The Hits Keep Coming

Yesterday, a man picked up a gun and killed 18 students in an elementary school in Texas. 

This morning a candidate for the leadership of the CPC promised to burn Canada’s gun control laws. 

Wow - talk about not reading the room - at all. Possibly the worst hot take to publish the day after yet another mass shooting takes place in the United States.  

Oddly, I do agree with the Canadian firearms lobby on one thing:  The regulatory framework around firearms is a shambles - decades of fiddling and tweaking has resulted in a mess of seemingly arbitrary rules - banning some firearms and allowing others that are seemingly very similar in function and capability. 

I don’t think the gun lobby would particularly like my approach though - because as far as I’m concerned, pretty much anything that isn’t a single shot firearm should be banned outright, and after that we can talk about what is allowed in terms of ammunition sizes. 

However, I don’t particularly want to argue about the particulars of firearms regulation today.  I’ve written other posts on the subject in the past. Today’s subject is about the culture associated with firearms. 

Mass shootings in the United States tend to involve people using AR-15 type rifles, sometimes with various modifications to make them fire faster, have larger magazines etc.  The AR-15 is in fact a platform device - in other words the basic structure of the receiver is pretty generic, and from there it’s a matter of assembling it with the desired barrel, stock, etc.  They’re cheap and plentiful in the US. 

But “cheap and plentiful” ignores a few factors about the AR-15, and in particular how people who buy them perceive not only the weapon itself, but also themselves. Spend a little time looking around, and you find most AR-15s come in a small handful of colours:  black, tan, and camouflage. They all take some kind of clip for a magazine, which hold between 30 and 100 rounds.  

The other thing to realize is that the AR-15 is the basis for the M-16. The M-16 is a well known firearm that militaries around the world have used extensively.  It’s well known, and strangely an AR-15 that looks almost identical to its military counterpart is easily made.  I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that many of the mass shooters in the US are using all black AR-15s.  They look “military”, and so many people equate “military” with “tough”.  

Can you imagine those same people buying an AR-15 if the only colours it was offered in were pastel pink and yellow?  I’m going to make a guess that you can’t, because chances are very good they wouldn’t because those colours aren’t culturally associated with the kind of “tough” image they want to project. 

In this respect, these guys are very much like the muscle car subculture.  You don’t see many muscle cars in pastel colours either - because there’s something incongruous about the colour with the noise the engine makes, and the association of speed with being tough and / or taking risks. In this context, firearms are as much about “appearing tough” as they are about shooting things. 

That’s the first problem with firearms in general - they have become symbols.  Symbols representing “tough”. Symbols that give the bearer the feeling that they are stronger, more dangerous, and therefore less likely to be attacked themselves.  

The second problem is the way that the idea of “violence as a solution to our problems” permeates culture - especially in the US.  The idea that you have to “fight back”, “defeat your enemies”, etc shows up in everything from television shows to music. Don’t get me wrong - it makes for easy writing - create an adversary, then put the protagonist in the situation where the only real solution for them is to hunt down the adversary and kill them. It’s easy, you can make it fast-paced - which means that the show pulls people along on their emotional reactions to things, because the audience never get a chance to actually think about what’s happening. 

Combine those two factors, and you create the basis for the current mentality in the US where everybody seems to have a gun (or two) at hand, and the temptation to use them to “solve” life problems is reinforced every time a show is on the TV.

Then add to that the deeply competitive nature of American culture. Everything is a competition down there - from enrolling your child in pre-school all the way through to getting into the university you want. Suddenly the fact that mass shootings are commonplace makes more sense - everything is a contest, and when you don’t get what you think you should, violence becomes a “solution”.  

Guns have become a symbol of “strength”, it’s become embedded in the culture of what it is to be “a man”.  That same thinking seems to permeate gun culture in Canada, it’s just that gun culture isn’t particularly mainstream here (although not for a lack of trying).  

The wedge they are trying to use is the “law abiding gun owner”. Of course, the problem with that is that it’s “self-selecting”.  Every gun owner is “law abiding” until they aren’t. This does nothing to address the underlying issues associated with gun violence. 

Do gun bans address those issues?  Only indirectly, as reduced availability makes it less likely that the object can be integrated in the general idea of being “manly” the way it has in the US. That doesn’t mean the firearms ban is irrelevant - it’s actually quite important.  But it also has to include taking steps to change the mentality towards firearms in general.  

Canada stands at a precipice on this issue. If we allow the gun lobby the loosened rules, public carry of firearms, and other things they are pushing for, it won’t take long for the poison currently circulating in the US to take over here.