guns don't kill, people do

           We've heard that old tired refrain from gun nuts and reactionaries for many years. But the libertarian baffle gab conceals many issues. Let's look at a few..

             The registration and control of firearms in North America turns out to be a tricky business. This suggests that it is not as straightforward an issue as one might at first think. 

              Firstly, why - exactly - do we have so many guns in the hands of civilians? Polls indicate that something like 40% of US households possess one or more firearms. "In the beginning", Americans, it is argued, lived on the land and guns were a means of self-defense for isolated families and a means of obtaining food. Also their political tradition gives the People the right to change their government if it serves them badly. (One could argue that this is the right of every People, so why so many guns in N. America?)

            Today, though, most of us live in cities and obtain our meat from the store. Even the argument about the right to change government is a bit weak on at least two points:

1- Though the People may indeed possess the right to change their government if it represents them badly, is arming the average household the most efficient way to obtain good government? We are no longer living in the 18th century with a weak central State. Modern military weaponry is highly specialized, modern standing armies large, well trained and equipped. Are citizens' militias a match for these modern fighting machines? Sure, one can argue that technology is not everything. Did not the Vietnamese pull off the impossible: beat the American behemoth, the mightiest military power that ever existed? (The Americans could, of course, have dropped the Bomb on Nam but would that could have been political suicide, hindering, rather than facilitating their future access to relatively undepleted 3rd world reserves of non-renewable resources like petroleum.) And look at the trouble the West is having today controlling ISIS! Their technology is relatively primitive compared to the resources of the West and we are having a gawdawful time controlling them. 

        So while it is true that human willpower is a wonderful and powerful thing, do we really want to govern ourselves by facing off poorly trained and equipped citizens' militias against modern armies in our city streets? It seems there should be better ways to implement democracy in the 21st century.

2- Another, practical, problem arises when one starts to examine the views and goals of militiamen. While posing as citizen "patriots" and opponents of tyranny, they often promote reactionary, racist even (proto-)fascist worldviews. The links below present a fairly balanced (moderate) view of the affair, I think.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/05/southern-poverty-law-center-militias-gun-control/1964411/

http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.html?xpicked=4&item=19

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/militia-madness 

          In the present context I can't help but think that our violent, militaristic culture accords a high status symbolic value to the gun and the cult which has grown around it: I have a Big Gun that can kill a lot of people in a short time; that makes ME a Real Big Man.

The gun is the Great Equalizer. It makes the small man equal to the tall man.
                                                               - anonymous (American)

         The need for the Big Gun and the cult grown around it may, in fact, be more psychological than political or material. The role the gun plays in the urban gang culture may be reinforced by our collective social values. Perhaps, at the beginning of the third millennium we need to ask ourselves: if we want to survive as a civilization, perhaps we need a new set of value to live by?

The background: December 6, 1989, avowed anti-feminist Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique, Montréal and cold-bloodedly murdered 14 female engineering students with a rifle because "you're all feminists!" To do his dirty work, he separated males from females, then gunned down the women. Afterwards, as so often in these cases, Lépine took his own life..

           Québec society was heavily traumatised. This type of thing was only "supposed" to happen south of the Canada / US border, and most certainly not in peace loving, tolerant Québec! We lost whatever semblance we had of (false) innocence in the months following the massacre.

            Families were broken, scarred, destroyed in complex and ramifying ways. Ripples of violence spread out from the Polytechnique massacre for years afterwards. Some  of the men present were crushed by feelings of guilt: "We should have done something! We should have rushed him en masse even if he did kill a couple of us.." A few of those directly connected with the tragedy or members of their families committed suicide: "post-traumatic stress". No man is an island, they say..

            The pro-gun regulation movement in Québec was mobilized (or born?) in those days and years following the massacre. Some of the survivors, their families and the families of the victims started a popular movement which led to the Canadian Firearms Registry  of 1993 under the Federal Liberal government of Jean Chrétien. The original cost of the registry was set to be a modest $2 million. But implementation costs inexplicably ballooned to a (possible) $2 billion: a mind-shattering 1,000 fold cost overrun! (Does this make the Guiness Book of Records? It should.) 

