Charleville musket 1766 (credit: G. Garitan (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons)

For one more post, I have to deal with the gun violence issue. The psychological roots of the obsession that some people, especially American males, have long had with guns. 

There are lots of theories out there about the psychological roots of some people's fascination with guns. A Freudian one that irks me claims that a gun is a kind of "phallic extension" and that is why guns appeal so primally to some men. 

But the idea that a gun is a "phallic extension" for insecure men, for me, just makes no sense. The link between the image of a gun and that of a phallus is just too tenuous and far-fetched. At that rate, shovels and conductors' batons and so many other objects could be seen as "phallic extensions". Wotan! That theory is founded on about as much evidence as Norse mythology.

On the other hand, I think some models from the science of Comparative Psychology do have things to tell us. One that I find interesting is called the "cichlid effect".  

It has been cited by several major writers. I first learned about this "effect" in 1970. Kate Millett, in a book called "Sexual Politics", discussed the ways in which human sexual relations are analogous to relations in the political world. There are opening moves, proposals that are subtle or not so subtle, counter-proposals, agreements that are spoken - or more often implied - disputes, resolutions, etc. - in politics and in human relationships. Sex as politics is a useful metaphor. 

But the model that she described which fascinated me most came from the research of Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Konrad Lorenz. He studied many animals' patterns of behavior. In several species, but most clearly, in fish called "cichlids", he found that when spawning season came, the males of this species would only attempt to mate with females that were "awed" by the male (his term). In short, a male would not perform sexually with any female who did not act deferential when he approached her. Millett made it clear that she was contemptuous of the idea. I thought it deserved a bit more consideration. 

There is a reproductive advantage for dominant males and submissive females. That is what Lorenz' followers claimed. Under this model, females get more opportunities to reproduce if they "kowtow" or "knuckle under" to a male. And dominant males get most of the females. Genes for these traits get passed on to more offspring more often.

Does this biological imperative drive human sexual behavior? Lorenz and some who came after him claimed that the answer was "Yes". Men want and need to feel superior to a woman before they will approach her in any sexual way. Control makes confidence. That's the theory. 

I, on the other hand, have doubts about the applicability of the model to human beings. But what does the evidence seem to say? 

Would this model explain the gun obsession of a small but scary number males in the U.S.? The need to own guns, to flaunt them, and, in some cases, to use them on other human beings? Do guns give one a sense of control and dominance? In short, has a deep but powerful sexual need caused the spread of gun culture in the U.S.? Does a sexual need underlie gun violence? 

It is generally acknowledged these days that males, especially white Western males, are feeling more and more under threat. The macho role models that they once looked to for direction are more and more becoming socially taboo. Much of what made the dominant place of Western males in their own society has been discredited. Values, works of art, images in advertising and in the media in general - these are all becoming more and more derogatory in tone toward the old images of "real men". Hairy-chested, gun-handling, hard-punching he-men are largely out of fashion. Maybe, modern confusion about what a man is supposed to be has caused some men to feel a need to carry and collect guns in order to get their confidence back. The return of self-confidence comes with the sense of power carrying a gun brings. Or so the "cichlid" explanation would go.  

The weak part of this way of explaining gun violence is that there are millions of exceptions to this model. Most men, in fact. Millions of men don't need a gun to have self-esteem. In fact, they don't feel a need to bully women period. If they are interested in a woman, they recognize that, unless the interest is shown clearly in return, they are probably wasting their time. They move on. She has a right to her preferences. There are plenty of other cichlids in the sea. 

In addition, millions of women now own guns. Millions more, without guns, are assertive, confident beings in their own contexts. And they have no trouble finding eager male partners for sex or company. In fact, millions of men today are attracted to confident, assertive women. 

In short, my reply to those who seek to find instinct-driven motives for some men's collecting guns is simply this: we aren't fish. What makes humans human is their capacity to recognize and rise above their primal programming. We learn about soils and pests so we can grow larger crops. The knowledge isn't gathered and passed on for the sake of curiosity. The same is true of our knowledge of animals, weather, diseases, etc.. And of our most primal breeding imperatives. We modify them and direct and re-direct them so that we can live together in communities and get along. Live. As whole nations capable of teamwork. Then, we multiply and thrive.  

Thus, men and women both learn to do better than fish do, or dogs or apes do. We don't need to yield to obsolete, primitive drives in order to just live. As a matter of fact, mostly we already have learned to live more sensibly. We do better than any other species on this planet because we can think and learn, change our habits and customs and adapt to changing circumstances. 

