Henry Allen
By Henry Allen
Let me dust off my favourite Sufi parable.
A man loses a ring inside his house. A friend sees him crawling around outside and asks, “If you lost your ring in the house, why are you looking for it here?” “You fool,” says the man, “the light is much better out here.”
And so it goes with people looking for solutions to gun killings in America.
We’re talking about the very best people, the people with statistics and proposals for regulation, crawling around in the sunlight of their social-scientific rationality.
They never find a solution because all their legislation, academic studies, mathematical proofs, and proposals for waiting periods, background checks and buying limits aren’t going to do much more than they ever have.
Nor are the pleas of the progressives asking why anyone would ever want to own a gun — thereby demonstrating their arrogance toward the people who own the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States.
Both the problem and the solution lie elsewhere, in what historian Richard Hofstadter called “America as a Gun Culture.”
It started with New England Indians trying to drive out settlers in King Philip’s War, 1675-76. Some five percent to 10 percent of settler men of fighting age were killed. Laws soon required settlers to keep firearms in their homes.
The 1700s brought the “Kentucky rifle,” the long-range symbol of frontier independence. George Washington encouraged “the use of Hunting Shirts, with long Breeches made of the same Cloth . . . it is a dress justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such person a complete marksman.”
In the 19th century, Samuel Colt brought the gleaming modernity of mass production to gunmaking. The slogan had it that God created man and Samuel Colt made them equal. Cowboys carried Colts the way noblemen carried swords, as blazons of their status. Dime-novel writers invented the quick-draw duels that almost never happened.
The 20th century brought the dark romance of the gangster armed with Thompson submachine guns and private eyes with their snub-nosed .38s. World War II veterans brought home enemy guns as trophies of their victory. Then came the AK-47, weapon of choice against Western imperialists.
Hollywood employs armourers tuned to the tiniest details of gun fetishism.
Wp-bloomberg
By Henry Allen
Let me dust off my favourite Sufi parable.
A man loses a ring inside his house. A friend sees him crawling around outside and asks, “If you lost your ring in the house, why are you looking for it here?” “You fool,” says the man, “the light is much better out here.”
And so it goes with people looking for solutions to gun killings in America.
We’re talking about the very best people, the people with statistics and proposals for regulation, crawling around in the sunlight of their social-scientific rationality.
They never find a solution because all their legislation, academic studies, mathematical proofs, and proposals for waiting periods, background checks and buying limits aren’t going to do much more than they ever have.
Nor are the pleas of the progressives asking why anyone would ever want to own a gun — thereby demonstrating their arrogance toward the people who own the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States.
Both the problem and the solution lie elsewhere, in what historian Richard Hofstadter called “America as a Gun Culture.”
It started with New England Indians trying to drive out settlers in King Philip’s War, 1675-76. Some five percent to 10 percent of settler men of fighting age were killed. Laws soon required settlers to keep firearms in their homes.
The 1700s brought the “Kentucky rifle,” the long-range symbol of frontier independence. George Washington encouraged “the use of Hunting Shirts, with long Breeches made of the same Cloth . . . it is a dress justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such person a complete marksman.”
In the 19th century, Samuel Colt brought the gleaming modernity of mass production to gunmaking. The slogan had it that God created man and Samuel Colt made them equal. Cowboys carried Colts the way noblemen carried swords, as blazons of their status. Dime-novel writers invented the quick-draw duels that almost never happened.
The 20th century brought the dark romance of the gangster armed with Thompson submachine guns and private eyes with their snub-nosed .38s. World War II veterans brought home enemy guns as trophies of their victory. Then came the AK-47, weapon of choice against Western imperialists.
Hollywood employs armourers tuned to the tiniest details of gun fetishism.
Wp-bloomberg