             This was also the time of the downfall of the Chrétien government, plagued by corruption scandals, broken promises such as failure to live up to the Kyoto Accord on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, budgetary muckups in military spending resulting from the government's attempts to pander to neoconservative pennypinching ideology and severe (and probably unpopular) cuts to the armed forces.

           The successive revelations of cost overrun and redtape, combined with rise of the New Right, eventually spelled the death of Registry. I believe it served as a convenient scapegoat around which to mobilize the forces of the resurgent Right. Harper and his crowd never tired of attacking the Registry for both good reason (overruns, redtape, missed deadlines, incompetence..) and bad ones (inconvenience for traditional - rural - gunowners or the idea that "urban criminals don't register their weapons"). It is interesting to note that police departments were among the biggest defenders of the Registry, claiming that it was a valuable tool in assessing the danger of a potentially violent confrontation: domestic violence with or without seizure of hostages, arrest of a citizen on their property..

            The Chrétien government are the real villains of the piece. They have, in effect, dishonored the memory of the slain through their incompetent destruction of a piece of potentially valuable legislation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/polytechnique-massacre-lives-forever-changed 

The final chapter:  "On October 25, 2011, the government introduced Bill C-19, legislation to scrap the Canadian Firearms Registry. The bill would repeal the requirement to register non-restricted firearms (long-guns) and mandate the destruction of all records pertaining to the registration of long-guns currently contained in the Canadian Firearms Registry and under the control of the chief firearms officers.The bill passed second reading in the House of Commons (156 to 123). On February 15, 2012, Bill C-19 was passed in the House of Commons (159 to 130) with support from the Conservatives and two NDP MPs. On April 4, 2012, Bill C-19 passed third reading in the Senate by a vote of 50-27 and received royal assent from the Governor General on April 5. The Province of Québec protested, appealing to the Supreme Court to save that portion of the database relating to the Province. "On March 27, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the destruction of long-gun registry records was within the constitutional power of Parliament to make criminal law, denying the Quebec government's legal challenge and allowing for those records to be destroyed." (Wikipedia) 

            Thus the Registry became history, in the grave 18 years after its passage (or 22 years if you consider the Province of Québec where it continued to be used by police until the court ordered the destruction of the database for Québec in 2015).

              Québec is debating whether to invest in its own, provincial, Gun Resgistry.

             But what does this pathetic "debate" over gun control say about our society? That our political parties are vacuous? (And if they are, why?) That they have no real positions on anything of importance and so are forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator (division, scapegoating, spreading fear and hate)?

When will the madness stop?

http://www.ecologicalhope.org/featured/the-ecology-of-the-mass-shooting-of-children-reflections-on-sandy-hook/#comments

               Please read the comments. They, too, are very insightful, lucid, sane..

Steven Harper - Québec separatists' best friend??

         bumptious: crudely or loudly assertive; pushy

         The idea might seem a bit bizarre but there is an argument that Harper's populist tub-thumping style may end up driving Québec into the hands of the seperatists, reviving what many consider a "dead issue"..

  

          Quebecers, on the whole, see themselves as (squishy soft) "social democrats" on many issues such as abortion, gun regulation, social programs, crime and punishment of adolescents.. Many of us find the recent destruction of the long gun registry repellent and offensive: the gun registry was, after all, created by the activism of Quebecers after the Montréal Polytechnique massacre of 14 female students by a misogynist gunman, 6 december, 1989. The fact that Harper, in good populist funk, went so far as to take part in a celebration - !sic! - of the long gun registry destruction really did not sit well with many Quebecers: it's hard not to feel it as salt deliberately rubbed in an open wound..

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/15/long-gun-registry-abolished/

            Populist, redneck, neocon triumphalism - or just bumptious naïveté?

