Camestros Felapton
Two Time Hugo Award Finalist
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I’ve covered four chapters and a foreword of Larry Correia’s In Defense of the Second Amendment and there are three chapters and a conclusion to go. There is a genuine danger of writing more words about the book than there are actually in the book. I’m already set to have more parts to this series of posts than there are chapters in the book.
I want to look at one of the broad themes that have come up in Correia’s book. I began to zero in on it in the previous post where he made this strange remark.
“Ironically, the Venn diagram of people who love the idea of red flag laws and people who protested the Breonna Taylor shooting that happened during a police raid pretty much make a circle.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 73). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Before I continue, I’d like to clarify something so that what I’m saying is not misrepresented. I do not believe that Larry Correia is racist in the sense that Larry Correia and many conservative Americans would use the word “racist”. That is, I don’t believe he has specific overt and conscious dislike of various ethnics groups or would consciously treat an individual he met negatively because that individual was a specific ethnicity, skin colour or nationality. People more broadly use the term racism to include other things such as unconscious biases , unexamined stereotypes, systemic biases in organisations, laws and social circumstances. That sense of the term “racism” is much broader and is consistent with the idea that somebody can be racist and not know it and indeed be racist whilst actively opposed to racism.
In the previous post I pointed to the way gun rights arguments have been curated so that they increasingly align with conservative law and order values. This alignment subverts the possibility of the kind bipartisan political consensus on gun control that has occurred in other English speaking countries where conservative law & order values have found common ground with left/liberal public safety values. This has led to the strange circumstance where the UK represents the most draconian levels of gun control and the US represents the most permissive. The two countries differ on other topics obviously (public healthcare being another one) but the disparity on guns is particularly notable given the common cultural, linguistic and legal histories.
Correia’s book has no specific chapter on race and no in-depth discussion about Black Lives Matter. There is also no specific chapter on the use of guns as a form of defence against the government nor a detailed discussion of the idea that this is a key purpose of the second amendment. There is a subsection in Chapter 5 that addresses the idea that “The Idea of the Second Amendment Being Used to Stand against a Tyrannical Government Is Obsolete, Because Our Federal Government Is Too Overwhelmingly Powerful for Its Citizens to Resist.” It is a bit of a mixed bag though and dances around the underlying political and ethical question of under what circumstance armed resistance against a government (and agents of the government) is permissible.
Some gun rights advocates on the right are more overtly negative about the police than Larry Correia. However, Correia’s position is best understood in terms of this alignment between gun rights and conservative law and order values. In the subsection I mentioned above there is an interesting quote from Correia. I’m removing it from the broader context because I’ll get to his boogaloo reasoning in a future essay. I’m bringing it up here because I want to piece somethings together.
“Having worked with a lot of police departments, guess what? The officers who actually know how to shoot? The ones who run the training programs? Usually they’re my people too. The gun nuts gravitate toward that position because (a) more taxpayer-funded ammo and (b) they actually care about the subject, so they learn on their own and then try to pass those skills on to their coworkers to better keep them alive.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 112). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
In context, Correia is making this point to illustrate how difficult gun confiscation would be and how US society might split in a civil war. However, it also helps illustrate who Correia sees as “my people”. Earlier, in the same chapter, he makes a similar point about members of the military and the police.
“Above I mentioned a Venn diagram of obstinate gun owners and the military, but you can change that to cops and it’s going to be pretty similar. Those groups overlap a lot, and, depending on the particular department or unit, the Venn diagrams look like stacks of pancakes.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 111). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
And to be utterly fair, when it comes to race, there are points where Correia uses the “my people” phrasing also.
“These racial comparison memes exist because of projection. The anti-gun zealots are terrified of the idea of minority groups being armed because of their own innate racism (just like the entire history of gun control), so of course they assume their opponents are the same way. But more importantly, the reason the vultures get so upset is that once people have chosen to arm themselves, they are less likely to vote for politicians who are going to disarm them. Meanwhile my people are downright gleeful. Welcome to the fight, newbs.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 181). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
After all, there’s no racial component in the gun rights Correia is advocating for. He wants guns to be legal and common. After all, the fewer laws restricting gun ownership there are, the fewer ways there are of those laws having either intentional or unintentional biases based on race. Further, as Correia is pointing out, many of America’s past gun control laws have had expressly racist elements to them.
Correia can also point to sections of his book where he is critical of police. True those sections are primarily about circumstances when the police were slow or ineffective but in Chapter 7 he acknowledges (sort of) police violence.
“Terrible reporting aside, you may believe that grand juries are too soft on police involved shootings. That may be a valid argument. You may believe that prosecutors are too lenient on police officers because they both work for the government and there is an existing relationship between the prosecutors and the police. That may be a valid argument. Burning down Walgreens isn’t the answer. There are stupid cops, and there are cops who make mistakes. As representatives of an extremely powerful state, they should be held to a higher standard. Just because people work for the government doesn’t make them infallible, and if they screw up and kill somebody for a stupid reason, they should be punished.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (pp. 175-176). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Well sure, burning down a shop SHOULDN’T be an answer in a stable society or in a just society. However, as we discussed in the last post about the murder of Breonna Taylor, it is extraordinarily difficult without intense public pressure to get US police officers punished. Worse, Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker who fired his gun in self-defence at a group of intruders (actually cops) was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor ).
