Are guns "froofy"? A "well regulated" post on the 2nd Amendment

I think I've written a fair amount in the past about the 1st Amendment, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to write a bit on the 2nd Amendment, as it's probably the most controversial section of the Bill of Rights. Generally, I consider myself to be pro-2nd Amendment, but I'm pretty sure most of the opinions I have on the matter would be less than palatable to the average NRA member. No matter; if there's disagreement, I hope it can spark dialogue.

So first, on a very basic level, I do think that people should have the right to protect themselves, and if they choose to do so with a gun, then in general, the Constitution says that's okay. At the same time, I personally have no desire to own a gun; they don't appeal to me in any manner. Perhaps it's my distaste for guns that leads to my nuanced views of this law, although I think if I did want to own a gun, I'd still expect some reasonable boundaries to my rights.

Just because the founding fathers wanted to guarantee us certain rights about guns doesn't necessarily mean that they intended ordinary citizens to own fancy automatic assault rifles. I've heard some people say that the argument that the founding fathers couldn't have imagined the sorts of guns we have today is invalid because you could draw similar parallels to the 1st Amendment: that the founding fathers couldn't have known about things like the Internet, so maybe we should curtail freedom of expression with respect to media types that are more modern than the 18th century? This is supposed to sound ridiculous, but I don't think it is. Why? Because the Internet really has changed the way we communicate and express ourselves.

Let me tell you a story. Back around, oh, I think probably 1995, I had a friend that had one of the first home PCs I'd seen that was web ready. He had AOL. One day I was at his house, and he was showing me all the cool things that he could do on AOL, and he paused. "Do you want to see something scary?" he asked me. I wasn't sure I was, but I was curious as to what he meant. He popped into a chat room and typed, "Can anyone send me nudes of 13s?" Before I could parse what that meant, his computer chirped repeatedly "YOU'VE GOT MAIL!" and he opened up his inbox. There he showed me that he had just been sent several nude pictures of underage girls, including one of someone having sex with what was claimed to be a 12-year-old. I'm feeling pretty confident that the founding fathers never intended the 1st Amendment to protect that sort of artistic expression. I would suggest that when technology changes, our understanding of the world changes with it.

So back to guns. I don't see why an average citizen would have a practical need for guns of a certain firepower. (I'll admit freely that I'm a person who knows very little about guns, and I don't feel I have the confidence to say that I can draw the arbitrary lines between acceptable and unacceptable guns. I do feel that there are lines that are reasonable to be drawn, however.) I don't think people should have machine guns, and I have a hard time believing that the average citizen has a need for armor-piercing rounds, for instance, but this is just my personal view.

Perhaps we should take a look at the 2nd Amendment?

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I think a lot of people, myself included, are confused about the meaning and significance of the first half of this law. I mean, if the 2nd Amendment were simply the text that follows the comma, it would be pretty simple, but the stuff before the comma leads to so many questions. What precisely is a "militia"? What does it mean for one to be "well regulated"? What's the real meaning of "the security of a free state"? Let's deal with these in turn.

Going to the dictionary for the first question, we find various definitions of "militia". The first definition given is "a body of citizens enrolled for military service, and called out periodically for drill but serving full time only in emergencies." This sounds like a group of people who are serving and protecting the government. But look at the fourth and final definition: "a body of citizens organized in a paramilitary group and typically regarding themselves as defenders of individual rights against the presumed interference of the federal government." This sounds like virtually the antithesis of the group in the first definition to me. While surely there are a lot of people today who believe it to be their right to be in a militia of the latter type, is there any evidence that the founding fathers meant that definition? Yet even if they didn't, does that make it wrong?

When something is "regulated" in any official sense (whether "well" or not) it's usually regulated by the government, isn't it? Once again, that would seem to rule out the latter definition of "militia", but I don't know I could say so with 100% surety.

