I saw another thought provoking tweet referencing a Washington Post opinion piece by Christine Emba: “Why do Americans want guns? It comes down to one word.”
The article is behind a paywall, and I don’t subscribe to the Washington Post, so I couldn’t read it. But there is a bit of it on the America’s Black Holocaust Museum site here:
Why do Americans want guns? It comes down to one word. – America’s Black Holocaust Museum
“At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear.
Here were weekend shoppers intently inspecting tools of death: moms testing the heft of handguns and fathers stocking up on ammo. When I asked attendees and sellers what gun ownership meant to them, most replied with the same word: “protection.”
The previous week had brought three highly publicized shootings. Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager in Kansas City, Mo., was allegedly shot by an 84-year-old White man after he rang the wrong doorbell to pick up his younger siblings; a 65-year-old man in Upstate New York allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman who accidentally pulled into his driveway; and two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after trying to get into the wrong car after a practice.
For all the talk of protection, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Yet over and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe.”
So the one word answer given by the gun owners themselves was “protection”.
The one word answer the author gives is “fear”.
Of course, you only think of protecting yourself if you’re afraid, so I don’t think she’s necessarily wrong in this, it’s just an answer from a different angle. But the angle is meant to portray something that may not be true, in which case it is possibly sophistry.
I don’t know if her original article contained these or not, but the ABHM site mentioned three “highly publicized shootings”, each of which highlighted incidents where people were killed by others whom, it would appear, were unreasonably afraid. The general takeaway then is that gun owners are unreasonably afraid which leads to unnecessary shootings of innocent people.
I can’t remember the name of the movie that Will Smith made with his son, but in that movie, he explains to his son that there are two separate things at play: fear and danger. Fear is your internal state of mind. Danger is the external state of affairs. There is danger, which is a real state. Then there is fear, which is the internal response (either rational or irrational) to perceived danger.
I believe that there is a lot of unnecessary fear in our society. I have heard younger people talk about how in the 60’s/70’s you could play outside and walk places on your own as a kid without worrying about abduction, whereas now you would never dare do that. I don’t really buy that. My guess is you could do the same today. But especially with the proliferation of news, we hear a lot more about the negative, so there is more fear. There is also an overparenting aspect too where parents feel that if they let their kids out of their sight for a minute, they are bad parents. One can always find examples of such things to bolster the argument too, so it gets passed into a general knowledge that the world is no longer safe, and the fear is justified.
I agree then there is a lot of unjustified fear, but of course not all fear is unjustified.
Are black people in black neighborhoods who have bars on their windows, and who lock their doors, and who avoid the places at night in neighborhoods with high rates of violence just living in “fear”?
Saying someone is living in fear is meant to portray them as unjustifiably afraid. But the real issue is whether they are reasonably afraid, I.e., there is a real danger; or are they irrationally afraid, i.e., there is no real danger.
There is one response in the twitter thread that were interesting too.
A user tweets:
“So would you consider owning other protective equipment as “fearful” or just guns?”
The author of the article responded:
“Depends on what the equipment is. A bike helmet is reasonable, bc accidents are fairly common. Also, their function is straightforward—you don’t need to have intense training/judgment to use them correctly in an incident. And they aren’t a risk to others.”
The person asks the relevant question about charging someone with “fear”.
The answer given is to say that a bike helmet is reasonable because accidents are common, but furthermore, they aren’t a risk to others. Which is true. But the ‘danger’ from falling off your bike and injuring your head is one thing. I’m trying to come up with the right way to word this, but most likely the only way you’re going to fall off your bike, unless you are a child still learning, is an accidental interruption in your ride; someone driving doesn’t see you and hits you. For what it’s worth, in years of riding a bike, I’ve never fallen off my bike. Of course it does happen, but I don’t know that’s it’s more common than gun violence though.
The ‘threat’ from someone pointing a gun at you and demanding you give them your watch, wallet, and phone, is another thing altogether. This is an willful threat from someone with an active intent to do you harm.
A helmet will likely do a reasonable job protecting your head from a fall of a bike. But what’s going to protect you from a guy pointing a gun at you and demanding your stuff? What kind of threat would have to be in possession of that would deter him from that confrontation?
I should add that I’m not a gun guy. I don’t own any guns and I’m not particularly an advocate for them either. But neither am I anti-gun. I get why people would want them. I have lots of friends who do have them, either for sporting reasons or protection.