A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

Let's start with a couple of basics.

You were born a man, or a woman.  We all were, and you can't change that.  If you are a man, no amount of surgery or drugs is going to make you bear life and bear all the consequences of the same, from hormonal storms on a monthly basis, to monthly blood loss, to a massive change of life, mid life.

Thinking that you can, and even wanting to makes you deeply mentally ill.

And a society that tolerates that attempt, is deeply sick.

An account I follow on Twitter notes the following:

22 years old Was 17 years old when Covid hitI wonder when he started going down the trans path

It's worth asking that question, and we'll touch on it in a moment. 

Part I.

Robert Westman,¹ who tried to be Robin Westman, but failed.  The photo alone shows you can't choose to be a woman if you are man, and that he was accordingly deeply mentally ill.  "You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows"  Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan.

Robert Westman, mentally ill young man, raged against the reality of life that had tolerated his perverted molestation of himself and lashed out against the existential nature that doomed his molestation to complete failure, and a deeply sick society now will wonder why.  Moreover, even his final act shows how deeply he failed in his effort. Women nearly never resort to mass violence in frustration.

That's a male thing.

And so we start, again by finding myself linking back to some old threads on this blog, unfortunately.  This was the first time I tackled this topic. 

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...

And I did again here:

Lex Anteinternet: You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence an...: (Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting...

The first time was intended to be the magnum opus on this, and indeed it likely still is.  It's still worth reading:

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

And on that, I'm going right to this:

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.

And also this:

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 Nibelungenlied 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.  Peckinpah 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. 

All of that is still valid, and in particular, I think, we need to consider again:

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.

Over the coming days and weeks pundits will ponder this event, and mostly spout out blather.  The explanation here may have deeply disturbing aspects to it, but the underlying root of it is not that complicated.  Robert Westman fell into the trap that ensnares some of the young in our society and hoped to completely change his nature by changing the outward morphology of his nature.  He was mentally ill.

A just society treats compassionately the mentally ill.

We do not live in a just society.

By and large, we just turn the mentally ill out into the street to allow their afflictions to grow worse until those afflictions kill them. Go to any big city and you'll see the deranged and deeply addicted out in the street.  This is not a kindness.

Gender Dysphoria is a different type of mental illness, but that's what it is.²

And its deeply delusional.

To put it bluntly to the point of being crude, no man, no matter what they attempt to do, is going to bear children and have the risk of bearing children, bleed monthly, and be subject to the hormonal storms that real women are subject to.  And, frankly, men generally become subject to some, if varying, degrees of drives that are constant and relenting, and never abate.³ 

No woman, no matter what she attempts to do, is going to hit a certain age in their teens have their minds turn to women almost constantly, as men do, in a way that women do not understand, and frankly do not experience the opposite of themselves. 

Indeed, no man really wants to be a woman, or vice versa.  What those engaging in an attempt to pass through a gender barrier seek is something else, and what that more often than not in the case of men likely is to drop out of the heavy male burdens in an age in which it increasingly difficult to meet them.  In spite of everything in the modern world, women remain conceived of as more protected, and therefore not as subject to failure for not meeting societal expectations.

Being a man has never been easy.

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man

And now I've reached that age

I've tried to do all those things the best I can

No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam

Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin.

I don't think lectures on what it means to be a man occur anymore.  I  know that I've never delivered one, but I didn't need one to be delivered either.  The examples were clearly around me, including all the duties that entailed.  We knew, growing up, that good men didn't abandon their families, and provided for their families, and were expected to protect women to the point of their own deaths.  Women weren't expected to protect men, at all.

Some men have always sought to escape their obligations, of course, and we all know or new those who did.  Most aged into disrepute over time.  Others got their acts together.  

You can’t be a man at night if you are a boy all day long.

Rev. Wellington Boone.

And some have always descended into madness.  But society didn't tolerate it, and it shouldn't have to.

So what do we know about Westman?

