A disclaimer right off the bat. This is not a "pro gun control" post here on Lex Anteinternet.
If you read it all the way through, that'll be plain.
This is an op ed from the Star Tribune. It probably frankly will get this guy a lot of hate mail. But it's worth reading.
Sexton: 'Gun nut' has a warning
This past week I ran an item noting that the Biden Administration has indicated it's going to try to implement some gun control measures. I'm sure it will, but I also doubt that they'll come into effect. If they do, they'll be a lot of howling and screaming, but one of the parties that will really deserve the blame for this, the National Rifle Association, will be one of the ones howling the most. Sexton nails the reason why.
Sexton is really bold in spelling something out that's going to have to be addressed:
By my twenties I had a sizable collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. Some people I knew had a “pre-64” Winchester, a rifle renowned for its quality. Or they had a Browning Auto 5, a beautiful shotgun. A friend had ten of those in various gauges.
But gun nuts today are a different breed entirely. When they talk about guns they don’t get into describing graceful lines, tight grain wood or immaculate bluing. At gun stores today what I hear praised is firepower that comes out of black plastic and steel. And these weapons are not for hunting, they’re assault rifles sometimes called “modern sporting guns.” The kind of sport they’re good for is not spelled out.
I can indicate what sort of sport they're good for. For one thing, rifles of the AR type are now necessary for those who shoot service rifle competition. The M14 type rifle was necessary for that before. At some point the ODCMP changed the rules, and they really had to, to require the AR type rifle to be used as it was embarrassing to have the M14 kicking the butt of the rifle that replaced it, the M16, and the justification for the service rifle competition, which is a serious discipline, is to promote military style marksmanship in the civilian population, so that it's useful in time of war.
They're also a plinker, frankly, and they're useful for that. I.e., they're easy to shoot and they have low recoil so they're something that a person can spend hours at a range, or wherever, shooting and never really feel like they beat you up. And that's legitimate. Where they are of very low utility is in the game fields (which will be discussed below) as the 5.56 isn't a really great hunting cartridge and in my view shouldn't really be an approved big game cartridge and, moreover, the AR is actually a pretty lousy firearms design. Just the other day I discussed the Army's long running effort to dump both the cartridge and the AR. It's frankly pretty junky, in spite of its present civilian reputation.*
Before a person goes to far on this, such competitions aren't unique to the United States. Switzerland, for example, has an equivalent. So does Norway. It is a sport, and a fully legitimate one.
But here's the problem.
Something has happened, and the NRA participated in spades, in which this sort of use was no longer focused on, and hunting use was no longer focused on, but it became the full-scale campaign based on fear and frankly an unreasonable fear. The thesis was that everyone lived in a state of constant unyielding peril where a gun battle was about to break out any moment. And over time that developed into an undercurrent that suggested that it wasn't just a gun battle, but basically the Battle of Stalingrad that was about to break out.
Now, let me be perfectly clear. I support the right to keep and bear arms and my view of that right and ownership of firearms to protect yourself is pretty supportive of it. I still think what Jeffrey Snyder stated in A Nation Of Cowards is right on the money. I also think that John R. Lott proved his point with More Guns Less Crime. I do believe that there are people who need to carry a handgun to protect themselves, and moreover, a person has to judge that for themselves, rather than have some governmental agency judge it for them. And unlike Sexton, I don't question that there are reasons for civilians to own ARs of any type. If I were a resident of Dayton or Detroit, I might very well want a military style rifle to defend myself in some circumstances.
None of that is the point.
What the point is, is the culture of the topic, and that's a developed one, and that's where Sexton has a point.
The NRA really became involved in opposing gun control with the Gun Control Act of 1968. If you looked at the covers of its magazine, the American Rifleman, you'd rarely have realized that at the time, however, and mostly would have seen firearms that were used in hunting, or competitive shooting, or which were historical in nature featured. You'd have had to read the journals editorial section to be aware of that, for the most part. In the 1970s and 1980s its big writer was Finn Aagaard, a former professional hunter in Kenya and a dedicated hunting rifle expert.** Rifles like Mauser 98s and Winchester Model 70s appeared.
