OSD 220: The evolution of what’s culturally unthinkable
Examples of positive cultural evolution in gun safety.
Last week we discussed the concept of “technically possible but culturally unthinkable”. The takeaway was that if you want to reduce violence, the biggest wins are to be had by shaping what’s culturally unthinkable, not on (quixotically) trying to shape what’s technically possible.
Let’s look at an area where that has changed.
Here’s a picture of John Browning:
Here’s one of Elmer Keith:
These are the gun celebrities of their day, and you’ll note they had a level of trigger discipline that would get them roasted today. At the range, you’ve observed that youth and gun safety are correlated, haven’t you? Anecdotally, it sure seems like you’re more likely to get swept by the 80-year-old guy who has owned guns his whole life than the newbie who learned on YouTube.
Data bears that out. Accidental shooting deaths have been doing down for decades:
Jeff Cooper’s four rules of gun safety are probably responsible for that. Not so much because of their exact details (people can and do reasonably quibble about that), but because Cooper introduced gun safety as a cultural expectation. His idea was to turn gun safety from a vague “be careful” to a repeatable series of exact steps — with the promise that if you follow these steps, you absolutely, positively will not have an accident. Culturally, that set a much higher bar for what the gun community thought of as safe gun handling. (See “OSD 192: Safety at scale” for more on that.)
You can see the same effect in smaller ways. Check out these vintage pistol training videos, with nary an earplug in sight:
It’s a small example, but going to the range without PPE is a lot more culturally unthinkable than it was a few decades ago.
There are more impactful examples. There was a recent wave of press coverage about cases of people being shot when mistakenly knocking on the wrong door. The press coverage tried to pin that on modern gun culture. But without any data, it’s not clear that this type of recklessness is more common than it used to be. Household gun ownership used to be higher, gun safety practices used to be worse, and it used to be easier for these incidents to be missed by the media — all of which suggests that wrong-door shootings are, if anything, probably rarer today than they used to be.
All of these examples of gun safety have something in common, namely that they’re cases where the interests of the shooter and the victim are aligned — it’s in everybody’s interests to avoid accidental shootings or hearing damage.
Cases where the interests aren’t aligned (the legal name for such cases is murder) are harder. But they’re not impossible. (The rise-and-fall of ISIS attacks that we discussed last week is a good example of success.) So they’re a high-impact place for us to focus on continuing to build better cultural norms. The better of a job we do there, the more the debate over gun rights will keep solving itself.
This week’s links
“A Skirt, a Wig, and a Glock 19”
Lowenstein and Chaiton are licensed, armed security — Orthodox Jewish sharpshooters. To most Jews, that’s like a WASP sex therapist or a short supermodel: a contradiction in terms. And the stereotype of gunless Jews has a strong basis in reality: according to a 2005 report from the American Jewish Committee, Jews have the lowest rate of gun ownership of all religious groups, with just 13 percent of Jewish households owning firearms (compared to 41 percent for non-Jews). A 2017 report on religion and gun ownership found just 10 percent of Jewish respondents own handguns.
But women like Lowenstein and Chaiton say that’s rapidly changing.
Ian McCollum interviews Biofire’s lead designer
Interesting 20-minute discussion about eng challenges and design philosophy.
“Stanford researchers scoured every reputable study for the link between video games and gun violence that politicians point to. Here’s what the review found.”
In short, current medical research and scholarship have not found any causal link between playing video games and gun violence in real life.
Point and counterpoint on open carry
From John Lovell and hard2hurt, respectively.
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"The first rule of gun safety is to have fun."
--Gun safety before Jeff Cooper
I found this to be absolutely true when teaching Hunter Safety classes. The new, young students may have been tentative but were good at least trying to be careful. I quickly found out I had to pay close attention to when Grandpa (and sometimes Dad) took the line.
Competitive shooting is a great way to avoid the complacency of “I’ve been shooting my whole life” as a lapse in safety results in an instant Match Disqualification. DQ is only good if you get ice cream.