Pissing Match, with Bullets

image from bookwormroom.com

Our problem with gun violence is that the people who defend unfettered access to, and carrying around, guns in this country, across the spectrum of society, far too often seem to believe that it is acceptable, EVEN DESIRABLE, to shoot people who, in their minds, scare them in some way or otherwise don't adequately conform to how they think someone else should behave.

Far too RARELY are these shootings genuinely and unavoidably life threatening when the escalation to lethal force occurs. The very essence of the problem, however much some of the gun huggers deny it, is the desire to escalate violence and force because they WANT TO DO SO, their very identity, including sometimes their gender identity as masculine, manly men, depends on it.

Just having a gun with you, on you, or in your hands, messes with your perception and increases your paranoia and sense of threats, which in turn fuels the escalation, in addition to the other factors fueling escalation - like conservative authoritarianism.

From a 2012 Notre Dame University study, via ZDNet, demonstrating that having or holding a gun makes you see bad things that aren't there:

Study: Carrying a gun can make you more paranoid
...the researchers subjected volunteers to a series of five experiments in which they were shown multiple images of people on a computer screen and determined whether the person was holding a gun or a neutral object such as a soda can or cell phone. Subjects did this while holding either a toy gun or a neutral object such as a foam ball.

The researchers varied the situation in each experiment — such as having the people in the images sometimes wear ski masks, changing the race of the person in the image or changing the reaction subjects were to have when they judged the person in the image to hold a gun. Regardless of the situation, the study showed that responding with a gun created a bias in which observers reported a gun being present more often than they did responding with a ball. Thus, by virtue of affording the subject the opportunity to use a gun, he or she was more likely to classify objects in a scene as a gun and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior, such as raising a firearm to shoot.

The researchers showed that the ability to act is a key factor in the effects by showing that while simply letting observers see a nearby gun didn't influence their behavior, holding and using the gun did.

The science tells us that those who carry guns around, legally or otherwise, get into more conflicts and confrontations. From the most recent study on gun ownership and aggression by Jeffery Swanson by way of the Huff Po:

Study: People Who Own a Lot of Guns Are More Likely to Get in Fights, Carry Guns Outside the Home
The new study compares rates of impulsive, angry behavior with access to guns. Swanson and his research colleagues asked 5,653 respondents to answer questions about their own behavior, and also asked these same research subjects if they owned and/or carried guns. The subjects lived in cities, suburbs and rural areas throughout the United States, and roughly one-third stated that they owned or had access to firearms, which seems to be what we consider the national firearm ownership rate to be today.

Every respondent was asked whether they had tantrums or angry outbursts; broke something in anger; lost their temper and got involved in physical fights. These are classic indicators of impulsive, angry behavior, with the tantrums/outbursts being the least serious, the fights being the most serious and the breaking of some object in between. Both the owners and non-owners of guns reported engaging in all three types of behaviors, with tantrums being three times as common as physical fights for both groups, and the percentage of gun owners and non-gun owners engaging in any of the three anger indicators being about the same.

What struck me as I read the survey results was that overall, there was not a great difference between gun owners and non-gun owners regarding to what degree they admitted engaging in any form of impulsive, angry behavior. Where the difference was clearly pronounced was among the 5 percent (roughly 290 people out of 5,600) who admitted to owning 11 guns or more, which was the only gun-owning group whose penchant for getting into fights was significantly higher than people who owned no guns at all. For that matter the percentage of the 11+ gun-owning group to get into physical altercations was substantially higher than gun folks who owned fewer guns.

Where the number of guns owned by individuals seemed to be a real risk issue can be found in the correlation between number of guns owned, engaging in any of the three anger indicators and carrying a gun outside the home. The good news in this survey was that less than 5 percent of the respondents reported that they walked around with a gun. The not-so-good news is that folks who owned six or more guns and carried a concealed weapon reported that they engaged in at least one of the three impulsive behaviors four times more frequently than persons who owned five or fewer guns.
This is the first study I have seen that finds a correlation between numbers of guns owned and a propensity to carry one of them around. As such, it undercuts the usual pro-CCW argument that people carry guns to defend themselves against crime. ...