Not that much, but what we do know is revealing:

• He killed himself after his cowardly murders.
• He'd developed an inclination towards violence.⁴
• He once attended the Catholic school whose students he attacked,  leaving in 2017 at the end of Middle School.
• He started identifying as a female in 2019, age 17, and his mother signed the petition to change his name.⁵
• After middle school attended a charter school and then the all-boys school, Saint Thomas Academy, which is a Catholic military school. ⁶
• An uncle said he barely knew him.⁷
• His parents were divorced when he was 13.
• He worked at a cannabis dispensary, but was a poor employee.⁸

What can we tell from this?

Maybe nothing at all, but the keys are that in spite of they're being Catholic, his parents divorced, and his mother thereafter tolerated to some degree his drift into delusion, while at the same time there's evidence they were trying to correct it.  After school, he drifted into drugs, which is what marijuana is.

Blame the parents?  Well, that would be too simple.  But societal tolerance of divorce and transgender delusion is fostering all sorts of societal ills.

It's notable that he struck out at a childhood school.  That may be all the more his violence relates, but probably not.  His mother had worked there.  He was likely striking out at her too.  And he was striking out an institution that doesn't accept that you can change your existential nature, because you cannot.  He likely was fully aware of that, which is why he acted out with rage at it, and then killed himself.

There may, frankly, be an added element to this, although only recently have people in the secular world, such as Ezra Klein, began to discuss it.  Westman may have been possessed.

Members of the American Civil Religion don't like to discuss this at all, and frankly many conventional Christians do not either.  Atheist and near atheist won't acknowledge it all, of course.  But Westman's flirting with perverting nature may have frankly lead him into a really dark place, and not just in the conventional sense.

Part 2. What should we do?

Well, what will be done is nothing.  Something should, however, be done.

The topic of gun control will come up, which brings us back to this:

You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

We're going to hear, from more educated quarters defending the Second Amendment, that firearms have not really changed all that much over the years, society has. This is completely true.

But we're at the point now that we need to acknowledge that society has changed.  And that means a real effort to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill needs to be undertaken.

When the Constitution was written, Americans were overwhelmingly rural.  Agrarianism was the norm everywhere.  People generally lived in a family dwelling that included everyone from infants to the elderly.  Normally the entire community in which a person lived was of one religion, and everyone participated in religious life to some degree.  Even communities that had more than one religion represented, still had everyone being members of a faith.  Divorce was not at all common, and in certain communities not tolerated whatsoever.⁹ 

Westman was mentally ill.  Transgenderism is a mental illness. He was a drug user.  Cannabis is a drug.

In 1789 the mentally ill, if incapable of functioning, would have been taken care of at home by their families.  Transgenderism would not have been conceived of and not tolerated.  Alcohol was in heavy use.  Marijuana was not.  The plethora of narcotics now in circulation were not conceived of.

Yes, this will sound extreme. Am I saying that because a tiny number of transgendered might resort to violence they shouldn't own guns?  Yes, maybe in a society that simply chooses to tolerate mental illness, that's what I'm saying, although it also strikes me that the people who have gone down this deluded path might be amongst those most needing firearms for self protection. So, not really.  I am saying that attention needs to be focused on their mental state.

Am I saying that marijuana users shouldn't own guns?  Yes, that is also what I'm saying, along with other chronic users of drugs, legal and illegal.

And as we choose to simply ignore mental illness, perhaps the time has come to see if a would be gun owners is mentally stable and societally responsible before allowing them to own guns.  People in chronic debt, with violent behavior, with unacknowledged children in need shouldn't be owning firearms.

Of note, at the time the Second Amendment was written, none of these things was easily tolerated.

Part 3. Getting more extreme.

Knowing that none of this will occur, I'll go there anyhow.

Societal tolerance of some species of mental illness should just end. There shouldn't be homeless drug addicts on the street and gender reassignment surgery and drugs should be flat out illegal.

For that matter, in the nature of extreme, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons should be banned.  Your nose and boobs are fine the way they are, leave them alone.

No fault divorce should end, and for that matter people who have children should be deemed married by the state, with all the duties that implies.  Multiple children by multiple partners should be regarded as engaging in polygamy, which should still be regarded as illegal.

Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial. It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.

St. John Paul II.

Yes, that's rough.

Life is tough for all of us.  Ignoring that fact makes it harder on all of  us.

Part 4. Doesn't this all play into Dementia Don and his Sycophantic Twatwaffles?