            Justin Trudeau, son of former PM Pierre Trudeau and himself Federal Liberal MP, recently shocked Canadians in a French language CBC interview. Trudeau said he was saddened by the right wing direction Canada was taking under the Harper government. He went so far as to say that if things continued this way he might consider the separatist option: this from a son of  arch-federalist Pierre Trudeau! (Obviously, this has separatists chuckling under their breath; I've heard them on the radio..) In the French language clip below the juicy part begins at 13 minutes.

http://www.radio-canada.ca/audio-video/pop.shtml#urlMedia=http://www.radio-canada.ca/Medianet/2012/CBF/DessinemoiUnDimanche201202120805_1.asx
 

              Quebecers are feeling increasingly under-represented, misunderstood and unheeded. The longterm effects of Harper's populist bumptiousness are hard to predict but separatist leader (Parti Québécois) Pauline Marois seems ready to make hay while the sun shines..

http://communiques.gouv.qc.ca/gouvqc/communiques/GPQF/Fevrier2012/17/c5352.html?slang=en

               In her open letter Madame Marois addresses what many Quebecers feel most offensive in the Harper government's handling of the deregistration process (aside from that damned celebratory cocktail party), the mean-spirited refusal of the Feds to turn over to Québec the portion of the long gun registry applying to citizens of the Province (my translation):

"We have proposed, with the Provincial government, the creation of a Québécois gun registry. To avoid prohibitive expenditures, the elected members of the Assemblée nationale have unanimously requested that Ottawa preserve the registry data relating to the Province of Québec. Unfortunately, your government has announced its intention to destroy these data. The people of Québec have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create these files which are indespensible to the creation of a Québécois gun registry. Transferring these files to Québec will cost your government nothing. All that we are asking your government is the freedom for Québec to act in its own interests.."

                 Indeed! But Mr Harper seems far more occupied with short term political gain but populist tub thumping and bumptiousness may be this country's undoing. 

                 Watch out Mr. Harper, what goes round, comes round..

Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind / Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête

           

Smoke Screens

        Mr. Harper is at it again: making cheap appeals to his populist base (one wonders if this is a conscious strategy on the part of him and his handlers or an simply unconscious political reflex). Be that as it may..

        Here's how it works. You appeal to your base: their vote has to be assured. Québec, on the other hand has probably been written off as a lost cause by the Harper team (more on this a bit later..)  Seeing the rightward shift in political and social attitudes taking place in Western societies, Harper and co. seem to be betting that mean-spirited, hairy chested populist demagogy will probably pick up more votes from the soft Right  than will be lost on the Left. And they are probably right..

        In the present context, Harper's most recent appeal to the populist base lies in his fufilling his electoral promise to eliminate the long gun registry - ONE promise he manages to keep at least!  His recent gaining of a parliamentary majority assures passage of the bill..

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/end-of-long-gun-registry-seen-as-victory-in-war-on-big-government/article2213761/

         Planified coup or savy political instinct, this vindictive move strikes deep into a core of resentment burning in the heart of the Canadian electorate. Lest we be accused of "Left wing bias", it is instructive to recall that the gun registry program, instituted by a Liberal government in the wake of the Montréal Polytechnique Massacre (6 Dec, 1989), soon degenerated into an obscene boondoggle, racking up unprecedented cost overruns during its implementation. To rub salt in the wounds of the taxpayer, no heads ever rolled over the cost overruns but the voters - and especially conservative, gun-owning rural voters - remembered. They remembered..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

           Here is an example of the masterful manipulation of the rural / small town / suburban voter's smoldering resentment at being ripped off and imposed on by "big city crooked politicians". Note, especially, the tone of righteous indignation (justified) and deep sense of victimization (a perennial theme of populist militants): "These are good salt-of-the-earth people".