As very recent events have shown, there’s more to this than just guns but guns and law enforcement are part of the picture.
I’m intentionally moving back and forth through the book because there are multiple pieces scattered throughout it. I’m circling back now to something I skipped over.
In 2016, Philando Castile was driving his girlfriend and her four-year-old child when he was pulled over by a police officer and questioned. Castille, for his own safety, let the officer know that he had a gun in the car. The police officer shot at Castille seven times at close range. Video of the immediate aftermath of the killing was streamed on Facebook by his distraught girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, people were shocked by the apparent murder of an innocent man.
“In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Reynolds posted a live stream video on Facebook from her and Castile’s car. The incident quickly gained international interest.[8][9] Local and national protests formed, and five months after the incident, Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm.[10] After five days of deliberation, he was acquitted of all charges in a jury trial on June 16, 2017.[11][12] After the verdict, Yanez was immediately fired by the City of Saint Anthony.[13] Wrongful death lawsuits against the City brought by Reynolds and Castile’s family were settled for a total of $3.8 million.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
Without the video and the subsequent protests, it is unlikely that the officer would not have been even charged.
The question then, in what meaningful, practical sense did Philando Castile have a legally protected right to bear arms or a legally protected right to self defence? If you can be legally shot dead by an agent of the state for stating that you have a gun, then practically you do not have a right that is supported by the law regardless of whether you have a “right” in a more abstract sense.
To be fair to many gun owners, many did express concern about the killing but notably the NRA was almost silent on the issue.
“We don’t want the NRA to be just for old white guys,” a member of the gun group wrote this week on Hot Air — one of several right-leaning outlets upset with the organization’s failure to speak out on Castile. “It needs to represent everyone who supports and defends the Second Amendment and stays on the right side of the law.” The Washington Post couldn’t find any statement from the NRA about the verdict or video in Castile’s case, and the organization has not responded to requests for comment since Sunday.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20210210085436/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/06/18/some-gun-owners-are-disturbed-by-the-philando-castile-verdict-the-nra-is-silent/
In so far as the police were held accountable for the killing, it was not due to the activity of gun rights activists but rather protestors and the growing movement that became known as Black Lives Matter.
Racism is obviously part of the reason behind the NRA’s silence, probably in both senses of the word. However, a more direct reason (also grounded in racism) was the alignment I have already discussed between gun rights and conservative law and order values. In particular, guns rights activists are unwilling to demonise local and state law enforcement and when they do (as we can see in Larry Correia’s book) it is for being cowardly and unwilling to shoot people.
Notably, the BATFE and to a lesser extent the FBI will get demonised and in particular, specific cases of law enforcement violence (the Waco Siege, Ruby Ridge and most recently the death of Ashli Babbit in the Capitol on January 6th 2021) are seen as important examples of the danger of the state to gun owners and conservatives in a way that Philando Castile is not seen.
Correia dances around Black Lives Matter because he sees it as a left-coded political issue. Back in 2020 on his blog he reacted to the multiple protests in US cities as follows:
“A friend of mine posted about seeing this: “Where are all you gun owners now that the federal government and police are attacking citizens in the streets?? Now that the National Guard is out oppressing citizens? I thought this was the moment you’re waiting for? So why aren’t you out there fighting them with your guns? You’re nothing but a bunch of fucking cowards!” My response was the GIF of Nelson Muntz going HA HA.”
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/06/04/where-are-all-you-gun-owners-now/
Of course, the actual point people were making was not a request for Correia’s “people” to turn up with their guns but to point out that supposed prophylactic effect of widespread gun ownership against government tyrrany was non-existent.
In Chapter 5, Correia touches on Black Lives Matter again with an attack on protests and dig at grifting:
“Why was there such an astoundingly massive increase in homicides in 2020? What current events could have possibly influenced that number? This was the year of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, and people chanting “All Cops Are Bastards,” while cities let hoodlums start up their own “autonomous zones.” Big city DAs decided to quit sending violent criminals to jail. Grifters changed Black Lives Matter to Buy Large Mansions, and the very people they were supposedly helping had their neighborhoods engulfed in violence and chaos for it. It’s almost like letting criminals do whatever they want, unimpeded by the law, Mad Max–dystopia-style has negative consequences or something.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (pp. 78-79). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The corruption and excessive spending in the NRA don’t get a mention though.
But there’s a much earlier connection that I want to look at in Chapter 1.
“There have been mass killings attempted by BLM supporters and Bernie Bros, yet when I mention those cases to the zealots who act like this “epidemic of violence” has a single source, I’m met with clueless stares because they haven’t heard of those. In 2016 in Dallas, a psycho gunned down five cops and then got taken out by a bomb robot2—that’s the kind of lurid sensationalism our sleazy media love. Yet that case got memory holed because the identity and politics of the killer weren’t convenient for the narrative at the time.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 4). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The “Bernie Bros” example was the shooting of Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (injured but not killed). I don’t know in what sense that has been “memory holed” but then I read rightwingers online all the time and in conservative spaces, you’d think it was the only shooting that has happened in recent years.