Unfortunately, it does.  I fear that this may prove to be the Trump Administration's Reichstag moment.

Indeed, this event is like a gift to people like Stephen Miller who will now assert that this came about due to the liberal policies of Minneapolis, and moreover, as proof that outright attacks on transgendered are needed, the same way the Nazis asserted that dictatorship was necessary in Germany after the Reichstag fire.

Isn't that what' I'm stating?

I am not.

I think we need to address mental illness as a mental illness, and do what we can to treat it.  And rather obviously, what I've stated above doesn't square with Second Amendment hardcore advocates.

And as part of that, we need to get back to acknowledging that the mentally ill are mentally ill, rather than "tolerating" it.  

And we need to quite tolerating "personal freedom" over societal protection, right down to the relationship level.  A married couple produced this kid.  Once they did that, they were in it, and the marriage, for life.  That included the duty not to make dumb ass decisions for their child, like changing Robert's name to Robin.

Part 5.  What will happen?

Absolutely nothing.

People on the right will argue its not the guns, it's the sick society.  People on the left will argue that the society isn't sick, except for the guns, and the guns are all of the problem.

Nothing, therefore, will occur.

Well, maybe.

If anything occurs, it'll be that Dementia Don will use it as an excuse to send the National Guard into Minneapolis.

Footnotes

1.  His name was Robert, not "Robin". The free use of female names for men afflicted by this condition and the press use of "she" for what is properly he, is part of the problem.

2  By gender confusion, I"m referring to Gender Dysphoria, or whatever people are calling it, not homosexuality.  Homosexuals don't fit into this discussion at all.  For one thing, homosexuals are not confused about what gender they are.

3.  This does not advocate for license, although some men argue that it does.  Inclinations are not a pass for immorality.

Anyhow, I'd note that even honest men in cebate professions acknowledge this.  Fr. Joseph Krupp, the podcaster, frequently notes having a crush, for example, on Rachel Weisz.

4.  Again, some women grow violent, but its a minority and, when it occurs, tends to be accompanied by something else.  There are exceptions.

5. I don't know all of the details of his personal life, of course, but that was inexcusable on his mother's part.  I'll note, however, that by this time his parents were divorced and no woman is capable of raising children completely on her own.  Again, I don't know what was going on, but this screams either extreme "progressive" views, or a mostly absent father, or extreme fatigue.

6.  I didn't even know that there were Catholic military schools.  

Military schools have always been institutions for troubled boys, and this suggests that there was an attempt to put him in a masculine atmosphere and hopefully straighten him out. The school had both a religious base and a military nature.  Both of his parents must have participated in this.

7. The modern world fully at work.  People move for work, careers, etc., with the result that nuclear families basically explode, nuclear bomb style.  People more and more are raised in families that are the immediate parental unit, or just one parent, that start to disintegrate the moment children turn 18.  This is not natural, and is part of the problem.

8.  I don't know of course, but I'd guess that in order to be a poor employee at a cannabis dispensary, you have to be a really poor employee. There are bars with bartenders who don't drink, but I bet there aren't any dispensaries with employees that aren't using.

The impacts of marijuana use are very poorly understood, but as it becomes more and more legal, that there are negative psychological impacts for long term and chronic use is pretty clear.

9.  Contrary to widespread belief, not only Catholicism prohibits divorce.  The Anglican Communion does not either, and at that time particularly did not tolerate it.  Divorce occurred, but it was not common.

Also, and we've touched on it before, the United States at the time of its founding was a Christian nation.  It was a Protestant Christian nation, but a Christian nation.  Protestants of the 19th Century would not recognize many Protestant denominations today at all, even if they are theoretically the same.  A 1790s Episcopalian, for example, would be horrified by many Episcopalian congregations today.  In contrast, a Catholic or Orthodox person would find the churches pretty recognizable, save for the languages used for services.

Wednesday, March 11, 1925. Private manufacture of arms.

The League of Nations abandoned proposals to limit the private manufacture of arms in advance of a conferences on arms trafficking  The thought was the United States would oppose such actions, which is interesting in that this is the first instance of such a proposal of which I'm aware.  

