Emotional comment? Pomposity seeking to impress?
Oh!! Please do hit the abuse button as it may make you feel more secure.
Posted on 03/08/2002 5:46:12 AM PST by babyface00
LET'S be honest. He's scared of the thing. That's understandable--so am I. But as a girl I have the luxury of being able to admit it. I don't have to masquerade squeamishness as grand principle-in the interest of mankind, no less.
A man does. He has to say things like "One Taniqua Hall is one too many," as a New York radio talk show host did in referring to the 9-year old New York girl who was accidentally shot last year by her 12-year old cousin playing with his uncle's gun. But the truth is he desperately needs Taniqua Hall, just like he needs as many Columbines and Santees as can be mustered, until they spell an end to the Second Amendment. And not for the benefit of the masses, but for the benefit of his self-esteem.
He often accuses men with guns of "compensating for something." The truth is quite the reverse. After all, how is he supposed to feel knowing there are men out there who aren't intimidated by the big bad inanimate villain? How is he to feel in the face of adolescent boys who have used the family gun effectively in defending the family from an armed intruder? So if he can't touch a gun, he doesn't want other men to be able to either. And to achieve his ends, he'll use the only weapon he knows how to manipulate: the law.
Of course, sexual and psychological insecurities don't account for ALL men against guns. Certainly there must be some whose motives are pure, who perhaps do care so much as to tirelessly look for policy solutions to teenage void and aggressiveness, and to parent and teacher negligence. But for a potentially large underlying contributor, psycho-sexual inadequacy has gone unexplored and unacknowledged. It's one thing to not be comfortable with a firearm and therefore opt to not keep or bear one. But it's another to impose the same handicap onto others.
People are suspicious of what they do not know-and not only does this man not know how to use a gun, he doesn't know the men who do, or the number of people who have successfully used one to defend themselves from injury or death. But he is better left in the dark; his life is hard enough knowing there are men out there who don't sit cross-legged. That they're able to handle a firearm instead of being handled by it would be too much to bear.
Such a man is also best kept huddled in urban centers, where he feels safer than he might if thrown out on his own into a rural setting, in an isolated house on a quiet street where he would feel naked and helpless. Lacking the confidence that would permit him to be sequestered in sparseness, and lacking a gun, he finds comfort in the cloister of crowds.
The very ownership of a gun for defense of home and family implies some assertiveness and a certain self-reliance. But if our man kept a gun in the house, and an intruder broke in and started attacking his wife in front of him, he wouldn't be able to later say, "He had a knife--there was nothing I could do!" Passively watching in horror while already trying to make peace with the violent act, scheduling a therapy session and forgiving the perpetrator before the attack is even finished wouldn't be the option it otherwise is.
No. Better to emasculate all men. Because let's face it: He's a lover, not a fighter. And he doesn't want to get shot in case he has an affair with your wife.
Of course, it wouldn't be completely honest not to admit that owning a firearm carries with it some risk to unintended targets. That's the tradeoff with a gun: The right to defend one's life and way of life isn't without peril to oneself. And the last thing this man wants to do is risk his life-if even to save it. For he is guided by a dread fear for his life, and has more confidence in almost anyone else's ability to protect him than his own, preferring to place himself at the mercy of the villain or in the sporadically competent hands of authorities (his line of defense consisting of locks, alarm systems, reasoning with the attacker, calling the police or, should fighting back occur to him, thrashing a heavy vase).
In short, he is a man begging for subjugation. He longs for its promise of equality in helplessness. Because only when that strange, independent alpha breed of male is helpless along with him will he feel adequate. Indeed, his freedom lies in this other man's containment.
I disagree a little bit. I've always thought of noisily enunciated nonviolence (not the principled kind described in various truly pacifist personal acquaintances), the kind that people like to announce with bullhorns at political gatherings, was always a claim on leadership by moral one-upmanship.
Then there is political nonviolence, on the model of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, which isn't truly pacifist but is instead a form of passive aggression -- and very aggressive at that, since it requires for its operation successfully provoking the very worst in someone else, with attendant bad consequences for other people.
I think of political nonviolence as a kick-your-sister-under-the-table aggressivity, the object of which is to call down external powers on your chump. Nothing pacifistic about it; its intention is to make things worse for everyone, in order to make things better for yourself.
I love taking novices to the range and watching their frowns of uncertainty and trepidation turn to smiles of enjoyment and accomplishment. I had a girlfriend once who supported the 2d Amendment, but "didn't trust guns". I talked her into going to the range with me one day, where I introduced her the .45, the 9mm, and the .357 revolver. I created a monster! She was a natural, and by day's end she was even outshooting me with the .357 Rossi. Much of folks' distrust and lack of understanding of firearms could be fixed with a simple day at the range.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
A true pacifist rejects all violence, for any reason. I have a rather disgusting thought experiment to smoke out fake pacifists.
You are tied up in a chair, looking through a one-way mirror. Under one finger is a button. On the other side of the mirror is your young child and a sadistic pedophile. If you push the button, he will die painlessly and your child will be saved. If you don't, you get to watch your child brutalized and killed.
If you refuse to push the button, you are a true pacifist.
If you push it, you aren't a pacifist, you are just posing as one. Any argument you have with Attilla the Hun or General Patton is not with the idea of violence as such, it is whether it is appropriate in a particular case.
Emotional comment? Pomposity seeking to impress?
Oh!! Please do hit the abuse button as it may make you feel more secure.
I agree. The pacifist does not rise to meet the need of others who depend on him for help in extremis, and therefore he privileges his own moral imposture over the dire need of others.
Oddly, you just did the same thing, and so did Gorin in the article -- and you're both right. Another way of putting it is, people on the Left like to accuse other people of having psych problems, and so tell on themselves.
Pacifism on a Chrisitan principle ("turn the other cheek to him") doesn't seek to change reality--it seeks to preserve one's soul. There's something to be said for Nietzsche's aphorism: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
That said, I think Jesus told his disciples to sell their cloaks and buy swords for a reason.
Why?
Robert Heinlein
That particular quote indicates to me that Ghandi used non-violent means to acheive his ends as more of a recognition of reality and proceeding to work with what he had than the inherent non-violent person that modern thought tends to portray him as.
That is not to say that he wasn't courageous and brilliant. The Indian people had already been disarmed, so armed conflict simply wasn't an option. Ghandi recognized this and managed to sour the British on the idea of an occupied India anyway. If arms had been readily available, I suspect that the history of Indian freedom from British rule might be different.
Knitebane
You're probably right about Gandhi's resort to non-violence as being more practical than ideal. Some people who've tried to profile Gandhi psychologically think he really was an idealist, however.
The above said they do have my utmost respect.
Stay well - stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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