The second example of the BLM supporter is more relevant. Again, I don’t know in what sense this story has been “memory holed”. I live a long way away from the US and I’m well aware of it but maybe the people Larry Correia argues with are more forgetful. I’ll quote Wikipedia to get you up to speed in case you are suffering the specific amnesia Correia is concerned about.
“On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed a group of police officers in Dallas, Texas, shooting and killing five officers, and injuring nine others. Two civilians were also wounded. Johnson was an Army Reserve Afghan War veteran and was angry over police shootings of black men. The shooting happened at the end of a protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, which had occurred in the preceding days.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers
Like all the other mass shootings I’ve had to dicsuss, it is a shocking and disturbing incident. It raises many questions but noticeably Correia doesn’t engage with any of them even though the case itself (a veteran uses a gun to kill agents of the government in revenge for killings by other agents of the government) is one that appears extremely pertinent to Correia’s later discussion of gun owners retaliating against the use of force.
Compare and contrast:
“The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was with five special forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other. And gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (pp. 110-111). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Compared with other developed countries, police in the US are particularly murderous. In 2019, police in the US killed over a thousand people. As a rate per 10 million people that comes to 33.5. So not a leading cause of death overall and spread over a huge population. The rate for Canada? 9.8 (2017). Police in the US kill citizens at rate over three times greater than their colleagues to the North. Australia? The rate is 8.5 (2017-18), way to high but a fraction of the US. In the UK with the strictest gun control and with police officers usually NOT carrying guns? The rate is 0.5 (2019) – a rate that represents three deaths.
It’s almost like gun control, even gun control that leaves police officers armed protects citizens from being killed by the government! Maybe that’s an inference to far but let us look at it the other way around. Is US gun ownership protecting people from being killed by the government (state or federal)? No. Unambigously no. Further, the burden of those deaths has a notable racial element to it.
Gun control laws in the USA genuinely do have a racist history. They really have been used to attempt to ensure that Black Americans do not have guns and that white Americans (particularly property-owning white American men) do have guns. That history has played out in that way up to the last quarter of the Twentieth Century. With the success of the Civil Rights movement, overtly discriminatory policies became less politically, socially and legally acceptable. Notably, in parallel with these social changes, we see the rise of an expressly ideologically conservative gun rights movement focused on the principle of individual gun rights as means of self-defence of the home.
The racially discrimination simply gets pulled into the arbitary application of self-defence. For Black Americans “self-defence” and gun rights in general are no protection against arbitary police violence. Where, gun rights activist speculate about future scenarios of government oppression, many other Americans are directly experiencing state violence. For them gun rights, gun ownership and second amendment provide no protection either via legal means or extra-legal means.
Nor is this just a racial disparity. US-style self-defence laws such as “stand your ground” laws provide little legal protection for women.
““(The Legislature’s) intent … was to provide law-abiding citizens greater protections from external threats in the form of intruders and attackers,” prosecutor Culver Kidd told the Post and Courier. “We believe that applying the statute so that its reach into our homes and personal relationships is inconsistent with (its) wording and intent.”
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/south-carolina-prosecutors-say-stand-your-ground-doesnt-apply-to-victims-of-domestic-violence-151d5532f75c/
Meanwhile, those same laws appear to have a connection with increased levels of homicide.
“In this cohort study assessing 41 US states, SYG laws were associated with an 8% to 11% national increase in monthly rates of homicide and firearm homicide. State-level increases in homicide and firearm homicide rates reached 10% or higher for many Southern states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana.”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789154
Pro-gun policies fail if we see widescale gun ownership as a means of securing the rights and physical safety of citizens in general. However, if we look at them as securing the power and legal impunnity of the police and a community of primarily white property owning men then it is notable how well they do indeed work. In fact they work in much the same way as many historical US gun control measures where intended to work. The legal strategy has changed rather than the policy objective.
Next time: Chapter 5 or at least part of it and some crimes against statistics.
To his credit, Larry Correia has so far focused his book In Defense of the Second Amendment on arguments in favour of gun ownership. To his debit, these haven’t been very good arguments. Chapter Four: The Usual Somethings looks at common proposals made for gun control in the USA.
“In an ideal world, gun rights would be a bipartisan issue, as everybody has the right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves, regardless of wealth, race, sex, religion, or social standing. However, that’s not how things are currently in our system, with one of our major parties being absolutely in love with gun control, while the other ranges from decent to awful in its defense of the Second Amendment depending on what day of the week it is.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 43). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Interestingly, gun control in the UK and Australia largely was bipartisan. The major gun control reforms that really ticked off the US gun lobby in the 1990s were first enacted by Prime Ministers from the respective major right-wing parties of both countries (John Major of the Conservative Party in the UK and John Howard of the confusingly named Liberal Party in Australia). This only seems weird because of the strange lens of US politics. Conservative politicians enacting tough laws on the basis of a fear of a breakdown in public order is neither new nor unusual and America’s GOP is no exception.
