OSD 287: Instruments of death in the land of life
Guns are for shooting people. Sure you can use them for other things, and it’s extremely unusual for any specific gun to ever be used to shoot anybody. People use guns for sport, fun, hunting, collecting, and tinkering. As David Yamane says, guns are normal and normal people use guns.
But after all that, you’re still left with the fact that they’re weapons. And weapons are for hurting people. When you train with a gun, you’re training to hurt people in the right way. Effectively and quickly, but most importantly morally. Most people don’t have trouble figuring out which kinds of harm are moral and which aren’t. But there is a common tendency to feel a little too secure in that morality blanket.
You see that in the terms “good guy” and “bad guy”. Or “room temperature challenge”. Or Instagram videos of robbers who “fucked around and found out”. It may be morally justified to kill someone. It may be the best (and only) available option. But blithe terms like these obscure a basic truth: it is never good.
Guns are valuable because they’re good for self-defense. Self-defense is good because life is valuable, and protecting life is a wonderful thing. But if you have to protect life by taking life, that’s something to be solemnly accepted, not celebrated.
This is hard for some people to internalize, because ghoulishly celebrating a “bad guy’s” demise is good clickbait. So there are incentives to be fine with it. From Erik Hoel’s Substack last year, in an article about internet death videos:
Even within Rome’s eternal stranglehold on (apparently) husbands’ thoughts everywhere, it’s worth noting the Roman Empire possessed a significant dark side…. [Their] reliance on death as entertainment marked its cultural corruption from top to bottom.
Ironic then, that we have returned so quickly and easily, with almost no remark at all by anyone, to being a civilization where real death gets lots of views. It is sold, as it were, for clicks. If this sounds overly dramatic, it’s only because everything depends on how you frame it. And one frame, certainly not the only, but a real one, is that over the past few years — again, I’m talking about a long-term trend — billionaires and companies have been making money selling ads to a huge audience while showing them knife attacks, public executions, and corpse parades. CCTV footage. Body cam footage. He shouldn’t have run. He should have run. Why’d he walk left? He should have walked right. He should have concealed carry. But then he’d be in jail. No city is safe. The country isn’t safe either. And so on.
Personally, I think watching snuff clips takes a little bit of our soul, individually but also culturally. I think it shifts us toward some sort of naturalism, maybe one could even call it a kind of paganism, which treats humans as just another animal. Look at that one. He sure wasn’t paying attention! Look at that one. She’s all strung up.
Under the erosion from snuff clips over the last several years we’ve become more casual about death: it used to be that when a political figure died, it was officially “thoughts and prayers” to their family, even if this was said through gritted teeth. The few departures from this, like Gore Vidal’s celebration of William Buckley’s death, were enough for entire news articles just back in 2008. Now, the debate has degenerated to: Why not celebrate? Why not rejoice? Why not dance on a grave?
On that final sentence, John Correia of Active Self Protection has a good framework. He says that it’s not about “Can I use deadly force?”, it’s about “Must I use deadly force?” Re the point about a return to paganism, @Hoffnung, a subscriber on the OSD Discord, points out that past cultures wisely developed norms to discourage taking death lightly — “often tied up with religion/superstition, PTSD folk treatment, and how to get the ghosts of the guys you killed to stop haunting you”. Other cultures, like many militaries and the Roman gladiator contests, encourage taking it lightly.
Yes, guns are for shooting people. We love self-defense because we love life. So be careful not to let your pursuit of one devalue the other.
This week’s links
Imagining a Future United States Militia — Force Size and Other Considerations
Written by @Hoffnung:
I have done a short, very casual study of what a futuristic American militia growing out of a recognizably-modern society might look like from the perspective of force size.
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Ouch. That hits home a bit more than I'd like.
Basically, Good always comes from the effort of reordering Evil, and Evil always returns from the effort of disordering Good. Good rejoices when Evil is conquered, but laments that such efforts are the basis upon which all Good exists. Human Weakness can only be made strong when this natural law is practiced and reinforced by doing so.