more so.  Running down Rugers or the like really doesn't cut it.  It is accurate, to be sure, but it isn't the end all and be all of anything, let alone the various .223s out there.  Plenty of bolt action .223s beat the AR in the game fields any day.  The old Minis plink just as plinkish as the ARs do, and work every time.  On the target range for its class, however, the AR is very good.
And beyond that, and here's the part that people causes debates and for which even somebody whose views on gun control hardly match the banners, are sort of shunned for saying, there's a real shift that's occurred over time reflected by the ARs.  Racks of tacticool ARs are at every gun store but why?  That wasn't the case some 30 years ago or so.  What's that mean?
It may mean nothing more than they are fun and easy to shoot, and on the range the functioning problems aren't much of a problem.  Or it may mean that a fascination with combat weapons, or at least that particular combat weapon, has spread from a niche category of shooting fans who were nearly like engineers in their view of that category of weapons, fascinated by mechanics, to some other sort of less technical fascination.  Certainly there's something to that as its not hard to find gun magazines that feature monthly articles on tactical shooting, even though that's something that has to be trained into proficiency, not read into efficiency.  As I noted much earlier on this blog, the United States, recent horrific events aside, is at an all time low in regard to violence and the chances of any one person needing to engage in tactical shooting with a carbine here is really low.  Maybe that's part of it.  Men, and it's mostly men, crave manly things, and the era when a huge percentage of men had military experience is over.

Not that I'm arguing that they should be banned, or any such thing.  Truth be know, the AR isn't much more advanced than the Remington 08, the Remington semi automatic rifle that was introduced by Remington in 1908 and which only came in a carbine form.  And like the AR, its virtues (and it had plenty) were a bit oversold too.
At the end of the day here, this post is about letting a little air in the room.  The current focus on the AR is just as overblown as Remington's suggestion that that hunter is going to survive his encounter with that bear.  Indeed, that poster is the subject of an amusing parody in which you see his hat flying off the cliff, he's gone, and the bear is going around the corner.^^^
___________________________________________________________________________________
*They include:

Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Packing Heat

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. Looking Again.

**The M16, in its selective fire military form, is probably an assault rifle, although early on it was sometimes referred to as an automatic rifle, which isn't quite the same thing.  Defining the term has always been extraordinarily difficult, but generally it means a selective fire rifle, fulfilling the role of rifle and machinegun, which fires an intermediate sized cartridge.  The Stg44 was the world's first assault rifle, coming out in the early 1940s in German production and made in creasing numbers until the end of World War Two.
***A battle rifle differs from an assault rifle in that it fires a full sized cartridge and may be semi automatic or selective fire, at least by some definitions.  The Belgian FAL is perhaps the most famous example of a battle rifle, with others being the M14 and the German G3.  The AR10 may have been a battle rifle or perhaps an assault rifle, depending upon how a person views it.
****This was actually the second military contract for the AR15.  Malaysia had contracted to purchase them in 1961.
^One of the designers who apparently came to the conclusion that the AR had real problems was its own designer, Eugene Stoner, who went on to design a new rifle featuring many of the AR's better features but abandoning its problematic gas system.  That rifle became the AR18.  Armalite introduced the gun to the market in 1969 but it never had the manufacturing capacity to really effectively market it and it was already competing against Stoner's own earlier invention, the AR15.
The AR18 has usually been passed off as a project to market an assault rifle to poorer nations, but that has to be baloney.  It was not any more mechanically simple, and therefore should not have been any more expensive to manufacture, than the AR15.  It was considerably more conventional in design, however, and completely abandoned the AR's direct impingement gas system in favor of a piston.  It also abandoned the AR's high line of sight which had come about due to the feeling that this would reduce recoil in the larger caliber AR10. That has always been a problem with the ARs and has only bee addressed very recently as the M4 went to optical sights and the upper carrying  handle, which is the support for the rear sight, has become detachable. 
The AR18 failed to secure any major military contracts although there were small military sales to some nations and police forces.  The US Army actually evaluated it but didn't want to buy yet another 5.56 rifle, which would seem to have been obvious.  The weapon obtained some infamy, however, as it was popular (along with AR15s) with the Irish Republican Army which liked it enough to give it the nickname "the Widowmaker".  A civilian version was offered in the form of the AR180 but it received little interest.
*****The Mini14, in spite of being constantly slammed by the fans of the AR15 actually came close to supplanting it, although the details are hard to come by.  My information from it comes from a fellow who was involved in Marine Corps procurement at the time, although you can pick up bits and pieces of the story elsewhere.
That the Marines never liked the M16 is well known.  They approached Ruger directly about acquiring Mini14s to replace the rifle and the only thing which kept it from occurring is that Ruger was engaged in a major overseas contract at the time and lacked the production capacity to fulfill a Marine Corps order.  So the Marines gave up and went on to design the M16A2 to fix the accuracy problems of the M16A1. The M16A2 went on to replace the M16A1 in the Army and Marines and the M16 in the Air Force.
Minis actually have a notable military record, but AR fans hate to admit it as it means that a rifle that looks so much more, well, World War Two, competed and still does with the AR.  It equipped the Bermuda Regiment, in a selective fire variant, of the British Army and selective fire variants are used by Philippine paramilitary police.  British police also have used it in the past and the French produce their own selective fire variant for their police.  Various orders are believed to have gone here and there in shipments that the US doesn't really want to track back to the US military.  It was widely used by US law enforcement personnel at one time, but that has very much declined in favor of the AR in recent years.
^^Bill Ruger was castigated by some in the firearms community for that view at the time.  Now there'd be absolute riots on this statement. His view wasn't uncommon at the time.  Just as there are those who regard any such statement as traitorous to firearms users today, at the time there were a fair number of people who believed that firearms manufacturers, like Colt, who offered weapons that were so clearly military were undermining support for civilian firearms owners.
^^^After all of this I'll confess that a couple of years ago I was walking through a sporting goods store and came upon an AR in the M16A1 configuration made by somebody other than Colt.  I was surprised but actually looked at it, and found myself being nostalgic about it.  No, I didn't buy it and I'm not going to buy the Colt "retro" AR15 made in the M16A1 configuration either.