True, in both the UK and Australia, opposition to gun control came from a section of the right. In Australia, we have these days the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, a fringe right-wing party which came into being as a reaction to tougher gun laws. The different party political dynamic in the UK and Australia on the issue of guns is partly due to the relative influence of gun owners on political parties on the right.
When gun control is seen mainly as an issue of law and order, conservative parties will lean towards it creating the conditions for bipartisan agreement with centre-left parties who see gun control as an issue of public safety and harm reduction. Some of the weirder aspects of gun rights rhetoric become clearer when it is understood as primarily aimed at disrupting this kind of potential bipartisan consensus. There is rhetoric on individual liberty and of course the second amendment but as we have seen in Correia’s book, even one with the second amenment in the title has very little to say on that specific topic. Instead, gun rights arguments tend towards a very familiar set of tropes about government regulation, the free market and the danger of unintended consequence. These tropes are familiar becuase they inhabit a common ecosystem of FUD with corporate arguments against the regulation of smoking and against environmental legislation.
At times, Larry Correia’s book claims that it is also intended to help persuade people on the fence about the issue. Perhaps that is true, assuming that there are conservative Americans still sympathetic to gun control. It really is not about finding some kind of bipartisan consensus. The emphasis is on sustaining in-group cohesion on the topic of gun rights — hence the mockery, the characterisation of the gun control debate as an attack on Republicans, MAGA and white men.
Left, liberal and conservative conceptions of freedom and the protection of such freedoms from the government are not the same but rather like the concepts of “law and order” versus “public safety”, they can be the basis of bipartisan political consensus. A case for gun ownership from a left conception of freedom is, of course, possible. For example, journalist and podcaster Robert Evans makes an interesting case for it in the context of gun violence in the US in this essay:
“Neither of these stories represent ideal social interactions. I do not believe, as some libertarians insist, that an armed society is a polite one. Any person with basic observational skills will tell you that the presence of weapons often increases the odds that those weapons will be used. But I also don’t consider my actions in California, or my friend the security guard’s actions, to have been irrational. We were in places where the law didn’t reach, and we took the actions that seemed most likely to improve our security.”
https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/outside-the-law
As with public safety versus law and order, the details of the arguments can be very similar. I can frame one key idea as common to both:
A common claim: We need guns and experience with guns because agents of the government and their political allies are going to come and kill us.
It’s the same! Except, of course, it isn’t because “we/us”, “agents of the government” and “political allies” have utterly different implications. Similarly, the evidence behind this claim is very different. Put another way, Larry Correia is not particularly worried that regular police officers are going to shoot at him (indeed, he’s largely pro-police with some caveats) but he is less sanguine about whether the BATFE might.
I’m digressing, but later I’m going to be saying Larry Correia mght be correct about something :).
My more direct point is that Correia’s focus so far on stopping crime and an almost civic duty to carry a gun wanders into the absurd but it serves to join the individual liberty values of the right with the law and order values of the right. In this light, his derisive comments about “vultures” become clearer. After all, Republicans fly off the handle to enact draconian measures that impact individual liberty in the wake of a media-hyped moral panic on a regular basis once we move away from guns. Asserting the need to respond quickly with gunfire to perceived threats as an essential part of maintaining law and order is framed by Correia in terms of the armed citizen but it is also a message, indeed an ideology, for law enforcement.
The approach of disrupting potential centrist consensus on gun control by pressuring right and centre-right law makers has been very succesful. The consequence is US gun laws and proposed measures exist in a strange place. Each one can be seen as an attempt to find an exception or grant a concession that will allow some degree of bipartisan consensus. Inevitably, this means many proposals will be actually inefective…at which point gun rights activists can reasonably point to the proposal as unlikely to achieve anything.
Correia has a laundry list of measures proposed in the wake of horrific gun massacres. Each one is dismissed in various ways.
And so on. The proposal either is claimed to be ineffective or is ignorant about gun or interferes with self-defence in some way. He’s not even wrong on some specifics. Rifles are probably less of an issue when it comes to US gun deaths but that’s because HANDGUNS are more of an issue. However, handguns are less of an issue when it comes to mass shootings and so on. Dance around the context and we get a dance of kettle logic where assault weapon bans are supposedly ignorant about guns and easily legal circumvented and the wrong weapon to target and depriving people of a weapon that’s good at killing people all at the same time.
The slippery slope is a well known fallacy but not all slippery slopes are fallacious and here I must concede another point to Correia. Gun rights activists have a reason to believe that any gun control is a slippery slope to more gun control. The evidence suggest that the underlying issue is widespread gun availability. If governments enact some minor gun control it may have a positive net effect but shocking incidents will still occur, perhaps less often. Yet infrequent mass killings don’t become less shocking because they are less common. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Further, gun control measures are easier to enact in socities where there are fewer gun owners. The stricter gun laws enacted in the UK in the 1990’s had little impact on most people because the UK already had low gun availability. Hence, for the gun lobby any and all gun control measures even ones that they claim will make no difference, must be opposed.