“They’re upstanding citizens who work hard. They take their kids and grandkids out hunting and shooting and those kids, by the way, probably aren’t involved in gangs in the streets,” she said.
“These are good salt-of-the-earth people and for so long they have had really nobody in government who has been able to make any changes on their behalf. So it really was very gratifying to know how thankful they were and how much it meant to them to have someone who was going to be promoting good policy, policy that was fair and wasn’t targeting them.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/killing-gun-registry-a-victory-for-salt-of-the-earth-people-tory-mp-says/article2212609/

                
                The depth of the anger and the sense of betrayal of the conservative, grassroots voter is probably reflected in the meanspirited, pyrrhic vindictiveness of the proposed legislation: Harper wants not merely to suspend the long gun registry but intends to destroy the data bases..

                As seems so often the case these past few decades, conservatives (especially neos) and reactionaries have reaped the fruits of years of liberal (small "l" liberal here) corruption and incompetence. Truth be known, neither the Right nor the Left in modern Western societies has much of a clue what to do next. All parties are in bed with the plutocrats who rule the world. Before the unfolding economic, ecological and climatological meltdown of our planet and its life support systems, they can offer nothing but platitudes ("economic growth", "fighting for democracy"), symbolic gestures ("Millennium Goals" of the United Nations), improvisation and - at the limit - the outright delusions of Magical Thinking:

“God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.”

http://minnesotaindependent.com/77707/gops-beard-wants-more-coal-plants-because-god-will-fix-global-warming



               What the heck is he talking about: what does "dynamically stable" actually mean in the present context?? Can anyone tell me..

                 Since neither Left nor Right has a clue how to get us out of the quagmire (since both are products of the system that created the quagmire), they both lack any coherent Strategy ("game plan"). But the forces of reaction have one huge, short term advantage: Tactics. The Right knows no better than the Left what to do next but they are past masters of the fine art of public opinion manipulation. Lefties are - to strike a caricature - college profs and garrett intellectuals from the Arts and Humanities. They are not the real shakers and movers of modernity. They do not possess the tools, intellectual or otherwise, to effectively jerk the strings of the increasingly frightened and disoriented "masses". The real shakers and movers - the technicians, engineers, programmers, business types, PR men, admen, bureaucrats and technocrats - are basically, by blood and breeding, men of the Right. They understand the tools of mass manipulation: they invented them in the first place!

                 Thus, while Rome burns, our elites fiddle. The public's attention is deftly turned aside from the real problems our world faces: overpopulation, resource depletion, Peak Oil, the need to develop renewable energy sources and to learn to do things more efficiently, to learn to live with less in dignity and in justice.. Thus these pressing real, high priority, problems are never addressed. Instead, just as the Roman mob was given bread and circuses to entertain them, we too are given gory spectacles and entertainment. We are enroled in pseudo-crusades, so that we don't have the time or the courage to pose the really important questions. Instead we fight the terrors of abortion, family planning, gay marriage, the "liberal media bias", creeping secularism, humanism and socialism. Reality check: defeating family planning and abortion in Africa will likely lead to more deaths from malnutrition and the attendant political instability and warfare. We are provided abundant scapegoats to hate - liberals, "socialists", "secular humanists", "baby killers", "Islamofascists", "green nazis".. - all of course to divert our attention from the real issues and who really benefits from maintaining society on its suicidal course.

                  To return to the Canadian situation in conclusion, Harper's team have probably decided that Québec is a lost cause. The gun registry, let's not forget, was born in the aftermath of the infamous Dec 6, 1989, Montéal Polytechnique massacre of women students by a misogynist gunman who then took his own life. Québec will not therefore take the elimination of the long gun registry lightly. Above all, the province wants the info in the data bases referring to guns registered in Québec in order to create its own provincial registry. Harper's move to destroy the data bases may pander to the smoldering anger of his core constituents but can only outrage Québécois voters. Harper's legislation threatens to reopen old mutual incomprehensions between Québec and the rest of the country in order to obtain short term political gain. In the long run it may be the country as a whole that will have to pay the price of his political myopia.