The thing that's funny to me is how with all that lack of specificity so far, there is still more lack of specificity to be found in the last phrase, "the security of a free state". If the militia is guarding the security of the state, then it seems that it's working for the government, but I'm sure some would argue that the addition of the word "free" in there could imply that the militia could be fighting for a "free state" against a state that is not free. While that seems like an admirable cause, it's also quite open to differing opinion, and when people with (arguably) excessive guns are fighting to protect the right to have said guns, isn't the logic sort of circular?

Anyway, it's just awful strange. The 1st Amendment, as well as most if not all of the others in the Bill of Rights, doesn't give a reason why the people are given rights, it just gives them. Why does the 2nd Amendment give a reason, and unfortunately a reason that is, in the end, quite confusing? It's the difference between saying, "All children should get a lollipop on Friday," and saying, "Seeing as lollipops are so froofy and the well-being of children is dependent on overall froofiness, all children should get a lollipop on Friday." You find yourself suspecting that if you knew what "froofy" really meant, you'd have a better idea as to the validity of a weekly lollipop, and without that meaning, you might suspect the whole thing's garbage.

But there are a lot of people who defend the right to own a seemingly (to many) ridiculous amount and kind of gun with the argument that it does serve to keep us safe from an oppressive government. I'm not sure that I buy this in the end, for two reasons. The main reason is that if the government is truly going to turn on you and take away all your beloved freedoms, I don't think it matters what kind of guns you have. The government has tanks and bombers and chemical weapons and if they decide to come for you, guns just won't be enough, no matter how many you have.

The second reason is one that may just appeal to me as a person who doesn't love guns: The world has repeatedly been changed by a group of citizens who armed themselves and fought against oppressive governments, this is true, but the world has also been changed by people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela who never picked up a weapon, but were simply willing to lay down their lives for the cause of freedom. I'd just like to believe that the world can be changed without having to kill people to advance worthy causes. There are those who have shown that it can be done.

They say that guns don't kill people, people kill people; and that's true. But a gun is a tool that is specifically designed to cause harm, and while I respect people's right to defend themselves, a gun is something that I'll never be 100% happy with.

The book of numbers

I remember many years ago, a couple of people came knocking at my door. I seem to recall they were Jehovah's Witnesses, but I may be remembering wrong; it's not important.

"Do you know what the most popular book in history is?" they asked me, their way of starting up a conversation. This is the sort of conversation I enjoy greatly; not the theological conversation, which I also enjoy and of course they were aiming towards, but the conversation of interesting but ultimately pointless trivia.

"That's an easy one," I replied, "The Bible of course. Now here's a stumper for you: what's number two?" See how I did the very thing that so often annoys me (probably most people, actually)? I took their train of thought and switched it off to a different track so they had no idea where we were going. Next stop: Trivialand.

Actually, the funny thing about pointless trivia is that often enough, it's not even so vital that it's true, which, in thinking about the story lately, I realized that I may have been incorrectly parroting back what I had been told. I'm fond of asking the trivia question: "What's the only animal with four knees?" This confuses people, who mostly don't notice that most quadrupeds don't have knees on their front legs. The answer is supposedly "elephants", but I not only don't know if this is true, but I don't know if even elephants truly have four knees. I don't think they do, actually.

...and I'm going on a tangent again, and from a tangent off of a story about going off on tangents, at that! So, back to my first tangent, the one I gave the poor confused representatives of the Watchtower Society: I had been told repeatedly in college that the #2 book--whether it was supposed to be in popularity or influence or what, I do not know--was Euclid's Elements, an ancient textbook on the fundamentals of mathematics. Wikipedia says it is "second only to the Bible in the number of editions published", which may be the basis for its supposed #2 slot.

I definitely think there's something very significant in the fact that a math textbook holds such a vital place in world history. The average person may find mathematics a very dull subject, but it has been said, and I believe quite truly that "Mathematics is the only true universal language." Some people find it strange for a Christian to say such things, but I believe that even God cannot subvert some of the basic principles of mathematics. As Galileo said, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Numbers interest me deeply. They have a power in them that people do not realize. I've worked for years as a computer programmer, not because I love computers, but because there's something in me that greatly distrusts computers, and wants to know as much about them as I can. Understand HTML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc., and you understand how the web works. Understand mathematics, and you understand how reality works.