We are not fish driven by primal forces beyond our understanding. 

So speaking of learning, we have learned by harsh experience over the last few years, that automatic weapons are not legitimate arms for regular civilians to own. Some ordinary citizens like to hunt, but no one hunts deer with a machine gun. That, for sure, is not sportsmanship.  

The need of the community for basic safety clearly outranks the citizens' right to "bear arms" in the automatic weapons case. If the U.S. Constitution says otherwise, it needs to be updated. It was made by people; it can be changed by people. It was not passed down on stone tablets inscribed by a Divine hand. 

The welfare of the whole community is the focus of the law. And if a document like the U.S. Constitution even appears to claim that some males, to fill their need to feel secure or powerful or whatever else they want to call it, have a right to own as many firearms as they please of any type whatever, automatic weapons included, then that document is just wrong. 

Study harder. Go to the gym. Build twenty pounds of muscle. Practice your three point shot. Or practice guitar. Learn to cook like a real gourmet chef. Write. Sculpt. Paint. Sing. Compose a symphony. Get your mile under six minutes. Build a home. Take pride in how you love your wife and kids. Take one of your best business ideas and go for it. Most of all, become a master of your trade, work at it hard, and take pride in every job well-done. Take pride in your character, your instincts about right and wrong. These are not to be lightly valued. Millions of all genders, nations, and creeds have them, but millions more don't. 

There are lots of ways to be a better man in your own eyes and in the eyes of those around you. There always have been. Finding your "self" by acts of violence or the threat of violence is a way of acting and thinking that became obsolete centuries ago. Soldiers who have seen a real war may know how to fight to the death if they have to, but they don't glorify war. They know better from hard experience. Violence is sometimes necessary. But in our neighborhoods, we don't want or need that to be the case. In short, let the cops handle it. Too many men taking it on themselves to avenge every slight is why America is in the situation that it is in today. 

Therefore, to put it all together, you could even campaign and vote for a candidate who will put the automatic weapons only in the hands of the police and the military. There is no legitimate reason for them to be in the hands of regular citizens. Experience in recent years has shown over and over that, in fact, there are compelling reasons for them not to be. 

Finally, if you still feel that you have no sense of being worthy as a man unless you can have a machine gun, get help. There is something deeply wrong in you that no gun is ever going to fix. 

The whole idea that men, or women for that matter, have a need and a right to feel powerful over others is obsolete. We have to learn to live together and get along or we are done on this planet. Every incidence of gun violence is just more evidence which shows where our bottom line in the twenty-first century lies. We must learn to respect our neighbors. Maybe, even love them. The alternative, when it is extrapolated to the global scale, is too terrible to contemplate. The way of love, on the other hand, has to begin in our own towns.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a great day. 





    Sandy Hook choir perform at Super Bowl, 2013 (credit: Au Kirk, via Wikimedia Commons)

   

                     Target 223 Savage 10FP 25 shots (credit: Arthurrh, via Wikimedia Commons)

What Are The Odds? 

Once again, a lone gunman – white, no known ties to any extremist groups – has bought an arsenal of guns and ammo and shot a bunch of people in the U.S. One of the posts on social media caught how people in other parts of the world, and even in much of the U.S., feel. The post showed a “news release form” that could be used to make up regular headlines for the news media. The fictitious form looked something like this:

“Breaking News: in _____________, U.S.A. _______ people have been killed, with an estimated ______ wounded and in hospital at the time of this news release. The alleged shooter died at the scene after being shot by police/taking his own life. (Circle one.) He has been identified as __________________, a man whom neighbors say seemed friendly enough. He so far appears to have been operating alone. The victims were at a …. (some public place where people gather to work or have fun). Of the ____ confirmed dead, ___ have so far been identified. Their names are  __________________________ …”

Et cetera.

Yes, America. Unfortunately, this is how you look to the world. 58 dead in the Las Vegas attack that occurred Sunday night. About double that number have been killed by guns in the U.S. in the four days between that shooting and the time at which I write these lines.

Let me try my best to get to the heart of the matter. America, you used to pride yourself on being rational. Crackpot ideas were for Europeans who still had kings and czars or Orientals with their emperors and emirs or Africans or Latin Americans with various dictators. America was down-to-earth. Sensible. Americans made a point of learning facts and coming to rational decisions based on those facts.

13,286 gun deaths in 2015, excluding suicides.   On this one, you have long since ceased to make any sense.

So here one more time is my case for serious gun control laws.

