The New Republic

Understanding the "gun culture" within the United States begins with some knowledge of how many people owning concealed weapons and/or rifles have attended training or other gun education classes within the last year, the last two years, or, to be generous, the last five years.

- Doug12

July 24, 2012 at 7:30pm

Hunting isn't vile. Come on. Do you eat meat, Noam? Modern factory-farming of livestock is far more morally suspect than hunting. And in the absence of the black bear and pumas--and the Potomac Indians armed with spears and bows, setting fire to the ground cover--without deer hunters in the woods of Maryland and Virginia, you'll need to welcome a white tail buck into your Washington DC bed with you. Ban handguns outright and any and all magazines that hold more than three rounds. That right there would deal great blow to gun crime. Sure, the gangsters might switch to sawed-off shotguns--though even with the baggiest of jean, a sawed-off is harder to hide than a pistol. More likely though they'd just use any of the several million pistols that would remain illegally in circulation. The real point of a firearms ban is to put a damper on impulse killings, both suicide and murder. Yes, some of these shootings are perpetrated using guns owned ostensibly for hunting, however the vast majority are committed using handguns. A pistol, quite simply, is more conducive to the impulse shot. And finally should anyone insist that he absolutely must have a weapon for home defense, a shotgun witha three shot magazine will serve that purpose better than any pistol, as anyone who knows anything about weapons can attest.

- AaronW

July 24, 2012 at 9:23pm

I think I may have written something like, "guns are so deeply in American culture," but, I didn't mean it as a shoulder shrug. I meant it as a means of understanding why people are so attached to the darn things. That, and the profit motive, although judging from another recent TNR article, European gun manufacturers are making a lot of that profit from Glocks, Sig Sauers and the like; regardless there's a shrinking US market for guns, so, a great deal of rhetoric explaining why we must have them including assault rifles. Much of this rhetoric is fear-mongering, the Right has been accusing Obama of Trying To Take Away Our Guns and Send Us To FEMA Death Camps, etc.

- Sophia

July 24, 2012 at 10:24pm

I live in rural America. Wild animals wander in and out of my yard (and for that matter, cause me to need to spend a lot of money and effort to be able to grow my own food in the fertile soil of my farm). My neighbors are farmers. For the most part I am not all that sympathetic with my rural neighbor's complaint that city dwellers and the coastal rims don't understand their "way of life." For the most part, their way of life isn't all that unique or special. But jeez, Noam, you go along way to convincing me that you really do live on a different planet. Poorly made arguments like the one you've repeated and made above just make it clear that the cultural divide I tend to discount is alive and well. People out here eat what they hunt. Most make every effort at clean and quick kills. And while there is certainly some suffering involved in killing animals with guns for food, it pales beside the suffering to animals that brought you your morning omelet, or chicken cacciatore. And, having not all that long ago made good use of my 20 gauge to dispatch a rabaid skunk pilfering my chicken coop and putting my pets and family at risk, I personally see a number of reasons to have that 20 gauge in the closet. Furthermore lumping all guns together - as if there were no difference in the risks posed by large magazine assault weapons, semi-auto pistols, and 12 gauge shotgun or bolt action hunting rifle is just plain ignorant. So, yes, let's talk about keeping assault weapons, large magazines, concealable handguns out of the hands of anyone outside of law enforcement. Let's talk about laws that require childproof trigger locks on all weapons, and make gun owners responsible for the safetly of their legitimate sporting weapons. But let's recognize that not all weapons are equally dangerous, and that life in rural places sometimes legitimately has uses for some kinds of firearms.