Military arms or military type arms rarely appeared on the covers and when they did, they tended to be collector items. In 1968, for example, a female marksman, dressed in a dress, a heavily engraved large revolver, and the firearms of George Washington made the cover. In 1980, quite awhile later, hunting rifles and shotguns, and sporting pistols made the cover. The only military cover, if you will, featured a pistol target shooter at Camp Perry, the big annual service arm competition. The same was much the true in 1981, except that year a marksman at Camp Perry and revolvers from the Union Army in the Civil War made the cover, so there were two military themes, if you will. In 1982 a combat type arm didn't make the cover at all.
The legendary rifle range at Camp Perry, Ohio, in 1913.
Indeed, I don't know when the AR15 type rifle first made the cover, but it may have been in May, 1985, when the Vietnam War Memorial was pictured. I'm sure there was discussion of it as early as the 1960s, and I'm also pretty sure early on its noted stoppage problems were discussed in the journal.***
Anymore, while I wasn't able to pull it up to really determine the numbers, the AR is constantly on the cover. And so are politics. Now politics have been on the cover at least as far back as the Reagan administration, as he was friendly to the NRA. But leading up to 2016, the NRA went full scale into the Trump campaign. Indeed, back in the 70s and 80s, the NRA still acknowledged it when Democratic politicians were friendly to their positions, but starting with the Obama campaign, the organization unleashed unyielding vitriol no matter what positions were actually being taken. With Trump it reached a state of near hagiography.
The evolution in its content was pretty significant over this time. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you could expect to find their position on gun control in their magazine, but it was clear that the readers of the magazine were mostly those who shot on ranges or in the game fields, and with arms of fairly conventional types. Advertisements reflected that as well. Now, however, article after article features the AR and its near fellows and a casual reader would assume that the magazine was geared towards those who expected to find themselves in combat in an American street.
Coincident with this, and perhaps in part due to their earlier positions, American streets have become safer and safer. Some large American cities such as New York could be regarded as credibly headed towards anarchy in the 1970s, but this simply is no longer true. Murders in New York are at all time lows and almost all involve unique circumstances that the average person is pretty unlikely to get caught up in. And the NRA can claim credit for being hugely successful at rolling back the tide on gun control, which needed to be rolled back.
But by embracing a vision of the world in which everyone is about to find themselves in combat its encouraged a view that's fed into an increasingly militarization of a section of the American populace. This past summer we saw, here in our city, people packing military type weapons on the streets for several days ostensibly to "protect" store owners from rioters who didn't exist. The only gathering that occurred at the time was one made up of young people and people who like gatherings during the George Floyd episode. A person quietly taking a handgun to work or their store, or something like that, may have made sense. Patrolling the streets as if its Hue, 1968, really didn't.
At the same time that this has occurred something really weird has happened in American culture concerning the worship of all things military. Indeed, this is feeding back into the military itself, something we'll address some other time.
On this, however, I'd note that when I was growing up almost every male had been in the service. All of my in town uncles had been and so had my father. It was so common, you nearly assumed that every male had been, and indeed because of World War Two and the Korean War, this was nearly true. The Vietnam War was on for my entire early youth, and that speaks for itself. That war was huge by modern standards, although small in comparison to World War Two, requiring as many as 500,000 American servicemen to be stationed in the country at one time at its height. And as earlier noted here, I served in the National Guard.
I note that as it simply wasn't really common for civilians to display any element of hero worship over servicemen at the time. Nobody said "thank you for your service" and usually you didn't even mention it to anyone. Indeed, in the wake of the Vietnam War, you really hesitated to, as there was an anti military feeling in the country in the 70s that went on for a long time in the 1980s, irrespective of a lot of Americans continuing to serve in the military.
That spilled over into feeling pretty badly about having kicked Vietnam veterans around following their return from the war, although the extent to which that has been over portrayed is pretty significant. Be that as it may, it did occur and for some time popular entertainment depicted every Vietnam vet as a psychopathic nut. That swung around in the 1980s when Reagan entered office and popular entertainment started depicting every Vietnam vet as an underappreciated hero.