I want to turn to an issue which ties a lot of varied themes I’ve raised in this issue: so-called “red flag laws” or Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPO) and other names.
“This is also one of the Do-Somethings that enjoys bipartisan support, as we’ve seen recently with fourteen Republican senators agreeing with all the Democrats to pass a bill that would fund red flag laws in all fifty states. The details of how this is all supposed to work are going to vary from state to state. Currently nineteen states and the District of Columbia have ERPOs, with most of those being put into place over the last few years, but that number will certainly rise dramatically after the passage of this latest bill.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 72). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Red flag laws have gained a degree of bipartisan support exactly because they lean into the law & order ideology of the right. It is also an attempt to try and draw a weird, squiggly boundary between notionally “safe” private gun owners and “unsafe” private gun owners. Correia’s objection is that such laws are open to abuse and I can see his point, after all, if a person is otherwise legally allowed to own a gun and the state recognises a right for people to own a gun, creating a legal mechanism to remove that right from somebody who has neither committed a crime nor been deemed legally incompetent creates a very weird legal status. However, it is a strange-shaped beast because it has to fit through the weird tangle of US gun politics.
Correia invokes the fear of police doing no-knock raids to enforce a red flag law.
“Ironically, the Venn diagram of people who love the idea of red flag laws and people who protested the Breonna Taylor shooting that happened during a police raid pretty much make a circle.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 73). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
In so far as both groups would rather people didn’t get shot, I can see the commonality. However, I’m using this quote because it is one of the few times Correia begins to acknowledge the power asymmetry in gun violence in America. There is a serious point there where I have to share a concern about ERPO laws that may well give police arbitrary powers. While Correia imagines such laws being used against upright conservative gun owners or as revenge against police officers (he cites an example of the second which actually demonstrates the checks in place to stop people doing that https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2022/04/22/fort-collins-woman-who-filed-red-flag-petition-against-officer-convicted/7401449001/ ) However, US history shows that when new and unusual powers are abused by the police, it is not predominately against well-off white guys.
Observant readers will have noted the flipside of Correia’s Venn diagram quip. Now, to be fair to Correia, logic isn’t his strong suit and I doubt he knows how Venn diagrams work and he doesn’t really think through what he’s saying. However, the implication is pretty clear: Correia really, really doesn’t see himself as somebody who protested the murder of Breonna Taylor.
Taylor was 26 when she was shot dead by police in Kentucky. She’d been in her apartment with her boyfriend when a group of men broke through the door. Her boyfriend Kenneth Walker did exactly what Larry Correia has spent several chapters and a whole career advocating: he fired a gun at the intruders. Unfortunately, the intruders were plainclothes police who then shot Breonna Taylor six times killing her. The flat had been targetted by police because of a former boyfriend of Taylor.
Taylor’s death was one of many high profile cases of US police officers using excessive force against Black Americans. Only after substantial protests where the officers involved held to any substantial account. Eventually, in 2022, federal charges were laid against the officers involved:
“Ex-detective Brett Hankison is alleged to have “willfully used unconstitutionally excessive force … when he fired his service weapon into Taylor’s apartment through a covered window and covered glass door.” He is charged with depriving Taylor and a guest in her home “of their constitutional rights by firing shots through a bedroom window that was covered with blinds and a blackout curtain,” the US Department of Justice said.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/04/us/breonna-taylor-federal-charges/index.html
Why would a self-defence advocate, gun advocate, second amendment advocate, and citizens-defending-themselves-from-government advocate, NOT see themselves as somebody who would protest the killing of Breonna Taylor?
At the start of the chapter, Correia lamented that gun rights should be a bipartisan issue because “everybody has the right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves, regardless of wealth, race, sex, religion, or social standing” and yet even he IN THE VERY CHAPTER IN WHICH HE STATED THAT easily falls down on that belief. In a country where the police can kill people with relative impunity and where demonstrable systemic biases exist in how laws are implemented and how criminal justice is employed, everybody does not have the right to keep and bear arms.
Next Time: Halfway through and what have we learned
Sometimes Larry Correia says something I agree with and other times he says something debatable but which is a much stronger point than I think he realises.
“Self-defense is a human right. Every individual being able to protect himself from harm is a fundamental principle of our society. Everyone should be entitled to this right without discrimination. The state doesn’t have a monopoly on force. We delegate that responsibility to them with the understanding that they’ll administer the laws equitably. Those laws should never require us to be defenseless. Enforced helplessness is tyranny.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 33). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The idea of a fundamental right to self-defence isn’t universal but it is a long-standing aspect of English law and systems derived from it. The European Convention of Human Rights acknowledges that the overarching right to life has exceptions in the case of defending somebody (including yourself) with reasonable force from unlawful violence (section 1, article 2, point 2a). In the UK, you can defend yourself with a weapon in self-defence, so long as you use reasonable force (https://www.gov.uk/reasonable-force-against-intruders ).