- IowaBeauty

July 24, 2012 at 10:27pm

Anyway, you're not going to get rid of guns. Concentrate on limiting what kind of guns, or magazines; and, hunting isn't evil, I agree with AaronW on this although I'm a vegetarian and don't hunt; but what he said about factory farming is right on and it's something we should be discussing, ditto factory fishing. And, he's right that hunters learn about nature, they (we, I still hunt - with a camera) are some of the strongest conservationists because we really appreciate the ecosystem and its intricacy. Regardless, that really is a facet of human nature, we're predators, and if you want to try and change that good luck. And, I mention American culture because that's a kind of DNA and before you change that you must understand it. You can't just wish it away and you must acknowledge its power; like other origin myths it's akin to religion. Changing that requires a narrative of equal or greater power. Given that we live in a time when people, as individuals, are relatively powerless guns have a great attraction and surely you can understand why Mr. Scheiber? A sense of potency and control is nothing to scoff at and asking people to give that up is asking a great deal; what are you replacing it with? Playing devil's advocate here, I hate guns. But I understand hunting, though I do it with a camera and - I understand feeling powerless. So, if you really want to fix this you've got to understand the roots of the attraction. It's the same thing with cars. Cars make even a poor factory worker feel like somebody, and in fact they really are liberating, regardless of how bad they are for the environment. PS I don't drive anymore either, due to said environment; but that doesn't mean I've forgotten the feeling of power and freedom - which I miss.

- Sophia

July 24, 2012 at 10:38pm

I'm with AaronW's whole "3 round magazine" guns being allowed for public use, and bolt actions and the like. It's really hard to do a drive by with a bolt action but it still allows you to hunt....or so I would assume *shiffty eyes go here*

- ARealHero

July 25, 2012 at 1:03am

Holy crap Noam, did the NRA pay you to write this? I'm sure this will be used as evidence to back up the paranoid fantasy that Democrats want to take all your guns and make you go vegan. Iowa did a great job describing the divide between rural and urban views on guns. Measures like restricting magazine size, requiring childproof locks, and requiring responsibility for any gun you own (or sell illegally) makes perfect sense. Outlawing all guns does not. Unfortunately many of the proposals being made in the wake of the Colorado tragedy also do nothing to address the real problems of gun violence in the US. Especially restrictions on how many guns you can own and how much ammo you can buy. It may be hard for many people to imagine why someone would own more than a couple guns or buy large quantities of ammo, but if you hunt and target shoot it is very easy to find yourself with with a sizable collection. I own about a dozen guns, purchased over 30 years. None are for home protection and all of them are kept on a friend's farm (where I go to fire them). About half of them are historical pieces and the others are for hunting. Over the week of the Fourth of July I bought over 500 rounds of ammo for a group of us to use for target practice. I think I went through about 200 rounds by myself over a couple of days. It wasn't a crazy gunfest weekend, just 4 or 5 guys shooting targets for a couple hours each day. I understand why tragedies like the recent one spark discussions about gun control, unfortunately it results in a misguided discussion. There is nothing uniquely American in what happened in Aurora. The recent shootings in Toronto and last year's massacre in Norway show that very clearly. What is American is the constant plague of gang gun violence and handgun suicides. None of the measures that are discussed in the wake of any mass shooting address the real problem in any way. Discussions of gun control need to address the common everyday gun violence that kills around 30,000 people every year, not insane acts that kill a few dozen people every year.

- Attrill

July 25, 2012 at 1:44am

Silly article, Noam. I grew up in a hunting culture, and I know that many people still eat the animals they kill. If hunting were banned in my home state, untold thousands of deer would starve in the freezing cold every winter from lack of food. Even in lower Michigan deer are so plentiful that they wander into people's back yards. Attrill is right. The main problem with guns in America is not mass shootings that are covered in the mass media. It's the everyday carnage in the streets, especially in the inner cities, that needs to be dealt with. When I still lived in Detroit in the middle Seventies, there was a drug war going on. In one year over a thousand people were shot to death, and Detroit wasn't a huge city. Talking about taking away guns will only enrage a paranoid U.S. population. Education is what we need. We talk in high schools about the dangers of unprotected sex. How about classes about the dangers of guns?

- magboy47.

