GUNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Below is my column in today's Minnesota Daily concerning this year's conceal-carry debate in the Minnesota Legislature. Conceal-carry bills are in committee in the House and Senate. The only question is whether the DFL (for non-Minnesotans that's "Democratic-Farmer-Labor" party: Yes, "Democratic" isn't liberal enough here) majority in the Senate will put up a fight. There is sizable majority in favor of conceal-carry in the Senate, but I suspect the leadership has a trick or two up its sleave.

Here's my column:

Some of the most important facts in life are counterintuitive. Just because something doesn’t “make sense” on first glance doesn’t mean it’s crazy. Often after meditating on a counterintuitive proposition, we realize it’s actually true.
An example is the fact that banks pay you interest. Remember when you were a kid and you found out that in exchange for taking care of your money the bank was going to pay you? How does that make sense? They’re doing you a favor, and yet they reward you. Another example is the misery of 1920s Prohibition. Instead of making the ills associated with alcohol go away, Prohibition created more problems, not fewer.

Similarly, another counterintuitive proposition is that if people own more guns there will be less crime. “More guns?” the likes of Sarah Brady will scream. “If guns are used to kill people, how can more of them lead to fewer people being killed? You’re crazy!” This statement reflects a person’s first-glance reaction, and too often the same person never looks further and reflects on the truth underlying the claim.

Yes, guns are used to kill people. Know what else guns are used for? No, not just hunting. Guns are used to defend people. A very small percentage of the population actively seeks to murder fellow humans. The rest of us wish to defend ourselves from those who seek to kill, rob or maim us. A way of doing this is owning and carrying a firearm. If we view carrying a gun not as heightening the ability to kill, but as strengthening our ability to defend ourselves, the counter intuition of “more guns, less crime” suddenly becomes a presumption.

Of course, this presumption is refutable. The best argument against allowing people to own and carry guns is that they will accidentally use them to kill people. If a prospective murderer enters your home, shooting him in self-defense doesn’t sound that bad. But what if your neighbor mistakenly walks into your home instead of her own in the middle of the night? Shooting her would be a tragic accident made possible through gun possession.

We cannot easily arrive at an answer to the “more guns, less crime” dilemma. It is an empirical question with numbers on two different sides — the number of crimes (especially murders) thwarted by gun ownership on one side and the number of accidental mutilations and killings on the other. (I leave out gun crimes committed by criminals, as they will probably occur anyway, although that is a legitimate empirical question.) It might be that allowing people to carry guns in public cuts down on crime because criminals are afraid potential victims will be armed. On the other hand, it might be that when people own and carry more guns, accidental shootings rise so dramatically that they outweigh the gains stemming from lower crime rates.

By approaching the gun issue through recognizing legitimate costs and benefits, we can leave out some of the fire-breathing zealotry employed by both sides of the debate. Anti-gun activists can’t just defer to the fact that guns are designed to kill people, and Second Amendment enthusiasts can’t just defend unrestricted gun ownership by stating “if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” Instead, we can employ actual facts.

Of course, there are all kinds of facts to draw from and volumes of numbers that sometimes contradict each other. What tends to get lost, however, is the balancing ledger I outline above. Numbers that pertain to the costs and benefits in accidental shootings and lower crime rates are central to the issue.

This spring the Minnesota Legislature is considering greatly expanding our ability to carry handguns. Minnesota is one of only 17 states that

do not automatically allow non-felons, after meeting certain nominal requirements, to carry handguns. In the coming debates I hope we utilize information on the actual impact of gun possession and refrain from resorting to hyperbole. Stop and challenge your intuitions. Check data on both sides of the debate. You might discover that an armed society is a safer society. You might realize that not everyone who wants to carry a weapon wishes to use it. Or, you might find that granting more handgun permits creates more death than it prevents.

Either way you end up, you can then call your legislator knowing you have thought about guns as real things that people use, not as personifications of evil. I urge everyone to think hard, as the issue is about to hit us right between the eyes, and no amount of untamed rhetoric is going to stop it.

"Victims" and Victims

Great piece by John Fund on Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke is a black sheriff accused of being "racist." No, not racist toward whites, but toward blacks. Reminds us of the battles of Clarence Thomas and Miguel Estrada. I'm coming to the conclusion that our culture of victim hood will only abate when more and more leaders from "victim" groups (blacks, Hispanics, the disabled, gays) speak out against reflexive finger pointing. Groups like CORE and the Independent Gay Forum are doing this, and the trend definitely points toward things getting better. I just hope it continues.

O Brother, What a Movie

I saw O Brother, Where Art Thou again the other night, the Coen Brother’s 2000 adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. As before, I was taken in by the ability of the Coens to meld Southern Christian motifs with Homeric spirituality. The story doesn’t follow Odysseus’ travels to the penny, but the general feeling is less the flight of three convicts and more the adventures of mortal men in the face of divinely inspired obstacles.

There are a few direct rip-offs from Homer’s work, such as the Sirens (who apparently turn one convict into a toad) and the Cyclopes (one of my favorite John Goodman roles), but the best parallel is the battle between Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and the surrounding societal and religious mores. The central struggle of The Odyssey is Odysseus’ attempt to make himself whole (return home to his wife and dog) and Poseidon’s (and other divine and semi-divine creatures) attempt to thwart him. The struggle is set up so that neither Odysseus nor Poseidon lies on the “right” side. It’s not like (as in Christian ethics) Odysseus just needs to learn to accept Poseidon as his lord and everything will be fine. Odysseus isn’t exactly a saint (he steals a bunch of cattle that aren’t his—but a god’s—among other things), but Poseidon is unfairly vindictive toward him. The divine isn’t something perfect, but something merely a part (albeit an important part) of the world.

Similarly, Clooney’s character possesses concurrent vices and virtues. He lies to his fellow convicts and steels a gold watch. Yet, he is determined to win his wife back from a devious suitor. He refuses to slow down in the face of such things as morality and religion. I admire the determination, and the pride, he shows toward these “superstitions.” At the same time, the “superstitions” present in the film (the Christian ethos—particularly apparent in the mass-baptism scene—and the belief that people can turn into toads) are beautiful aspects of his world that I want to root for at the same time. There are “absolutes” in the movie, however, such as the evil of the Cyclopes, the KKK, and the devilish State Trooper. Perhaps this illustrates that within a Christian motif it’s very hard to escape the black-and-white nature of monotheism. Even so, to the extent that O Brother presents a polytheistic view of the world—a world of many powers and opportunities in which an adventurer faces multiple chances to get lost, to follow the straight and narrow, or to play those powers against each other—it breathes a sense of the Homeric that our culture could use a bit more of.