There are two little logical leaps and one bigger one here. The first is that a right to self-defence includes arming oneself in advance and the second is that guns are an effective means of self-defence. The bigger logical leap is that enforced helplessness is tyranny, which is historical nonsense. For example, Nazi Germany did not remove existing laws on self-defence as such, but those laws weren’t going to be of any use to you if your attacker was the state or an instrument of the Nazi party. The nature of tyranny is not the removal of a legal right to self-defence broadly but rather the inequitable use of such a right i.e. that the right is recognised for some and not for others. This can be either expressed overtly in law (as in Nazi Germany where gun laws were liberalised for most Germans while Jewish Germans were disarmed and persecuted) or expressed in the nature and practise of the law (i.e. the laws are phrased as universal but applied differently to some groups than others).
The question then is this: is the vision of a right to self-defence as adopted in the US and promulgated by gun rights activists practised in a way so that it works equitably across all Americans or does it actually empower SOME Americans and disempower other Americans? This is the actual distinction between tyranny and freedom rather than “enforced helplessness” which is just a way of trying to shoe-horn quasi-libertarian ideology into the discussion.
I’ll get to that question in a later essay but it is a central one to understanding current and historical gun laws in the USA.
Let us return to the theme of the chapter.
“This is where the concept of “defense in depth” comes into play. Security is made up of multiple layers. If one layer fails, hopefully the next one intercepts the threat. Each layer the attacker has to go through buys time and complicates his mission. IT departments don’t just rely on a firewall. They’ve got layers of security: passwords, software patches, policies, and a physical lock on the server room door. In a warzone, the military doesn’t just arm the troops on the front line, because the enemy will try to go around where you are strongest, to hit the vulnerable areas behind them. Which is why rear echelon support troops are also armed, so the attackers will always meet resistance.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 34). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
This is similar to the seat belt analogy Correia used in the previous chapter and it makes a lot of sense. No response to violence is perfect and hence you need layers of response. However, note something fundamental here. When gun control measures are discussed Correia and other gun rights activists will note that such measures can be subverted or bypassed. As Nick Searcy says in the foreword:
“They know that all the gun laws they can dream up will apply only to people who obey them. Criminals, by definition, will not obey laws.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XV). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The standard by which gun control laws are judged becomes one of perfection. In Chapter 1, Correia used the assassination of Shinzo Abe as an example of how even in a nation with strict gun laws, a determined person can get past them. However, the “defence in depth” concept Correia employs in this chapter to show the value of private firearms, accepts that no measure is perfect.
“No one is naïve enough to think that merely having a regular person with a gun nearby is a perfect solution. Permit holders have been murdered in these events too. There have been mass killings where there were armed guards present, but the attacker still got through.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 34). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
However, Correia is apparently naïve enough to think that gun control must be perfect before it can be an additional layer of security. The opposite is obviously true. Making it harder for people who wish to hurt others to get access to guns is an additional layer of security. It’s not a perfect layer but as demonstrated in multiple wealthy nations, it is a very effective layer.
Of course, if Correia conceded that gun control is an effective layer in a model of “defence in depth” then a rather alarming conclusion would logically follow: gun control is part of self-defence. Ah. The implication of that is both huge but also demonstrable. A right to protect yourself from harm applied equitably i.e. a right that makes it easier for everybody is the opposite of tyranny.
Instead, Correia ignores the first and most effective layer of “defence in depth” and asserts that:
“As we’ve seen constantly demonstrated, the best way to end a mass killer event is with an immediate, violent response. If that response comes from somebody already present, the body count will be lower. If the response comes from the authorities, then there are usually more casualties simply due to the response time.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 34). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
He has not, in fact, already shown this and the statistics he cited are far more ambiguous on the issue than he portrays them, as I demonstrated in Part 4 of this series. Further, the data from the UK and Australia both point to gun control as an effective way of reducing the incidents of mass killings. Again, the FIRST layer of “defence in depth” based on the actual numbers is: gun control.
This is overtly rejected by Correia:
“Too many of the Do-Somethings assume that if we ban a particular thing, the bad guy will be thwarted and stop. Real life shows us that threats always find a way around. If you’ve got an armed guard on some facility, that’s just one level of defense. They go around. You ban some gun, they get it anyway. You got a secure door, and they drive their car into your lobby. You violate the civil rights of millions to red-flag one actual bad guy? He reassesses and makes a new plot. Like water flowing downhill, evil gets around.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 35). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
True, a determined person (such as Shinzo Abe’s assassin) will find ways around and also have some strokes of luck (i.e. misfortune for their victim) but this is true of armed citizens as well. Indeed this is even more true of armed citizens in the case of mass killers who unlike assassins aren’t seeking to kill a specific person and in many cases aren’t intending to escape alive. Mass killers have a great deal of freedom in where and when they attack people.
But…if gun control is a layer of self-defence it comes with the removal of the layer that Larry Correia advocates: the armed citizen. It’s not clear how many Americans routinely carry weapons. In states where a permit is not required (so-called “constitutional carry”), there is no direct way of counting. However, in states which require permits but are relatively permissive about issuing permits, the highest is Utah with 21.88% according to one gun advocacy site (https://www.usconcealedcarry.com/blog/the-most-armed-states/ ). Even in Correia’s home state, people can’t rely on the “armed citizen” being present as part of the layered “defence in depth” which is why Correia’s argument depends not just on it being legal for people to carry concealed guns but for more people to do it.