July 25, 2012 at 3:03am

One more thing: I have never bought the slippery slope arguments of the NRA and their fellow travelers. I am convinced that in a democracy, one can have sensible regulation without that leading to nonsensical restrictions. Scheiber's rant here, however, only serves to reinforce the slippery slope argument. Magboy and Attril also make a very valuable point: the first thing we need to take on when talking about controlling gun violence is the everyday single killings, mostly perpetrated with cheap, concealable handguns, and gang violence (which is more likely to involve an assault weapon or other long gun, but which is still mainly handguns). When half, rather than 1% or so, of the gun killings in this country are deranged idiots on a shooting spree, we can give that problem equal consideration to the day in and day out use of guns in less newsworthy settings.

- IowaBeauty

July 25, 2012 at 4:58am

It was Jonathan Safran Foer (author of, among other things, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) who wrote the quoted passage, not Scheiber. Foer's allusion to the 9/11 attack (3,000 dead children) is sly, but it makes his point very well. We as a country were willing to invade a country and set aside the Bill of Rights to avenge the deaths of 3,000 on 9/11, but will do nothing for 3,000 dead children every year.

- rayward

July 25, 2012 at 7:15am

Last weekend a young man who is very important to me and his friend did a real dumb thing: they decided to buy some marijuana. But the dealer didn't sell them anything, he stuck a gun in the young man's face and robbed them. In an instant, their world and mine could have been changed forever. Fortunately, the boys are fine, if terribly shaken by the incident. I gave the young man a copy of Campbell's essay about blood diamonds, and I hope he and his friend have learned a lesson they will never forget. If you think this cannot happen to your child, think again. Anybody who has raised a boy knows that they make foolish mistakes, and trying marijuana is viewed as a rite of passage. It's not. It's death. And even though this young man's family owns no guns, he was able to identify the handgun in has face as a Glock because of its distinctive two tones. Even these two young boys can identify the weapon of choice used to kill and maim thousands. I appreciate that these comments are not intended as some sort of personal testimony, but the criticism of Campbell's essay, in comments here in TNR and on blogs around the internet, have been shockingly self-centered and naive. Marijuana is death. And so are handguns.

- rayward

July 25, 2012 at 7:57am

"Hunting isn't vile. Come on. Do you eat meat, Noam?" Noam was quoting an article in WashPost. Those were not his words. And anyway, the point being made by the original author was that hunting FOR SPORT is vile. You don't hunt mountain lions, bears or wolves for food. That is straight-up trophy hunting (save the occasional rancher trying to protect his cattle). Everyone should be in agreement that the commercial meat industry is far more disturbing than hunting for food. I do not see anywhere that Noam was arguing against that.

- jm3245

July 25, 2012 at 10:56am

Well, sometimes it can be for sport, and for food, right? My dad enjoyed hunting deer and elk and antelope, and we ate all the meat. One year, my dad didn't get an elk, and my mom cried (it was the 70's, inflation was rampant, they had 5 kids). It doesn't mean that he didn't enjoy the camping with his buddies, probably drinking by the campfire, and bragging about how they got a good clean head shot, no panic hormones spoiling the taste of the meat, no shooting anywhere that would waste meat.