It was also Reagan who started the habit of giving service members a snappy salute, and he had of course been in the Army Reserve prior to World War Two (at a time when the Reserve was in fact very small) and in the Army during the war, although never in a combat role. Some would and did belittle that, but I'm not going to as service of any kind is real service and, moreover, its more service than John Wayne had, who is commonly oddly regarded as some sort of military hero.
Anyhow, this all gets into the law of unintended consequences, but the Cold War ended in 1990 and the service started shrinking. Fewer and fewer people served just as at the same time praise of servicemen grew louder and louder. The wars that followed the Cold War were fought by volunteers and National Guardsmen, who are volunteers, and not by conscripts as had been the case for World War One, World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. And as that happened, the praise of servicemen turned into hero worship, and that has now turned into something else. And that has fed into what Sexton has noted, and what has gone on in regard to firearms noted above.
Just as fewer and fewer American males had any sort of military service, forces in the culture kept telling them that they should be expected to fight at any moment. Men who had never been issued a military rifle, who had never been made to memorize the Rifleman's Creed, or forced to march to the Jody Call of "This is my rifle, this is my gun", or who had never marched along chanting to the imaginary "Captain Jack" about meeting him with rifle in hand at the railroad tracks, or who had never been made to chant the lament "I used to date the high school queen, now I carry an M16" were told they absolutely need to have a M4 carbine to defend their house. Indeed, by this point quite a few of those men are two generations removed from an era when military service was nearly universal.****
Indeed, by way of an example, during my long service in the National Guard I served with a large number of Vietnam veterans and, as this is Wyoming, lots of them were shooters or hunters. I didn't know a single one who claimed to own an AR15 and they almost all detested the M16. One experienced combat veteran I was friends with was a dedicated hunter, and he hunted with a full military M1903 Springfield rifle with iron sights, as that's what he'd hunted with as a kid. A long ways from the pages of the American Rifleman which maintain that everyone needs to use the AR15 and its clones for everything.
Also by example, we were pretty careful in telling anyone we were Guardsmen at the time. Nobody was going to thank us for our service and there was a better risk that some girl we might be trying to ask out would be turned off right away, or at least give us a lecture. Nobody was going to walk around town with a "molon labe" t-shirt. I don't even remember seeing unit shirts. Some of us had artillerymen's t-shirts, as that's what we were, which means that nobody ran around pretending to be a sniper. Indeed, the entire time I was a Guardsman I met an actual sniper once, in South Korea. He didn't seem to be particularly impressed with himself as a sniper.^
Now that's all changed, and not for the better.
Some years ago I happened to be at a youth event in which a group was taking up space we needed. I casually walked up to them to discover that they were a group of civilians that were getting yelled at by an instructor drill sergeant style. These people, mostly male but including one woman, had paid this fellow to instruct them in the use of combat arms. They apparently also expected, as part of that, to be yelled at as if their instructor was a DI.
Now, there is a shooting game that does just this, and its legitimate. But that's not what these people were doing. They'd paid to be yelled at so that they could pretend in their minds they'd been trained like combat soldiers. Training combat soldiers takes months, not a few hours, but that's what they were doing. Why did they think they needed that?
Once again, I don't belittle training people how to use defensive handguns. I'd rather people know how to do that if they're going to carry than not. And I don't belittle people who take part in competitions based on the combat use of firearms, the same which date back at least to the 1970s. But training civilians to fight like soldiers as they imagine that they're going to need to fight like soldiers is odd.
But there are a lot of people who have been encouraged in that belief.
And that gets us back to where we are now.
On January 6 some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief stormed the Capital. Prior to that, on November 4, some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief were elected to Congress. No matter how many people have been encouraged in that belief, there's a lot more people who don't see things that way at all, and now they're really scared.^^
And they're going to react.
It's common for gun owners to point to Nazi Germany or Communist Russia as examples of the dangers of gun control. I don't really know if the examples are valid, particularly that of Nazi Germany, as it was actually Weimar Germany that had brought gun control in, and that story is really complicated and tied to the Versailles Treaty. It's probably true of Communist Russia following the Civil War. A better example might be the Irish Republic, however.
The Irish Republic came into existence through the use of firearms, which the British prior to World War Two really didn't restrict. The Irish sure did following Irish independence, however. Ireland had seen their use in civil combat and acted to pretty much completely control their ownership in order to stop anything like that happening again, Ireland's independence by that means notwithstanding.
