Safety Blues
I keep getting mad when people do their reflex slam of guns. I just feel like I keep being baited. My outdoorsman ways represent a mature culture with solid roots which keeps being second-guessed in ways that seem out of place. The second-guessing comes across as confident yet not comprehensive or superior. Since to me such confidence is related to modernism which is related to the near-destruction of culture, it wears a little thin. Sure, people have good intentions when they’re trying to save others. But I get a little short anyway because the destruction itself only comes from good intentions. No one ever sets out to wreck culture or write bad law on purpose.
I mean, of course I keep my house safe. Has it ever not been? Do bad things happen around me? Tend to happen around people like me? Where does the license to 2nd-guess the way I live with confidence come from? I don’t know anyone else we know who gets hassled this way. But I guess that I’m about the only traditional sort of person we know, so I’m fair game.
Basically I feel that it’s like a farmer having cityslickers visit and declare they know best about the animals in the barnyard and that they have answers to farm ‘issues’.
Anyway, I keep mentioning gun stats so here where you can get them: Gary Kleck’s “Point Blank: Gun Violence in America” or his newer books of essays. Really, just surf the Net a bit under the topic ‘gun control’ and you’ll easily find all the points that either side can offer. Klecks books do not come to simple conclusions. They conclude that gun control works to reduce crime as well as that guns are effectively used by citizens to prevent crime. No neat and tidy worldview; he’s not in anybody’s pocket.
But stats don’t deal with the whole picture. There seem to be five things (at least) about ‘issues’ that seem neglected nowadays. They’re probably obvious, but I think they belong in the mix.
1.) You can’t legislate against stupidity. But you can. That is, people won’t be any smarter, but you can save them from themselves, for awhile. The only problem is that you have to keep saving them as they get dumber, limiting life to a prison state that then self-destructs.
2.) Accidents aren’t accidental. The majority of accidents happen to a minority who are accident-prone. Attempts to reduce accidents among the accident-prone are difficult-the main result being that of ruining the culture of a majority which wasn’t experiencing accidents.
3.) It’s a mistake to use statistical methods with mechanical models. That is, people will do bad things x-% of the time, but each person’s obligation is to do good all the time. This also means you can’t work back from symptoms to cures. That is, you can stop hitchhiking crime by stopping hitchhiking, stop theft by locking doors, but the depravity is still there, growing ever faster. But a person with a performance mentality will see mainly the narrow, outward improvement and maybe only give a wistful sigh about the cultual price we had to pay to get there. But a culture often views risk as a necessary price to pay. But professionals aren’t happy until the ‘bad things’ (covered by their department) are down to zero and any cultural element is fair game for fiddling with. At this point our culture has nearly disappeared as a result. A sign of statistics mentality is ‘opposite response,’ such as when situations which are inherently safe seem to be dangerous-like people who are afraid of areas where they see gunracks in pickup trucks.
4.) What makes people want to ‘fix’ society? What parts do they want to fix and how? It pays to test why and how we’re interested in social issues. Choosing a ‘logical’ fix might relate to pride in the scientific method and pride of opinion. A caution flag should go up if those who we want to help are remote to us or are politically fair game for such help. Fixing can be a way to conquer, to express hate. We make our money off of science, but we feel ambivalent about it, so we get activist with it to feel like it works. In school we were trained to think our opinion mattered. In pop culture, our opinions are used to exploit us, so it also makes us feel like our opinions matter. There’s no modern element encouraging humility. Instead, the ego is encouraged because when it’s in charge, the person can be exploited. Opinion spurs desire, makes good feelings, but it doesn’t change the facts. The result is that every rich person (or even credit card holder) can be convinced to spend a fortune on gun-safes, just like they spend fortunes to buy land and post it ‘no trespassing’, by paying to visit preserves of any type, or by joining property clubs. The result is elitism and debt. The real problems remain and the culture goes down. It pays to ask whether other cultures exist in our midst which don’t ‘solve’ problems that way, which might not even have such problems. One might start with the Amish and work out to millions of nooks and crannies which have refused to participate in modernism this way.
5.) The vast majority of accidents and crime involve teenage boys. The most amazing thing isn’t that teens are still relatively safe, which they are (even though that is amazing). The amazing thing is that teens survive at all! With the crazy things they do, circumventing every safety concept to maximize danger, that they live at all is a miracle. (Culture is a miracle. Actuarials and modern science fetishists hate miracles.) The fact is that people need risk, at different times to different extents, some types seeming shocking depending on the culture involved. Risk strengthens them and makes them safe in the end. Doing the right thing is a great risk all our lives. Youthful risk-taking is training for life. Sure, if you locked teens up you’d stop nearly all crime and injury, but you’d kill culture. Yet injury rates are unacceptable to various groups and exploited by others. They will do their professional best to wipe out the plague of this or that. At their office, they might be lobbying to criminalize teenage gun possession, while they take their teens motorcycle riding on the weekend for the ‘thrill’ of it. In another office, professionals are working to illegalize teenage motorcycle riding, while their kids shoot in 4H. We all fall down. On the other hand, the goal of culture is life, warts and all. With culture, a few simple rules uphold a myriad diversity. With modern science, an infinity of laws and precautions can’t slow the snowball to extinction.