And for those who resist my case before they have even heard it, it might help for me to say that I grew up in a house that always held between 4 and 10 guns. My dad was a hunter. He also bought and sold guns because he knew a good deal when he saw one and he was willing to buy and hold. He taught me to shoot when I was about 7. I have shot game of many kinds. I know guns.

The thing that many people don’t get is that no matter how sensible you think you are, anyone will have had moments of rage in their life. You can bet on it. Everyone "loses it" sometimes.

So here’s the big point: if you do “lose it” for even a short while, the odds that you will do something irrational and cause major, irreversible, perhaps fatal, harm to one or more other persons are much, much higher if you have guns handy than if your only weapons are a knife, a club, or even a vehicle. Guns were invented, and have always since been manufactured and sold, because they are efficient, lone-attacker killing devices. That's why assassins use them. 

In plainer language, when guns are all around, more and more people will use them on more and more other people. And it’s not because the U.S. or any other gun-toting nation is full of crazy people. It is just a matter of statistics. The odds. A percentage of Americans are troubled with mental illnesses, but no more than anywhere else. It’s the availability of guns that makes these horrific outcomes follow as naturally as night follows day. Guns being so easy to get means that horror is statistically inevitable on a regular basis.  

What are the odds, when so many guns are so easy and relatively cheap to obtain, that they are going to be used to kill other people?

And that is the heart of the matter. What Americans should be asking each other, once they calm down again, is “What are the odds?” That is the rational question the gun rights folk should be answering.

And those odds, of course, are plain as the lumpy nose on my face.

So how do gun rights advocates answer this completely cool and calm rational argument?

   

                                                               Declaration of Independence 

                                                   (credit: John Trumbull, via Wikimedia Commons)

Basically, their responses boil down to asserting that they have Second Amendment rights. The constitution says in clear langage that they have a right to “bear arms” if they want to do so. 

How then should those who wish to see much stronger gun control laws enacted answer this “bottom line” that the gun rights advocates see as sacrosanct and inviolable? Take it on. 

  

So once more, in a sincere attempt to be rational, calm, and open in our reasoning, let’s answer the Second Amendment argument rationally.

No, the Second Amendment is not the final word on the matter. The founding fathers of the U.S. were not gods. They were mortal men. They did their best, but they made mistakes in parts of the documents that they wrote for the new republic they were trying to set up.

They were men. Human. They had shortcomings. They sometimes could not foresee what the future might bring. They did not make provision for all possible eventualities because no one can. They made mistakes or left gaps. The Second Amendment is one.

No one in that painting of the founding fathers of America could possibly have foreseen the kinds of weapons that exist today. Paddock, the Vegas shooter, used more firepower in nine minutes than a company of men would have been able to get off in that time span in 1776.

Today, American gun control laws look to the rest of the world like madness, the opposite of what for so long Americans prided themselves on, namely common sense. When you make laws for millions of people, you have to look at the statistics. The odds.

The Second Amendment never really had the effect that Jefferson was hoping it would even in his time. He wanted citizen militias that would protect the citizens against the power of the federal government. The plan did not work. West Point was created because the local militias that Jefferson thought would be the American people’s protection against tyranny performed so badly so many times. British regulars in 1812 to 1815 whipped them over and over.

Note also that America’s biggest heroes of the Old West cleaned up towns that were run by gangs simply by making every person check his/her guns upon entering the town limits. Wyatt Earp saw what needed to be done and did it. Check your guns. No exceptions.

There are other gun rights advocates’ arguments, but they don’t hold up. Good guys protecting themselves and their families against bad guys? If those bad guys get “the drop” on you – which is pathetically easy to do – your plan is gone in a heartbeat. Then, too often, so is your heartbeat.

I could go on, but enough already. America, you always prided yourself on your common sense. Finally, after so much rage, pain, grief, and fear, show some. Not while everyone is emotionally overwrought, but later, when everyone is calmer.

No automatic weapons and no devices to make semi-automatic weapons automatic and no 20+ shot clips. The only exceptions should be for law enforcement personnel. For the rest, hunting arms only. Difficult to conceal. Long barreled. Maximum 6 shot magazines. And every device the gun makers cook up to get around these laws, legislators should block that week.                                                                  

You know the drill, America. I pray that this time, you will show, in the long run, grief, rage, and fear, yes, but then quietly and more determinedly, just some common sense.  