The NRA has been hugely successful in rolling back gun control Coming out of World War Two and all the way into the 1970s, the majority of Americans supported an outright ban on the ownership of handguns. If you'd asked me in 1981 what I thought would occur, I would have told you that the days of control of handgun ownership were right over the horizon. And the NRA has been a factor in lawsuits and the support of judicial appointments that have done a lot to roll that frontier back. Much of that was achieved before the Trump Administration, however, and in actuality at least as far back as the 2008 election Democrats had quietly dropped gun control as something they were really pushing.
That got them no credit and instead the NRA not only continued to lambast President Obama, who had done very little in this area, but it backed Donald Trump full scale. At the same time they went from an organization that publicly focused shooting sports very strongly to one that really emphasized the defense role of weapons in cities. As this occurred, fewer and fewer Americans served in the military and more and more, mostly men, became fascinated with what they think the military is about, or at least imagined themselves as soldiers. And then, from 2016 forward all of this was encouraged by a political atmosphere that portrayed party of the country as the enemy of the other, and that suggested we were near a life and death struggle over the fate of the nation.
And that's going to have an impact. And that impact will be what those who struggled in the NRA in the 70s and 80s feared the most. The Democrats have no need to fear the NRA anymore. It's not going to give them any credit and the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump is fractured and potentially headed into two parties. The element of that party that's most likely to howl over gun control is probably headed towards political irrelevancy. The Wyoming GOP will probably pass bills that attempt to preclude the Federal law from being enforced, but unlike Canadian provinces, states can't nullify the Federal law and this will, in short order, just look pathetic and further distance the state from any political influence.
Normally, of course, the question would be asked, "what can be done?". Probably nothing. Only the courts can really stop anything that's passed now, and they might, but they very well might not. Congress might not, as noted, pass anything. The impact of things in Congress is slow. Some states certainly will, however.
If courts hold things up, and if Congress fails to do anything quickly, this is the breathing room, and there's previous little of it, that those concerned about Second Amendment rights will have. And what that means is acknowledging that firearms have a role in personal safety, but a civil war isn't going to break out. It'd be well worth remembering that, in American history, backing insurrection has been a bad bet in every sense, particularly politically.
And then there's our neighbor to the North.
I hadn't really intended this post to include Canada, but right after I started the Canadian Liberals (a party, not a category) which control the Canadian government via a minority government (they don't have an absolute parliamentary majority) introduced its second major gun control bill in two years. It's grossly overbroad.
Canada doesn't have a "gun problem". For that matter, the United States doesn't have a "gun problem" either. The United States is developing an odd alt right mindset problem in one large section of its population which is excessively focused in some quarters, on the concept of a Stalingrad right around the corner, even though it hasn't happened and its not going to. Indeed, most of those M4 Carbine replicas do nothing more than gather dust. Canada has developed a far left fuzzy thinking problem. They're practically mirror images of each other.
Canada is sometimes imagined as "The Great White North", but in reality modern Canada is the Great Urban Belt. 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US. border. That makes the US a mirror in a way, but what also tells you is that Canada's population density is basically sort of like that of the US coasts. Canada has a huge landmass, but people largely don't live in it anymore.
Up until the 1950s they did.
Canada was once a highly rural and highly conservative society. There's a reason that Canadian troops in World War One and World War Two were good soldiers, just as Australians were. They came from a largely rural background.
Now, none of that is true.
And what we're seeing in pretty soy boy PM Justin Trudeau's gun control package is a reflection of that.
Just as the alt right wing of the US political spectrum sees a civil war right around the corner for which everyone needs to be armed, the Canadian left sees everything other than going to a children's soccer match as excessively dangerous. Neither side in these respective camps is capable of seeing the views of the other.
Indeed, Canadian liberalism, a post World War Two development, features the elitist "I know what's good for you" arrogance that all such upper middle class liberal movements do. It's not that htey don't understand the views of rural and western Canadians, it's that those people shouldn't have those views at all.
