Avdi Grimm's Library tagged shooting →  View Popular

Gun control is a complicated and emotional issue and an informed policy discussion is impossible in this space. But one thing seems certain to me: no one who's never shot a gun should be permitted to create gun-control policy. The psychological stakes are otherwise unfathomable.
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The old shibboleth that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," with both its commonsensical appeal and its obvious flaws, was not trotted out in my presence, but a revealing variation was: "Guns aren't evil, evil is in your heart." Each time you fire a gun, you face for one moment your own secret capacity for violence: this is why we liberals, with our disbelief in evil, fear them. But each time you fire a gun safely, you have demonstrated that acknowledging such murderousness does not license it. "I think of shooting as an educational practice," that same cracked-goggles range master tells me. "You don't need to be scared of a gun," he continued, "but you need to respect it." It's like armed yoga.
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Draconian gun-control—outright bans, say, instead of registration statutes—laws feel, to these men, like the most insulting kind of paternalism. It's the government telling them: Sorry, boys, but we don't believe you can settle your own seething dark. Max Weber's definition of the state is inverted: it's not the institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of lethal force, it's the institution with a monopoly on the containment of such bloodlust. These men consider the Second Amendment to be less about self-defense than it is about trust: the right to bear arms makes them feel entrusted to their own psychic balance. When they say that guns aren't evil, they're not defending guns; they're congratulating themselves, and, from what I can tell, for good reason.