Anyhow, I never liked the M16A1 when I was a Guardsmen and hardly any of the guys I served with did either. The Vietnam veterans in our ranks, and there were a lot of them, openly disdained the rife.  It's a powerful demonstrator of the nature of nostalgia that a guy like me, who had no love for any AR, would actually stop and admire an old M16A1 type one.  The power of the longing for lost youth I suppose.  A lot of people must feel that way, as why else would Colt be offering one in the M16A1 configuration?

Wow, this is a long thread, eh?

Okay, picking back up, what's the point?

Well, I disagree with the blogger whose blog I quoted above that there's "ABSOLUTELY ZERO" civilian or sporting need for this type of rifle, and in the current debate, it is actually usually the AR15 that's spoken of.  Prior to that it was the AK47 type rifle, which is actually subject to a bit of a different debate.  I'm not, I'll note, an AR fan (if you read the above you are already aware of that) but there are legitimate uses for one.  An entire class of target shooting uses only AR15s and they are target shooters.  A second and third class see them predominate.  And there are a lot of other sport shooters who use them.  

None of that completely answers the bloggers question, however, as if these are weapons of war, which they indeed were and are, and if their design was for killing human beings, which we've addressed above, and if they're particularly suitable for that, her question could easily be modified into a balance of values one.

Now, right there, quite a few shooters would start to yell at me, but then when I said there were legitimate civilian uses quite a few banners would.  This isn't a simple topic. So let's go on.

What seems to be little noted, and I'm only noting, not commenting on, is that what has really changed over the years are two things. There's become a weird glorification of violence that attracts a sort of violence admiring clan, some of whom have an exaggerated love of military violence.  And magazines are now much more common than they once were.

Eh?  Like Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue?

No, rifle magazines.  Or rather military type magazines.

Without lots of magazines these rifles are just rifles for the most part.  It's odd that the people who would seek to address the instrumentality don't focus on that.  Indeed, I've long wondered why the suggestion isn't to serial number the magazines to the rifle and allow a person to have only one or two magazines so serial numbered.  Indeed, that woudl be a much easier thing to do in reality than actually try to band the zillions of such rifles and carbines that there are.  

Not that I'm suggesting this as a cure myself.  Indeed, I don't know if that's Constitutional.  It might not be.  I'm sure if it was tried, that would be tested.

But circling back, somehow or another we produced a generational definition in the 1960sl that flowered in the 1970s that we were all about ourselves.  Following that, we produced technologies that rendered the some of us completely marginalized.  So we've produced a generation of people that has no values and nowhere to go.  Some take their own lives.  Some just become lost.  Others lash out.  And we don't seem to grasp that we've done that.

Che Guevera.  If you know anything about him, you'll know why he's posted here.