Indeed, there are regions of Canada where it makes a lot more sense to be carrying a firearm on a daily basis than in the United States. While 90% of Canadians may live 100 miles within the US border, 10% don't, and there are still rural Canadians. In much of the rural United States the most dangerous things a person might encounter would be snakes (which are dangerous) and wild hogs (which are also dangerous). Canada, on the other hand, has really big bears, and they're certainly dangerous.
Given that, what Canada proposes to do is, well, stupid.
This all stems from a 2019 event in which an unhinged lunatic in Nova Scotia impersonated a police officer and killed 22 people over a 13 hour period. Guns control wouldn't have prevented this.
The killer had some sort of odd fixation on the police, although the murders started with his attacking. but not killing, his common law spouse on the day of their "anniversary" (how a common law couple can have an "anniversary" isn't really clear). Following that, the killer dressed as a policeman and went around for a prolonged period of time killing people.
The firearms the killer had were all illegally held and, moreover, he was reputed to be basically a long term criminal who had never been caught. The police were criticized for failure to properly react. Faced with this, soy boy Trudeau is sponsoring a bill which would have done nothing whatsoever to address what actually occurred.
This gets into the Liberal Party's flipside, but interestingly similar, world outlook as compared to the American alt right. The American alt right sees the world happy on the edge of societal collapse and a world in which it'll be dog eat dog and combat in the street, so everyone needs to be armed. The Liberal Party sees the world on the edge of being on the edge of blissfully slipping into a My Pink Pony episode in which nobody needs arms of any kind. Each is equally way off the mark.
Indeed neither seem to have a fundamental grasp of the nature of firearms at all.
Canada already has a pretty extensive gun control regime right now, although unlike the United States', it can flip over night and it can, moreover, be trumped by provincial refusal. Indeed, the latter happened when a prior Canadian liberal government instituted the "list", requiring everything to be registered. Alberta simply refused to comply. Ultimate the following Canadian Conservative government reversed the law. Lots of Canadian gun owners are hoping for this to occur again.
Current Canadian law has a host of semi automatic rifles that are restricted and licensed in a special fashion, and prohibits the carrying of a sidearm without a local permit. The new bill would ban the semi automatics, propose to buy them back and for those who would not surrender them (and if post compliance with Canadian firearms laws is any indicator, that would be a huge percentage of the owners), they could license them in a special category where they basically were restricted in how they sued them and couldn't pass them on to anyone else. In other words, the semi autos would be temporary "rack queens" until their owners died.
The bill would allow Canadian cities to restrict handgun any way they wanted to, right up to and including banning them. Some Canadian cities, notably Vancouver, have already said they would.
This would actually achieve next to nothing, but it shows the skewed mindset of the Liberals, which is remarkably similar to that of the American alt right. The American alt right sees Stalingrad right around hte corner and is arming up. The Canadian liberals seem to think that Stalingrad is right around the corner if they don't ban it.
Neither is correct.
Truth be known there's very little Canadian firearms crime and there's really nothing about that crime that Canada does have that can be distinctly tied to long arm type. In the rare instances of terrorism that Canada experiences, Canada's experiences show the same features as terrorism anywhere else. Terrorist will get the means. Mostly what this is about, therefore, is the Liberal government figuring that such weapons are disreputable, as they feel all weapons are disreputable.
Indeed, a video put out by a Canadian minster shows that. She relates how she grew up on a farm and her father carried a rifle or shotgun in his truck for hunting. But not one of the banned weapons which "are only good for one thing". They actually are good for more than the "one thing", but this does relate back to the American AR emphasis over the past decade which suggests we need to arm up for that "one thing". As we've noted elsewhere, however, mechanically there's little existential difference between these arms and semi automatic sof a century or more ago.
The pistol part is even more revealing.
Canadian pistol carry restrictions are frankly absurd as it is. T here's a lot of Canada where a sidearm would be pretty handy. In the vast Canadian outback, for one thing, they certainly would be, for one thing, due to the fauna. But beyond that, Canada has its share of murders in remote areas where there's no protection other than yourself.
Indeed, the new law is very illuminating in this fashion. Vancouver proposes to ban handguns as there are criminal gangs in Vancouver that use handguns. The thing that Vancouver is missing on this is that there are criminal gangs in Vancouver. If you are a member of a criminal gang, the legality of your sidearm is unlikely to be a matter of real consideration. And Vancouver has criminal gangs as its a port city, and every port city on Earth has criminal gangs as they are port cities.