Here's another observation: aggressive, combative, ANGRY PEOPLE, WITHOUT GUNS, DID NOT SHOOT, or THREATEN TO SHOOT OTHER PEOPLE, whatever else they did.

We have a failed gun culture, fueled in large part by right wing glorification of vigilantism, glorifying people taking the law into their own hands rather than leaving law conflicts and disputes to the courts and law enforcement. Criminal activity emulates and mirrors that thinking and authoritarian social structure of coercion and conformity.

We saw that failure of gun culture in action this past week, in the shooting in a Lafayette, Louisiana theater and in a case of Florida road rage that escalated and ended in an unarmed man being shot in the back three times, in front of his wife, child and grandchild, and then held them hostage at gun point. The shooter was the kind of gun owner the NRA and other pro-gun groups tell us is safe and law abiding; he had a concealed carry permit. This was emphatically an avoidable shooting;the shooter could have turned the conflict over to law enforcement. The shooter instead drove PAST a police station, and like George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin, ignored the directives of the 911 operator about engaging in further escalation of the conflict.


In the same week as the mass shooting in Louisiana, there were five other mass killings that did not receive extensive media coverage. Only one of them involved stabbings; the others were all shootings.

Individually or as a group, the right embraces as a part of their ideology taking the law into their own hands, as noted in this article from the Examiner looks at this as not only a modern phenomenon, but as an historic one to present:

Armed and dangerous: Right wing vigilantism in American history
...Contrary to the popular phrase, an armed society is not always a polite society. American history is full of examples of the perils of allowing armed citizens to take the law into their own hands. Vigilantism has an ugly history in this country. The fact that the loudest advocates today for arming the populace come from those on the political far right, should give us pause for concern. The tradition of vigilantism in this nation is a history of upholding xenophobia, racism and white privilege by lethal force. From lynch mobs to riots to extrajudicial executions, that history undermines the logic for unqualified support for the second amendment.

It extends not only to matters of personal conflict, but to issues of imaginary personal honor and insult, and to political disagreements. An example of the latter would be the numerous failed revolutions of right wing crazies that believe they are going to rise up and overthrow the government for imaginary wrongs, particularly the lunatic militia movements. When they are angry, the gun nuts, the right wingers, want to empower themselves with lethal force when they are unable to get their way through persuasion.

This right to coerce and compel anyone who violates a right wing norm is a core facet or characteristic of Right Wing Authoritarianism.

Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms, and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who don't adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favor of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it.

One of the components of Right Wing Authoritarianism is aggression:
Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.

Combine that with poor cognitive abilities associated with RWA, and you have a recipe for disaster when you arm them with lethal force:

According to research by Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning. Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking. They are also more likely to uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs, and they are less likely to acknowledge their own limitations

Sadly, too often the gun huggers embrace vigilantism over the authority of law enforcement. We see that thinking expressed by the Louisiana movie theater shooter, who targeted liberals, mostly women, watching the Amy Schumer movie. We saw it in January of 2014, with the fatal shooting of a man by a retired police captain, for texting briefly to his young daughter during the previews of a movie theater in Florida. The victim of the shooting didn't do what the gun carrier wanted him to do as quickly as he wanted him to do it. We see it in the recent road rage shooting in Florida, where a concealed carry permit holder shot an unarmed man in the back as he was trying to leave, and threatened three other people. We see it in the higher rates of gun violence in states with more guns and with more lax gun control. Gun violence is endemic to gun possession without sufficient regulation and restriction.

Time to end our gun culture, before it puts an end to any more innocent or mostly innocent people. Our gun culture is an epic failure, a destructive and dangerous social force, that looms large -- as large as the GOP elephant in the room. Time for the guns AND the GOP which enables and facilitates the gun violence as part of their political exploitation of the worst elements on the right, to GO.