The thrust of his argument is that there is a personal responsibility for each individual to be this final layer.
“We’ve all seen that guy who says, “I’ve never needed a gun. Nothing bad has ever happened to me. I just don’t go to bad places. You’re paranoid.” Fool. He has never needed a gun… yet. Nothing bad has ever happened to him, but he’s not you. He doesn’t go to “bad places,” but some of you live there, and even if you don’t, sometimes the bad place comes to you. Evil delivers.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 35). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I am a guy who says “I’ve never needed a gun” but I have been too bad places. I’ve lived in big cities (gasp) and developing countries, nations with and without gun control. I’ve worked in some very interesting places and travelled on four continents. Now, I’m a tall man with unprepossessing looks and at least one eye that looks in a different direction than where I’m trying to look, so maybe trouble avoids. Who knows? But I’ve never needed a gun. Most Americans, despite the popular stereotype that non-Americans like me might have about them, don’t carry guns either. Maybe nearly 80% of Correia’s fellow Utahns (Utahians? Utahnitians?) are not naïve wishful thinkers going through life oblivious.
Sure but Utah is relatively safe, right? It’s not one of those terrible crime-ridden Democrat states? True, it has one of the lowest murder rates of the US states with only 102 murders in 2020 (see https://www.thecentersquare.com/utah/how-the-murder-rate-in-utah-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-country/article_965bff1a-9235-5d29-9f69-10aaf1affc46.html ) across a population of 3.25 million people. Let’s compare that with my cunning defence in-depth plan of living in a (non-US) state with gun control. Wait, no, let’s weigh things further in favour of the Utahns. Sydney has a population of 5 million people — more than Utah but at least comparable. However, it’s a city with all the associated crime that comes with a city. Yes, comparisons can be apples and oranges but comparing a whole state with large rural areas with a city advantages Utah.
In 2020 there were 76 murders from september 2019 to october 2020 (https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_crime_stats/bocsar_crime_stats.aspx) and even fewer the following year. It’s fewer murders as a raw figure and far fewer murders proportionally. Utah really is relatively safe compared to other US states but compared with other developed English speaking countries, it is a murder hotspot. The murder rate in Utah is 3.1 per 100,000 people. The comparable rate for Canada as whole is 2.06 in 2021 which was seen as worrying rise in Canada (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2022001/article/00015-eng.htm ). Getting danegerously close to the deadly streets of (checks notes) erm Vermont?
And it is also worth noting what the potential dangers in Utah amount to. Despite the stereotypes we might have of Utah as a state of god-fearing, law-abiding Mormons, it does have issues with gangs and drug violence. They are not the primary dangers when it comes to deadly force though:
“A Salt Lake Tribune review of nearly 300 homicides, using media reports, state crime statistics, medical-examiner records and court records, show that use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.”
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=1842489&itype=CMSID&fullpage=1
How does the armed citizens, good guy with a gun fit into those scenarios?
As I discussed previous, the main threat is not mass killers but people in your home. However, the threat may also be police officers. Correia is right that we should be sceptical about the idea of the state saving us from armed killers but not because police are slow. In the USA in particular, the police are deadly.
I have found myself back to the same question: is the vision of a right to self-defence as adopted in the US and promulgated by gun rights activists practised in a way so that it works equitably across all Americans or does it actually empower SOME Americans and disempower other Americans? I will return to that but for the moment I want to wrap this post up.
Yes, sometimes an armed citizen has intervened and saved some lives. The cost is greater availability of guns, higher murder rates and greater risk of death at home. This isn’t “defence in depth” but rather sacrificing the more effective measure (gun control) for a weak, inconsistent chance that a gun owner will be more likely to shoot a bad guy than shoot their partner or themselves. Most legal gun owners don’t do any of those things but all we conclude from that is that most legal gun owners don’t directly make things worse. The net contribution always comes out with more dead.
Next time. I’ll concede that Larry is sometimes correct.
Imagine a public debate on transport policy, with a focus on increased pedestrianisation of town centres. Fewer cars, fewer accidents, safer streets and a more congenial place to shop or visit a library. Not everybody will be in favour of such a plan and maybe a guy write a book about why we should actually have more cars in town. After all, you can’t get run over by a car when crossing the road if you are already in a car! We’ll call this author Lorry Career.
Now you may ask what qualifications Lorry Career has to back up his claims about more cars = fewer pedestrian accidents. He might point out that his claim is only logical because more car drivers means fewer pedestrians. However, he will also point to his technical expertise:
You might cock your head to one side with a puzzled expression like a puppy wondering why the big human is making weird noises. To which Lorry Career might further explain:
“This book isn’t intended for policy wonks and pundits. I’m not an academic. I’m not a statistician. I’m a writer who knows a lot about guns.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 23). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Larry Correia does indeed know a lot about guns. He knows far, far more than me about the makes, types and varieties of guns. Very much like Lorry Career knows far more than me about the makes, types and varieties of cars. That knowledge though is of limited relevance to the arguments employed so far. It begins to have more significance when the book gets into some of the more byzantine gun control laws attempted in the US but naturally, Correia fails to address the question of why America ends up with quite so many weird laws about guns.
