Where does the salad fork go?

I can tell you to use a fork with your salad, a spoon in your soup, and a knife on your steak, but when is a gun the appropriate tool? I guess as a weapon. Thing is, lots of tools, such as knives, hammers, and baseball bats, can be used as weapons. Guns are weapons; that is their primary purpose and they’re very good at it.

They’re not just weapons. Unlike various hand tools that can be turned to violence, or even a sword, which is designed to be a weapon, their successful use does not depend on being physically strong. Even skill isn’t much of a factor; any idiot with a shotgun can blow away whatever’s in the general direction they point at. This is seen as a virtue. Guns are called “the great equalizer” because, in the words of Reagan, “a small person with a gun is equal to a large person”.

Of course, if pressed, you could probably come up with some legitimate uses for guns outside the military. Particularly in rural areas, guns might be needed to protect livestock from predators or to hunt animals for food. But most guns are owned under the theory that they offer protection against violence. That’s what the overwhelming majority of gun owners say, with most of the rest citing hunting, sport shooting, and collecting. Less than a tenth use them for their jobs.

The problem with the case for self defense is the base rate fallacy. You can only defend yourself against violent crimes that actually happen to you, so unless you’re a cop or live in a western, these circumstances are exceedingly rare. As one researcher put it, “The average person […] has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense. But […] every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared.” In addition, being able to use a gun effectively in your defense requires skills above those you’d get from shooting at paper targets.

As a result, if you get a gun to protect your home, it’s unlikely you’ll ever use it for this purpose. It’s much more likely that someone in your home will use it to kill themselves or another person, either by accident or as suicide. Suicides account for two thirds of gun deaths and guns account for almost half of suicides. And studies have shown that making it harder to kill yourself makes it less likely that you’ll try, so these are mostly not deaths that would otherwise have happened.

Past the suicides, you have the accidents, often while cleaning a weapon or when a child gets access to it. And, of course, having a gun handy makes it easier for any personal disagreement to escalate to murder. It’s bad to get beaten up, worse to get shot in the head. (Ask me how I know!) Guns are not absolutely essential for killing, but they make it so much easier that they make it more common. More sensible countries create a natural experiment that confirms this.

Speaking of countries, in that Reagan quote above, the “Great Communicator” went on to repeat a popular myth: guns are for protecting the people against tyrannical government. Thing is, the police have fully-automatic rifles, body armor, and the training and organization to use both effectively as a group. Anyone who’s seen a tank, whether the military type or the paramilitary SWAT variety, knows that they render guns pretty much useless. For that matter, no gun is going to protect rebels from being carpet-bombed to oblivion from jets. And the military has nuclear weapons! We’re a long way from muskets and bayonets, so this argument is a farce.

A student of history will quickly find a more realistic, if sinister, purpose for mass gun ownership: it’s not about equalizing, it’s about keeping people down. Black people, mostly; the reason gun ownership was enshrined in the Bill of Rights was to protect the great American institution of slavery.

Laws rarely allowed free blacks to have weapons. It was even rarer for African Americans living in slavery to be allowed them. In slave states, militias inspected slave quarters and confiscated weapons they found. […]

These restrictions were no mere footnote to the gun politics of 18th-century America. White Americans were armed so that they could maintain control over nonwhites. Nonwhites were disarmed so that they would not pose a threat to white control of American society.

The restrictions underscore a key point about militias: They were more effective as domestic police forces than they were on the battlefield against enemy nations; and they were most effective when they were policing the African American population.

What the Second Amendment Really Meant to the Founders (WashPo)

This is not just another embarrassing historical fact, it’s a modern reality: gun ownership is for white people. This is made particularly clear in areas when open carry is legal, but black people with guns risk being killed by the police. I could fill pages with stories of black men killed by police claiming that they had a gun, and the NRA’s zeal for firearms is notably absent when the owner isn’t white.

Putting aside the inherent racist past and present of guns, there’s the problem of proportionality, of cost-benefit analysis. Today, very few hunters are doing it for the food, and even then it’s more choice than necessity. If meat were the goal, then hunters would focus on ducks, beavers, and squirrels, not hoofed mammals, which are not only more dangerous but often provide meat that’s too tough, lean, or stinky. If you want good meat, you’d do best hunting it in a supermarket. But if you’re aiming for food, you need a small-caliber rifle that won’t blow a varmint apart, not a big gun for elk, much less a fucking assault rifle to spray the forest down with bullets.

We need to be honest with ourselves. Guns are not for protection or food: for the most part, guns are toys and gun ownership is a hobby. Shooting a gun is fun, like throwing darts, except the projectile is far more deadly. They’re also something people collect, much like hording Beanie Babies. Half the guns in America are owned by 3% of the people and half of gun-owners have more than two. And they’re part of our movie-fueled image of rugged manliness, from cowboys to James Bond.

Of course, if a game like darts killed half as many innocent people as guns do, we would immediately regulate their use. We’d require darts to be kept behind the bar or at the range, and never taken home. We’d require strict background checks for darts to keep them out of the hands of those who would throw them at other people, and make it illegal to resell darts without going through these checks. We’d create a computerized national registry to let us track dart ownership, prevent straw sales, and match darts used in crime to their owners. And we’d make these laws national, so nobody could make a business out of smuggling darts from lenient backwoods jurisdictions.

We don’t, and it’s because of our Big Lie about what guns are for. We pretend they’re for safety when they measurably decrease safety. We pretend they haven’t always been a tool for racist oppression. We pretend that they’re needed to prevent tyranny. We pretend that we’re fucking action heroes who need guns to be cool. And, because we embrace these myths, our citizens die by the tens of thousands each year, disproportionately including minorities and children.

As a nation, our gun ownership is wildly out of proportion to our population. The rest of the world offers plenty of examples of how gun control works and people remain safe because there are fewer guns around, not despite. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority want gun control, the NRA has systematically thwarted the will of the people. And so long as “they’ll take away our guns” is an effective rallying cry to excite right-wingers and send them to the polls, gun violence will be sustained.

We are so politically dysfunctional that even the occasional massacre of children is not enough to spur action. We did this to ourselves. Like most gun deaths, this is suicide.

P.S.
The choice of darts was an apt one because, after a child died in a lawn dart accident, we immediately banned them. Sadly, this act of unilateral disarmament left us utterly vulnerable to the attack of the balloon doggies, which was shaping up to be massacre until the wind shifted and saved the day for non-inflated people everywhere.