- ReganaD

July 25, 2012 at 11:23am

I am someone who believes killing for pleasure is unethical (whether it's killing by proxy by buying meat or by going hunting), and am a vegetarian as a consequence. I also believe I have a human right to defend myself, and have a concealed-carry license and own several firearms. It certainly may be that people are more likely to harm themselves with their guns than they are to defend themselves against violence. That is not a valid reason to punish me, a person who applies appropriate safety measures to his guns, for the same reason it's infantile to punish an entire classroom of children when one of them messes up. If someone else's negligence results in death, punish them, but please do not punish me. Briefly, the argument from utility-vs-need argument is stronger when applied to drunk driving than when applied to guns. I say this to demonstrate the vague incoherence and consequences of the proposed gun ban. We have 270 million guns in the country, and approximately 12,500 of them are used to commit homicide. That means 99.9954% of guns in the country are not used to commit homicide. Let's compare that to drunk driving. There are something like 255 passenger vehicles in the United States. 10,939 were involved in drunk driving incidents that resulted in fatalities. That means 99.9957% of vehicles were not involved in drunk driving fatalities, a statistic within the same range. If we just look at casualties, and not strictly fatalities, cars pull ahead: with 265,000 injuries or deaths due to drunk driving, 99.8957% of cars are off the hook; with 100,000 injuries or deaths due to guns, including suicides, 99.9630% of guns are off the hook. Alcohol, while essentially tied on the fatality front, pulls significantly ahead on the casualty front, and this is not even counting people who kill themselves with alcohol, while the gun numbers do include self-inflicted injuries. All this despite it being illegal to drive drunk. One could say that you don't need alcohol, that it provides you with no utility, that the only argument for keeping it legal is based on pleasure, and that the pleasure people derive from alcohol is not worth the lives lost to drunk drivers. In short, the argument for banning guns is weaker than the argument for banning alcohol. Noah, based on this data, do you intend to write an article calling for the repeal of the 21st amendment?

- phargle

July 25, 2012 at 12:18pm

As an aside, a person who chooses to eat meat because it gives them pleasure is complicit in the deaths of nine billion animals in the United States every year. Given that meat is a choice, not a requirement, and is a choice made for reasons of convenience and pleasure rather than utility, the "you don't need that" argument presented with regards to guns is stronger when applied to the banning of meat consumption, which would prevent the death of billions of living things instead of perhaps preventing the deaths of thousands of people. We could, after all, simply eat mixed grain proteins and drink vitamin B12-enriched soy milk, which are both, I might add, delicious. I do not, as it happens, support such a ban, and present it here only as a way to contribute to the discussion by examining Noah's implied proposal from a different perspective. Peace!

- phargle

July 25, 2012 at 12:22pm

Noam, not Noah. Apologies. Fingers put habit ahead of thought there.

- phargle

July 25, 2012 at 12:23pm

"Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder...Guns on the street make us less safe. For every justifiable handgun homicide, there are more than 50 handgun murders, according to the FBI." Those are useful but incomplete statistics. For example, you overlook the deterrent effect--it is difficult to count the murders (and burglaries and other crimes) that would have occurred if criminals were more confident that their victims and bystanders were unarmed. You overlook sex differences: men are much more likely to be violent criminals, and women much more in need of an equalizing weapon that doesn't require physical strength. You overlook the circumstances of murder in the US--half of the 15K annual murders are related to the Drug War, so eliminating that black market (which could be done with a simple legislative act) would do more than trying to eliminate the guns (which is practically impossible). Finally, you ignore the most important statistics of all: US murder and violent crime have been dropping over the past couple of decades, while US gun ownership has risen. I understand that correlation does prove causation, but evidence is so strong that the burden of proof is on you. Your arguments in this article were weak, the sort typically used by people ranting to the choir. You need to address your opponents stronger arguments (if you want to be taken seriously). Having said that, let me point out that the US has about 45 murders daily, and getting worked up about an extra 12 on one day is absurd. A dozen people died together, so it was a tragedy, but what about the other 45 who died singly? Day after day after day people are murdered in the US because of drug prohibition, but somehow we let it go on. I suspect that it is because we feel that the sorts of people who are dying, same as those south of the border, don't really matter.