People shy away from understanding numbers and how they interrelate, but they don't realize the vulnerability it gives them. As a someone who has also worked as a statistician, I also understand that. Another famous quote is "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." People who control the numbers can have power over those who don't understand the numbers. Even my father, who was not good at math, understood the principle. He once told me, "I noticed there was a brand of soup in the local supermarket that nobody wanted to buy at 25¢. The managers of the store took away the 25¢ sign and put one up that said '4 for $1', and they couldn't keep the stuff in stock!" Lack of a basic understanding of mathematics clearly leaves one wandering in the wilderness of confused ideas. And manipulation of statistics can be even worse than this sort of amateurish manipulation of simple fractions.

Statistics is a "science" of mathematics that involves sometimes a process of incredibly complicated calculations and delicate statements of degrees of confidence that are actually quite precise and accurate. But most people don't operate on that level, and don't want to operate on that level, so statistics tends to come at people with a simple pecentage, or a cutesy chart; a method that tends to simplify things to the point of meaninglessness.

Case in point: a friend elsewhere on the web posted a link to an article suggesting that statistics show gun ownership decreases the rate of "hot" burglary, i.e. burglary that happens while the residents are in the house. Here's the article. Can you spot the problem with this? In the first paragraph, we are told, "In studies involving interviews of felons, one of the reasons the majority of burglars..." Now a citation is given, so the original study may show more, but here we are told about "studies" which may mean anything. When I was in high school, I was fond of bolstering my arguments in research papers by interviewing classmates and citing useful responses. There's no good reason to assume that's what's going on here, yet there's not really any reason to assume something better. As far as the numbers go, "one of the reasons the majority" is worded so nebulously I'm not even sure it's safe to say that 50% of the interviewed felons feel this is important. Of course on top of that, we also don't know if this claim holds true in real life. Some felons (and which ones? I assume these are felons who were caught; who knows if those who got away with their crimes have the same feelings?) may claim that they behave this way, but how do we know how they act in real-life situations?

Here's where the numbers come in, right? The numbers were compared to Britain and the Netherlands in the second paragraph. Questions here that occur to me are: How do we know that theses are reasonable comparisons at all? What are the actual levels of gun ownership in those countries versus the U.S.? Do criminals know the statistics before they approach a house to burglarize it? What was the computation used to come up with the number of 450,000, and assuming this is a reasonable computation, what's the current number? I mean, is this 450,000 "hot" burglaries that would have still ocurred, but would not have been "hot", or brand-new burglaries that simply wouldn't have happened? Are we talking about doubling the number of burglaries, or increasing by 50%? (For that matter, do you know that those aren't the same thing?) That last statistic of 30% is tossed in with no comparison to the other two countries, so what's the significance?

The most important question to ask, however, is whether guns are really the deciding factor behind these numbers. Another article my friend linked to pointed out that in Britain, many people are getting high-tech security systems for their homes, making it a necessity that burglars need to strike while someome is home. Many years ago, I remember hearing that the proliferation of "The Club" device for securing one's car was causing a rise in carjackings. Does that mean security systems are bad? I don't know much about the Netherlands other than the fact that drug use is much higher there. Could that have something to do with crime rates? Look, the conclusion that the article is trying to support may actually be true, but the numbers and info given are largely meaningless. How many people realize that, though? People love to say, look, I've got statistics! I am right! But who knows what numbers really mean, and who knows when numbers are misleading, whether intentionally or accidentally?

Our whole world is made of numbers. Numbers to count items, numbers to measure time and distance, numbers to represent complicated concepts. They're simultaneously the most abstract concepts of our minds and the most fundamental building blocks of concrete reality. They're powerful, they're meaningful, and they're there whether you try to understand them or not. Ignore their power at your own peril.