Pax on both houses: Guns Are The Problem In The Hands Of Anyone... Cops Included

Alan: I know families whose children have used guns-in-the-home to kill themselves.

I know families in which accidental killing has taken place.

On the other hand, I do not know anyone who used a gun to successfully fend off a home invasion.

Do you?

Ask around.

It is far more likely you will learn of firearm suicides and accidental deaths than successful resistance to unprovoked aggression by strangers.

When the human mind considers self-defense "in the abstract," it tends to imagine super-hero scenarios in which --- Voila' --- bad guys with guns are vanquished by "good guys with guns."

The Right-Wing Dream

Absolute Safety vouchsafed by ubiquitous firearms.

(The impossible quest to make Reality safer than God intended is the core appeal of fascism.)

If every passenger can "pack," then every terrorist would have a firearm and only a few citizens. (Would you take a firearm on board a plane?)

Those who think ubiquitous firearms are a solution to any of life's problems contribute to the problem.

The likelihood that well-armed citizens will perform acts of sudden, salvific heroicism when a criminal already "has the drop" is vanishingly remote.

Such wishful thinking is the product of arrested development, the vestigial puerility of children playing at "cowboys and Indians."

Many more innocent Americans are killed by firearms "in the home" than the piddling number of Americans saved by domestic firearm heroics.

And when, at rare intervals, such heroics do occur, they often result in the death of property thieves who harbor no violent intent.

Where are the Christian literalists when we need them?

“You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But now I tell you: do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too. And if someone takes you to court to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. And if one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two miles. When someone asks you for something, give it to him; when someone wants to borrow something, lend it to him. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends, hate your enemies.’ But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil. Why should God reward you if you love only the people who love you? Even the tax collectors do that! And if you speak only to your friends, have you done anything out of the ordinary? Even the pagans do that! You must be whole—just as your Father in heaven is whole."

I am 67 years old and have friends "on both sides of the aisle."

I have never heard any of them say that their firearm saved a life.

I have never heard any of them say they know someone whose life was saved by a firearm.

Occassional anecdotes do not establish "general rules."

On the flip side of this coin, I have heard several friends say firearms were used by family members to kill themselves.

Whether by accident... sudden eruption of anger... or by psychological disease... firearms in citizens' homes exact a terrifyingly high toll with correspondingly trivial benefit.

***

The belief that individual heroes will "save the day" is essentially self-ish.

Yes, an occasional hero will "save the day."

But arming an entire society increases cumulative carnage.

***

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . . The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake."

"A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable." Thomas Merton - New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964

***

In almost all "home invasions" or "street stick-ups," the bad guys already "have the drop on us" which makes it very difficult, verging impossible, for an ordinary citizen to overcome that advantage.

Although statistics are unavailable, it is a reasonable postulate that using firearms to overcome a villain's preexisting advantage will result in an innocent citizen's injury (or death) than not using firearms.

Much of the mythology surrounding "the well-armed citizen hero" is attributable to the urge to "do everything possible" to forfend violent assault.

Thus fixated on "doing something," the human mind ignores the likelihood that "doing nothing" is safer than "upping the ante" by bringing even more firearms into play.

In Luke 6:29, Yeshua offers this advice to his followers: "If someone steals your coat, offer him your shirt too," rendered by an exegete friend as ""If someone steals your outer garments, give him your underwear as well." (Here is the full contextualization of Luke 6:29: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+6%3A+27-38&version=VOICE)

"Love Your Enemies. Do Good To Those Who Hate You," Luke 6: 27-42

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/love-your-enemies-do-good-to-those-who.html

Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/yeshua-excoriates-fellow-pharisees-woe.html

Thanks to Patrick O'Neill for forwarding the following article. Patrick is a pillar of the Fr. Charles Mulholland Catholic Worker House in Garner, NC.