Gun control itself had gained support, somewhat, after World War One.  It did exist to some extent before, but after the war it really started to advance, in no small part due to social concerns, rather than criminal ones.  It came into the UK for the first time, for example, as the British upper class feared that the lower class had been radicalized.

Last edition:

Monday, March 9, 1925. Try this in your happy home.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Adolf Hitler, Bavaria, Cartoons, German Weimar Republic

Obfuscation watch. Tweaking the English language so what you say isn't quite true.

I've been meaning to start a thread like this for some time, but given recent events, massive obfuscation is really in evidence in debates and news.

Indeed, here's one area where the news media does the public a genuine disservice. Right wing critics of the press complain that it's biased, and in terms of the language they adopt, which tends to come right from liberal speak, they have a point.

This will be one of those trailing threads, so it will no doubt grow over time.

This is not, I'll note, intended to have a right/left theme to it.  It's just noting what ought to be noted. The older terms here, which people grew uncomfortable with, were honest ones.  The newer ones are intended to cloud the issue.

June 27, 2022

Some in the news or recently in the news starters.

Reproductive Rights:  This just means abortion.  When the press or an advocate speaks of "women's reproductive rights", what they mean is a woman having the legal option to kill her fetus. That's all they mean.

This has, we'd note, replaced being "Choice" as the word of the hour, that meaning the same thing.

The term "abortion" has never gone away, and based on the last week's news, people on both sides know what these issues mean in this sense, so the use of the less clear term is really pointless.

Gun Safety:  This means gun control, and nothing else.  The word was changed as gun control is widely unpopular, but everyone is keen on safety.

Whether a person is for gun control or not, just say it. There's no reason to suggest that anyone is really lead to some other point when discussing the issue by calling it "gun safety".

Undocumented Immigrant:  This means illegal alien.  The term illegal alien was used for decades, but that points out the fact that immigration without approval of the receiving nation is illegal, which those who are basically in favor of an open border, or uncomfortable with enforcing the nation's immigration laws, don't like to point out.  Being "undocumented" suggest that you just have to get some papers in order, which is incorrect.

Constitutional lawyer:  This seems to come up in describing lawyers with boutique practices, law professors who want to comment on the Constitution, or news people with law degrees.

There's no such thing as a "Constitutional lawyer".  All lawyers make use of the Constituion, and frankly lawyers who practice criminal law do so the most.

Two Neighbors: 'Gun nut' has a warning in the U.S., Trudeau breaks out the soy milk in Canada.

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.

Advertisement for a semi automatic Remington rifle from prior to World War Two.

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.

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Syria.  To read the pages of the American Rifle man and other firearms stuff now days, you'd think this is what daily life in Parker Colorado is like.

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.

Troops of the U.S. Army in Manilla, 1945.  The way that some gun magazines read today, you'd think that the readers expect to find themselves fighting here.

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.  

I don't know when it started, but I think it might be tacked back to the "Greatest Generation" tag that baby boomers started to use for their parents after they felt sufficiently guilty about kicking them around for decades.  The generation that fought the Second World War suffered enormously, given that they also had to content with the Great Depression, but the hagiography that's attached to them since the book of that name came out has really been over the top.  Frankly, neither the World War Two generation or the Baby Boomers deserve any special prizes for societal virtue, although once again, the generation that fought World War Two suffered uniquely.  The one that fought World War One suffered uniquely too, and the Civil War stands out by itself as something disasterous.  Anyhow, after Tom Brokaw decided to start praising his own parents generation, all of a sudden "thank you for your service" started showing up everywhere.

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.

Marines in Hue in 1968.  Goats one moment, heroes the next.

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.

Ronald Reagan greeting Margaret Thatcher and wearing a G1 flight jacket.  Reagan typically saluted the Marine guards when he came on or off Marine One, and the same for servicemen when he came on or off Air Force One.  For some veterans of the day, including my father, it was incredibly irritating.  For that matter, the latter day change in service regulations that allows veterans, myself included, to salute for certain things is incredibly irritating to me, and I don't do it.  The recent habit of Presidents wearing service flight jackets also seems to go back to Reagan, who after all had been an actor and who knew a lot about presentation.

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.