   

                                       Children's Day 2012, Chiang Mai Airforce Base, Thailand

                                                   (credit: By Takeaway, via Wikimedia Commons)

   

                    Taking Aim (credit: Airman 1st class, C. C. McCloud) (www.af.mil/News/Photos) 

   

                            "Penelope Reading A Letter From Odysseus" (artist: L. J. Lagrenee) 

                                                 Artist's conception of Ancient Greek daily life 

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

On a site that I visit, a young person asked what I thought of moral relativism. Here is my reply:

Moral relativism is a mistake. It is a philosophical stance that says that the ideas behind what we call “right” and “wrong” are illusions. There are no universal standards of right and wrong. Right and wrong depend entirely on the culture in which one is located at the time when one is making a moral decision. What was right in ancient Athens would not be considered right today. Even in a given era, like today, what is right in one part of the world, like West Africa, may not be considered right in another part, like Canada.

There is a lot of evidence in History and Anthropology to support the moral relativists’ position. We can see that it may have been useful for the ancient Greeks to use infanticide as a form of birth control. We certainly know they did it. A lot. Some men could not feed all of the babies that their women kept producing. On the other hand, the men’s appetites for sex were at least as strong as those of men today. So they solved their family’s surplus population problem by exposing unwanted babies in the forest to be eaten by wild animals. Today we would be appalled at such a practice, but it made sense to them in their times when they had no reliable forms of birth control.

It is also common in our own times for little girls in West Africa to undergo what is called “female circumcision” by its supporters and “female genital mutilation” by its foes. An old woman who travels from village to village has girls brought to her for the “operation”. While female relatives hold the little girl down, the old woman uses a small knife to cut off the girl’s clitoris and inner labia. There are several versions of the operation, but this is the commonest one. Is it useful to the tribe as a whole? Its proponents claim it is. It curbs girls’ sexual appetites and reduces the risk of their having clandestine affairs which might tear a tribe or village apart.

Thus, different tribes arise, and each has its own sets of morés, beliefs, and customs. When tribes interact, too often in the past the result has been war. Then the tribe with the more efficient beliefs and customs nearly always has the larger numbers and better weapons; it conquers the other tribe, then assimilates it. War, to the cultural relativists, is an inevitable trait of the human animal. They have no suggestions for reducing the odds of wars’ happening. They shrug when you say that the next full-scale, all-out war, if we have it, will very likely kill us all.

The mistake, it seems to me, is implicit in the very ways we discuss the mores and customs of other cultures. We always talk in terms of why the custom got established in the first place and whether it serves some purpose in the larger community to which those practicing the custom belong.

Implicit in this whole way of thinking is the assumption that our customs, ways, and morés must serve the needs of the larger community in some fashion or we would never have set them up and gotten used to them in the first place.

The part the cultural relativists are missing or denying (I’m never sure which) is that we all must survive in the same material universe in the end. While tribes may move from one environment to another occasionally, and face different challenges than those that they knew in their old homes, there are always fundamental laws of Science that can’t be evaded no matter where you move.

The most important of these are entropy and uncertainty.

As whole cultures, we humans have learned, by trials and errors that sometimes got whole tribes wiped out, to teach courage AND wisdom to our offspring so that they will face the omnipresent reality of entropy. More recently (the last 2000 years) we have begun to learn that we must teach freedom AND love to these same offspring so that they will effectively handle the uncertainty of life. (I went into these matters in much more depth earlier this year on this blog site, beginning on April 13.)

In short, morals and morés are not relative. They must program the people who believe in them to behave, as whole tribes, in ways that enable them to survive.

There is a lot of room for many different “ways of life” to be set up differently in any given environment. But the “ways” that people practice and the values and beliefs that underlie them are not arbitrary in the way that a roulette wheel is arbitrary. In an analogy from Biology, we can say that many different species of animals may live in each environment and all find their respective niches, but they still must answer to the laws of Science. There are millions of species in the Amazon basin, but there are no polar bears among them and for good reason. Similarly, many different tribes might settle beside a lake that has just formed since the volcanic eruption six years ago, but if the lake is teeming with fish, the odds are very good that whatever tribes settle there, with baskets or hooks or spears or nets or bows and arrows, they will very likely learn to fish. This move in their cultural evolution is not arbitrary.

It seems clear to me that we don’t have to settle for the moral relativists’ position that leaves us all paralyzed and helpless when disputes arise between different cultures. We could work out the theory of a maximally efficient culture, one that lent itself readily to periodic updates, and we could teach it to the children of the world.

An idealistic vision, you say? I ask you to consider the WWIII alternative, which is where we’re headed if we don’t get past this moral relativist ennui, and then look at your kids, and then …think again.

But in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.

   

        (circumcised) African mother with daughter whom mother says will not be circumcised 

                                            (credit: By DFID, via Wikimedia Commons)