Alan

Fascinating how differently two nations can approach similar situations .... Guns are the problem -- in the hands of anyone, including cops

Patrick

-----Original Message-----

From: David McReynolds
To: undisclosed
Sent: Fri, Jul 17, 2015 3:01 am
Subject: Re: BANG BANG! YOU'RE NOT DEAD from Clancy

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 3:41 PM, CS wrote:

  BANG BANG! YOU’RE NOT DEAD

I hold no special brief for the British police at whose hands and batons I’ve split a lip or two.   But here in Los Angeles, where our trimly athletic LAPD shoots fewer civilians than, say, in Albuquerque or Baltimore, we’re seeing a spike in “he was reaching into his waist band” or “coming at me with a knife (or rock)”.  Police in Gardena, LA, shot two unarmed Hispanics looking for their stolen bike, one died (you can see the police-camera video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkjGBEbfKyo); a few days ago police in the beach city of Venice shot and killed a homeless guy who allegedly had a knife; police in Los Feliz, LA, shot an unarmed jogger who approached them.  The dead guys tend to be black, brown or homeless.  It’s a weekly sometimes daily occurrence. The city has paid victims' families over $20m in recent years.

From the WashPost and the UK Independent, I’ve put together  one or two factoids for perspective.

Armed police in England and Wales only fired their weapons twice during 14,864 operations in 2013-14.  That’s TWICE in ONE year.

Only one person has been killed by armed police in England and Wales in the last four years, and one of them, near my old neighborhood, sparked four days of riots.

In the first 24 days of 2015, American police killed more people than police in England and Wales have killed in 24 years.   Read that sentence again.

The number of police shootings in England and Wales has fallen consistently over the last few years.

There are 5,875 specially-trained armed police in England and Wales (see below), but their numbers have fallen in recent years In 2011 police fired weapons six times.

In 2013, 30 U.S. officers were fatally shot while on duty in America where crazy people or anyone with a grudge can get a gun NQA, no questions asked.

We are five times the size of Britain.  However, when population differences are taken into account, people in the USA are around 100 times more likely to be shot by the police than British people are.

                                    *

What can US cops learn from Britain's gunless police?

A British cop who applies for a gun first must walk the beat unarmed for years.

Then there is the rigorous selection process — an unforgiving complement of fitness tests, psychological appraisals and marksmanship exams. Finally, there is the training, which involves endless drilling on even the most routine scenarios.

Lightly armed Britain might seem an unorthodox place to look for solutions to our plague of police shootings. But is there a blueprint here?

In Britain handguns and assault rifles effectively banned.

Like the United States, Britain is large, urbanized, democratic and diverse. Police have to reckon with gang violence, organized crime and Islamist extremists, all amid persistent allegations that they unfairly target minority communities.

Other police forces facing similar problems also forego firearms including New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Norway.

Sir Peter Fahy, chief of the Greater Manchester Police, commands 6,700 officers — just 209 of whom are armed. Those authorized to carry guns, he says, face extremely tight protocols governing when they can be deployed and under what circumstances they can fire. Shooting at moving vehicles, at people brandishing knives and at suspects fleeing a scene are all strictly forbidden except under extreme circumstances.

Officers must serve for years before they can apply to carry a gun, and the selection of those deemed worthy is intensely competitive.

All officers, he said, are taught to back away from any situation that might otherwise escalate and to not feel that they have to “win” every confrontation.

“I constantly remind our officers that their best weapon is their mouth,” he said. “Your first consideration is, ‘Can you talk this through? Can you buy yourself time?’ ”

When Mark Williams applied to be a firearms officer in 1995, he was among a group of 16 who started the grueling regimen of physical and psychological trials. Three made it.

Williams was among them, but that wasn’t the end of the testing. He and his fellow firearms officers faced regular drills challenging them to find creative ways out of confrontations and spent long nights at the shooting range to upgrade their marksmanship.

Sir Denis O’Connor, a former police chief,  says cops here…know that someone is always looking over their shoulder.

“The cops here tend to fear getting it wrong and being criticized by a judge,” he said. “Cops in the U.S. fear getting shot. Those are two very different worlds.”