raspberryrain

After the massacre in Orlando, I went looking for a 3D model of a Sig Sauer MCX. I couldn't find one. This is an MPX, by the same company. I put together this scene and then didn't use it. It doesn't look that much like an MCX, and it didn't seem useful after all. I still haven't done a comic about the shooting.

Well, today I was thinking about fireworks and firearms, and I dug this shot out.

Gun owners, I get it. I do. Firearms are a powerful modern technology. You don't want your children to be left behind, to grow up not knowing how to use them. And you don't want to be caught unprepared. The genie is out of the bottle, you think. And in the USA, you were probably taught that you have a right given you by God and the Constitution that should not be taken away, nor diminished.

For Americans who think this way, the phrase "well-regulated militia" is irrelevant.

But even half your own countrymen don't want firearms in their homes. They don't want their children to get into them. They don't want to be scared of stray bullets from their neighbors' children, or from a fight down the block that gets out of hand. They don't expect that carrying their own sidearms will mean they're safe from drive-by shootings.

We do keep some kinds of technology locked up. Even in the USA, the federal government tries to track any large amount of explosive. Large amounts of fissionable material aren't even supposed to be accumulated in private hands, or even some government hands.

And it's very, very hard to get an auto-fire rifle in the USA.

But somehow an auto-loading rifle, that's deemed to be acceptable.

Weapons like this can be useful. They can have their place. I wouldn't want to take them away from the Kurdish freedom fighters, for example. On the other hand, I wish Sendero Luminoso didn't have them.

But another modern technology that's useful is legal and societal control of weapons access. There's a reason most people in wealthy countries don't actually have to put together a squad of armed men to safely drive a journey of 50 miles, even though they almost certainly have something worth stealing. Gun regulation, where it has been successful, has literally made many people's lives safer and freer.

Omar Mateen wasn't remotely in a well-regulated militia. He was one madman, seeking his blaze of glory. Clearly, Omar Mateen should never have had an MCX. The Second Amendment wasn't written to enable someone like him, but if anything to stop someone like him. But when you defend the right of every private individual to a weapon, you defend Omar Mateen's right to a weapon.

Admittedly Omar Mateen, without a rifle, might have gone in for arson, and possibly been an even more successful mass murderer. Or he might have gotten a rifle on the black market, maybe; that would have been far more expensive, though.

But so-called Second Amendment defenders aren't defending either freedom or security when they defend his right to a weapon. What are they even defending? A hobby?

Some gun rights advocates think that someone at Pulse should have had a weapon, but statistically, there would be more problems with firearms in bars than without them. More than mass shootings, we regulate guns to stop stupid little shootings–toddlers killing their parents, for example. And more than that, we have laws around guns to stop terror imposed by gangs.

Ultimately, the arguments about gun control aren't about guns. They're about law and regulation. Spend some time around the populist/libertarian right wing in the USA, the UK, or other English-speaking countries, and it becomes clear: The sort of person who rejects firearms restrictions often also despises minimum wage laws, environmental standards of most kinds, product safety laws, torts, professional licensing, and the very idea of paying tax on income or wealth. There's no coincidence these opinions tend to pop up in the same person; they're all the same opinion. It all comes from historical ignorance of why these things have been placed into existence. All of these social innovations are relatively recent in the English-speaking world, and are responses to the kind of problems society had without them.

Too many persons who live a privileged life in a community with functioning public services, public utilities, police, and so forth don't understand what it means to be without these institutions. So they imagine that with more freedom to do as they will, more respect of what they see as their rights, they'd be at least as happy, healthy, safe, & free of problems. It's easy to do when you live in ignorance.

We could live in a society where street gangs constantly patrol with fully automatic weapons, and people stay locked in their homes in fear. Many people have. Many people do. But having seen what that was like, statesmen and jurists changed things. Just like we've seen what it's like to live somewhere with no guarantee of water quality. Or with no law mandating overtime pay.

But it's not about that for Second Amendment defenders. It's about a fantasy version of history & morality they've concocted in their heads; the same one that says they don't need to be paid overtime pay or even a minimum wage, that they don't need CDC or FDA, that they shouldn't have to pay taxes.

Looking at it that way, it seems about one step away from being "Freemen on the Land," really. Son profundamente locos.