- simplulo

July 25, 2012 at 1:00pm

I agree that it's ridiculous that we can't have a serious gun control debate, but this post and Foer's essay are not the sorts of things that help. Frist of all, any proposal to ban all guns is, after Heller, unconstitutional. So, you're going to have *some* legal guns -- in fact, quite a few. Instead of fantasizing about a world without guns, liberals should focus on, you kow, gun *control*. Second of all, this blanket hostility to hunting is overwrought, and, really, a different issue -- that of animal rights. Foer, I'm sure, is oh so morally advanced in this area, but the rest of us, while averse to cruelty, do not hold quite the same level of care and concern for soulless creatures that he exhibits. In any case, there's a very good reason "nobody talks about" this when it comes to gun control -- because it's totally counterproductive. You're not going to convince a sportsman that his sport is psychopathic, and mainstream opinion will gravitate toward the hunter's viewpoint when his hobby is targetted by stereotypical liberal elites so perfectly exemplified by Foer. Far better to let people have their hobbies, and their now constitutionally protected right to self-protection via handgun, and focus like a laser on how to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and mental cases. There's a whole lot that could be done: registration, more stringent background checks and waiting periods, restricting all gun transfers to a relative few licensed gun shops which would be tightly controlled, limiting purchases of guns and types of guns and paraphernalia, limiting the number of guns anyone may possess (say, 3), maybe even requiring biometric safety locks built into new weapons sold, maybe even requiring that in order for young adults (say, under 25) to buy a gun they need an older co-signor (say, 35 or older) who would assume liability if the gun is later traced to a wrongful death or injury. I could think of lots of ideas, and I'm sure people who have studied the issue systematically have a lot more and better ideas. Banning 'em all though is just so far off the table that it's not even worth discussing, especially insofar as all it does is serve as evidence that, yes, those liberals really do want to take all your guns away.

- JakeH

July 25, 2012 at 1:33pm

We really need to take a hard look at who should have access to high-powered rifles, handguns and high capacity magazines. I'd add that I agree with Aaron's and Iowabeauty's post with regards to hunting. I will add, for those who don't hunt, is that most standard hunting rifles hold 5 - 6 rounds even the older lever actions like I use. As a person who hunts and fishes, these sources have become my primary sources of meat protein. I get my chickens from my cousin-in-law who raises grass-fed, free range chickens and processes them himself. So I would disagree with outright bans on all guns. I will say that I think retired law enforcement and retired military should not be able retain or have access to assault weapons or high capacity magazines upon retirement. With many of them suffering from PTSD the odds of them cracking and using weapons on civilians is a high probability. If you really want to shoot an assault rifle then I propose we have special ranges where you could go demo it. But otherwise, you can't own them. I think carrying concealed weapons is unnecessary nor do I buy the argument of self-defense or protection. I live in the murder capital of the U.S. and I don't feel the need to pack. I also avoid the neighborhoods and housing projects where random gun violence and drug-related gun violence takes place here in New Orleans. 90% of the gun fatalities here in NOLA are the result of a prior convicted felon or person with an arrest record shooting another person they know because of some dispute over money, drugs or perceived insult. Gun bans would not lower that nor would expanded conceal & carry laws. I know people who carry and I sense a mild level of paranoia on their part that they believe there is some Other out there waiting to get them or break into their home. I had a co-worker who had Conceal Carry permit and kept a pistol in his truck. Until his truck was broken into and the pistol stolen. Now he doesn't carry any more to my knowledge. I occasionally visit gun forums just to get an idea of the paranoia that exists out there, and heard on NPR this morning that since the Aurora shootings, concealed carry permit applications in Colorado have shot up. Most hardcore concealed carry advocates are convinced, that had more or all of the people at the theater been packing heat, less people would have died or been injured. I can guarantee that with the chaos, smoke and fear in that theater that had anyone carrying decided to unload at the perpetrator, we would have seen more fatalities than we did. A gun jam saved more lives than armed citizens did. The guy was heavily armed and armored and typical citizen in a panic situation is not going to remain calm enough to engage and stay on target with pistol, in the dark, breathing tear gas, while being fired at with an AR-15 and people running in all directions. Anyone who says otherwise is smoking crack. We need to take a serious look at who retains their right and who doesn't not have the right to guns. Convicted felons, domestic abusers or diagnosed mentally ill / unstable persons I think should have limited or no access to guns. Period. Assault weapons and high capacity magazine are banned. And I think for pistols and long guns, we require simple registration much like we do automobiles and voting.

- singlspeed

July 25, 2012 at 2:28pm