But beyond that, the new law proposes to remove carry permits from local officials to a national office, no doubt because rural western Canada, which doesn't care for any of these laws, is more willing to issue carry permits that hte Liberals would like. It isn't that they're a problem, it's that the Liberals don't feel you need a permit.
Nobody really has a right to tell anyone when they're imperiled and when they are not, and self defense is an existential right. The central authority isn't going to see it that way, however, as it'll be a big police authority. Big police departments (as opposed to small ones) don't think anyone needs to protect themselves as that's their job. Simple logic tells you that for the most part the police really can't protect you as you call them after something has happened. If the police could protect people in advance, the entire Nova Scotia incident would not have occurred. But in giving police the controlling authority, they'll use it. When it doesn't work, they'll ask for more. And when that doesn't work, they'll ask for a bigger budget and more police.
How this spins on is already evident in the United States. Plenty of big city police departments are so heavily armed and equipped they look like military units and they behave like them too. That's caused over policing in the United States and we're in the midst of a major backlash. Canada will get that too, ands oon the local RCMP units will look like the Canadian 1st Infantry Division. Not a good trend.
So here we have the irony. The US might get more gun control because, in part, a certain section of the firearm's world has been glorifying the military nature of some weapons, and scaring people into thinking everyone needs to carry a gun no matter what. Canada is probably going to get more firearms as the Liberal government thinks that it can order everyone to live in a cartoon fantasy land.
Reality has left the building.
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*The AR, and more particularly I suppose the military variants like the M16 and M4 Carbine, have a fan aura that surrounds them and which is particularly pronounced with weapons of the Vietnam War.
The M14 which the military started off with and which neither the Army or the Marines wished to abandon, was well regarded by the soldiers who carried it. If you read the Internet gun stuff now, however, you'll read how it was a horrible weapon. Oddly, therefore, it's peculiar that it never really went away and it still hasn't. Every time the service needed a serious rifle. . . to include even the Navy, it reappeared. The only one who were really keen on leaving it was the Air Force, which is really focused on a different sort of fighting.
Servicemen I knew who served in Vietnam hated the M16, but now all sorts of fans love it. Servicemen who served after the Vietnam War, to include me, hated it too. Indeed, all sorts of complaints about it have come out of Afghanistan. No matter, if you read the American Rifleman it's billed as "America's Rifle". Bleh.
The M60, on the other hand, was a machinegun which people who carried it, including me, really liked and trusted. But if you read the Internet stuff now, it's just awful.
**Aagaard was a Kenyan, in that he was born in Kenya, of Norwegian parentage. He'd grown up in Kenya, served in the British Army while there, and gone on to be an African professional hunter. When the country obtained independence it enacted a series of laws that were really more directed at its colonial legacy than anything else, and Aagaard accordingly lost his profession there.
If he was bitter about it, it didn't show in his writing. He relocated to Texas and was a writer there.
***Part of the propaganda for the AR has been to rename it the "Modern Sporting Rifle", but there's nothing modern about it. It's been in service since 1964 or so and its design is based completely on World War Two technology. Nothing about it pioneered anything new, and even the cartridge wasn't a new one designed for it. Put in proper context, it's basically a World War Two generation weapon firing a 1950 vintage cartridge. In comparison, the M14, which it replaced, was a 1930s vintage rifle, in terms of design, firing a 1900s vintage cartridge.
****While it technically ended two years later, conscription really ceased in 1973, which means that the youngest of the former conscripts are now 65 years old. The last servicemen to see Cold War service are now 49 years old.
^He was identifiable as a sniper as he was carrying a standard M14. I asked him about it and he noted he was a sniper, but that he didn't carry his M21 in training so that it wasn't damaged.
^^It's worth noting that in the 1960s and 1970s when radicalized left wing groups such as the Black Panthers also trained with military weapons and wore military gear there was no sympathy for them among conservatives at all even though, quite honestly, African Americans are one of the groups of Americans for whom the Second Amendment is the most valuable.
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