http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html
Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun:
What Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life
Translations: Spanish
The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the
individual asserts both his social power and his participation in
politics as a responsible moral being... (Historian J.G.A. Pocock,
describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.)
There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to
reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch — ultimate
decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.
It is a kind of acid test, an initiation, to know that there is lethal
force in your hand and all the complexities and ambiguities of moral
choice have fined down to a single action: fire or not?
In truth, we are called upon to make life-or-death choices more often
than we generally realize. Every political choice ultimately reduces to
a choice about when and how to use lethal force, because the threat of
lethal force is what makes politics and law more than a game out of
which anyone could opt at any time.
But most of our life-and-death choices are abstract; their costs are
diffused and distant. We are insulated from those costs by layers of
institutions we have created to specialize in controlled violence
(police, prisons, armies) and to direct that violence (legislatures,
courts). As such, the lessons those choices teach seldom become personal
to most of us.
Nothing most of us will ever do combines the moral weight of life-or-
death choice with the concrete immediacy of the moment as thoroughly as
the conscious handling of instruments deliberately designed to kill. As
such, there are lessons both merciless and priceless to be learned from
bearing arms — lessons which are not merely instructive to the intellect
but transformative of one's whole emotional, reflexive, and moral
character.
The first and most important of these lessons is this: it all comes down
to you.
No one's finger is on the trigger but your own. All the talk-talk in
your head, all the emotions in your heart, all the experiences of your
past — these things may inform your choice, but they can't move your
finger. All the socialization and rationalization and justification in
the world, all the approval or disapproval of your neighbors — none of
these things can pull the trigger either. They can change how you feel
about the choice, but only you can actually make the choice. Only you.
Only here. Only now. Fire, or not?
A second is this: never count on being able to undo your choices.
If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead. You can't take it
back. There are no do-overs. Real choice is like that; you make it, you
live with it — or die with it.
A third lesson is this: the universe doesn't care about motives.
If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe
direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming
the shot. I didn't mean to may persuade others that you are less likely
to repeat a behavior, but it won't bring a corpse back to life.
These are hard lessons, but necessary ones. Stated, in print, they may
seem trivial or obvious. But ethical maturity consists, in significant
part, of knowing these things — not merely at the level of intellect but
at the level of emotion, experience and reflex. And nothing teaches
these things like repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices in
grave knowledge of the consequences of failure.
This psychological insight both illuminates and is reinforced by one
central fact of U.S. history that is usually considered purely
political, and even (wrongly) thought to be of interest only to
Americans.
The Founding Fathers of the United States believed, and wrote, that the
bearing of arms was essential to the character and dignity of a free
people. For this reason, they wrote a Second Amendment in the Bill Of
Rights which reads the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually
interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political
character — an expression of republican political thought, a
prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at
least equal in might to the organized forces of government.
It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders
regarded political character and individual ethical character as
inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary
collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of
bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal
virtue.
The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of
them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave
knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people
of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical
maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they
had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their
liberty.
Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept
powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins
in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The
wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to
deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from
aspiring to the dignity of free men.
The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free
women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth
century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly
lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on
private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches
family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery
and perjury, and don't see a contradiction.
But Thomas Jefferson's question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801,
still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself,
how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where
history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because the
dignity of a free (wo)man consists in being competent to govern one's
self, and in knowing, down to the core of one's self, that one is so
competent.
And that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of
arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is
what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing
arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner
qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.
It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug
addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free
men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are
merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars.
And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and
effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms.
And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless
victims.
But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an
assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When
sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more
careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because
you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or
succumb to bad temper, people will die.
Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this
discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths
or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves
armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and
kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days
holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper
draws a bead...
But it's not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and
generative patterns of weapons crimes. Virtually never, writes
criminologist Don B. Kates, are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding
people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception,
murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime,
substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational
violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior,
e.g., automobile and gun accidents.
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in
corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to
affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from the dignity of a
free man would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising
this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and
ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal
arms, is, ultimately, most important.
This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are
possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient
to make them.
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-
death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate
responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just
intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to
choose.
And not only can we — we must. The Founding Fathers of the United States
understood why. If we fail this test, we fail not only in private virtue
but consequently in our capacity to make public choices. Rudderless,
lacking an earned and grounded faith in ourselves, we can only drift —
increasingly helpless to summon even the will to resist predators and
tyrants (let alone the capability to do so).
Joel Barlow, a political theorist of Jefferson's time, wrote tellingly:
[The disarming of citizens has] a double effect, it palsies the hand and
brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally
destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of protecting
themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
We live with a recent history of massacres by governments that have
dwarfed in scope and cruelty anything Barlow or Jefferson could have
imagined. The Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the Nazi final
solution, the Soviet purges, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Hutu-
Tutsi massacres in Rwanda; each and every one of these vast and hideous
slaughters was preceded by and relied upon the disarmament of the
victims.
It is more important than ever, today after a century of blood, that we
retain the power both to protect ourselves and to discern the cause of
such oppressions. That cause has never been in civilian arms borne by
free people, but in their opposite and enemy — the organized and
conscienceless brutality of cancerous states.
It is time to recognize that we, as individuals and as citizens of our
neighborhoods and our nations and our planet, have gone too far down a
road that leads only to disintegration of both society and self — a
future of atomized and alienated sheep, terrified by the reflection in
each others' eyes of the phantoms in their own souls, easy prey for
demagogues and dictators.
It is time for each of us to rediscover the dignity of free men (and
women) in the only way possible; by proving it in the crucible of daily
decision, even on ultimate matters of life and death. It is time for us
to embrace bearing arms again — not merely as a deterrent against
criminals and tyrants, but as a gift and sacrament and affirmation to
ourselves.
_________________________________________
On this Memorial Day we salute our troops and veterans and remember all
of those who have died to keep this country relatively free.
--
Are private banks printing our money and then loaning it to this country
and taking all our income tax to pay the interest on it?
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IF YOU'RE NOT VOTING FOR LIBERTARIANS, YOU'RE ONLY VOTING FOR YOUR
RULERS! If the government wasn't allowed to initiate force, the vote
wouldn't be that important. It's only important because they can.
http://www.stentorian.com/spectrum.html
'Guns cause shootings like cameras cause pornography'
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