Chapter 2 has no secondary title unlike the others. It is just “Chapter 2” but it opens with a recap of the theme from the Vulture chapter. We eventually reach a repeat of the hardship gun owners are placed in.
“Then there’s my people, the so-called gun culture. We aren’t allowed time to process the event. We don’t get the benefit of the proverbial seventy-two-hour rule to wait for all the facts to come in. It doesn’t even matter how close the tragedy was to us either. We have to immediately go on defense because we have learned the hard way that if we don’t we will have our rights stripped because of someone else’s crimes.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 22). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
They just HAVE to go on the defence! We evil people just won’t let them time to process the fact that some other gun owner (who for reasons is not part of the so-called gun culture) just murdered some general with an example of their favourite hobby.
He goes on to explain his relevant background. He once owned a gun shop that was licened to sell the more restricted weapons and gun accesories (“legal machine guns, suppressors, and pretty much everything except for explosives.”) He was also a concealed weapons instructor, which is an instructor for concealed weapons rather than a weapons instructor who is hiding in a box. He has also been a competition shooter. So, as I said, Larry Correia knows a bunch of things about guns.
That’s the first half of the chapter. The second half takes us back to school.
“When I suggest letting school employees carry concealed weapons in an article or on social media, I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak-out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (pp. 25-26). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
So there you go. He suggests arming teachers and the only response to that is an emotional freakout. That’s just unreasonable of everybody and quite amazing that nobody at any point in time has ever given a reasoned answer as to why arming teachers isn’t much of a solution to mass shootings. So amazing as to be not just unbelievable but also obviously not true.
We’ll come to the argument against shortly. First we should let Larry Correia put the argument for arming teachers. Should we not let armed police deal with the situation? No, Correia advisors us and he actually has some statistics to back it up.
“According to one calculation, the average number of people shot in an event when the shooter is stopped by responding law enforcement is 14.3. The average number of people shot in an attempted mass killing event when the attacker is stopped by regular people is 2.3. The reason is simple. The armed citizens are there when it starts.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 27). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Correia helpfully provides a reference https://web.archive.org/web/20220328073705/http://www.lawenforcementservices.biz/Law_Enforcement_Services,_LLC/FIREARMS_TRAINING_files/Shooting%20Statistics.pdf which already puts him streets ahead in the quality non-fiction stakes of his former ally Vox Day who is hopeless and referencing his work. A low bar, but Correia met the challenge.
The figures he quotes are plausible compared to other sources, for example https://www.activeattackdata.org/allattacks.html However, quoting sources and reading sources are two different things.
Correia overtly says that the reason for the different death rates is because “armed citizens are then when it starts”. That ignore a key fact about those statistics. The MAJORITY of the 17 cases that make up the 2.3 average where cases where the shooter was stopped by UNARMED people.
“Second, within the civilian category 11 of the 17 shootings were stopped by unarmed civilians. What’s amazing about that is that whether armed or not, when a civilian plays hero it seems to save a lot of lives.”
http://www.lawenforcementservices.biz/Law_Enforcement_Services%2C_LLC/FIREARMS_TRAINING_files/Shooting%20Statistics.pdf
The Active Attack Data I quoted earlier sheds more light on these statistics. Not all shooting incidents are the same and indeed in 120 of the 464 cases looked at, the shooter just left the scene before the police arrived.
Correia accepts that school shootings are rare events. He also accepts that many teachers would not want to be armed and that this choice should be respected.
“A school employee with a concealed handgun who is a few yards down the hall is a lot more useful in this kind of emergency than a cop who is a mile away. Supporting a policy of allowing your coworkers to be armed might someday save your life. And far more importantly, it might save the lives of the kids in your care.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 28). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition
Correia’s argument is that an armed teacher would be an additional obstacle that might reduce the death toll of a school shooting. I’ve noted before that Correia’s argument for arming teachers is a bit of a motte and bailey style argument. It starts with the provocative “arm teachers’ but then retreats into a position that says only the teachers who really want to should be armed and that it might not make a difference but who knows etc.
Larry Correia’s other career was an accountant and not an actuary, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he doesn’t consider the relative risk of his proposal. Most legal gun owners do not shoot themselves or other people but some do. School shootings are rare events and not easily predicted. For a policy of arming teachers to have any significant impact on school shootings you would need to arm a lot of teachers.
Any policy based on arming more people quickly runs into a basic issue. A 2014 meta-analysis of studies looking at access to guns in a home as a risk factor in suicide and homicide found that (unsurprisingly) access to guns in a home is a significant risk factor.
“We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of all studies that compared the odds of suicide or homicide victimization between persons with and without reported firearm access. All but 1 of the 16 studies identified in this review reported significantly increased odds of death associated with firearm access. We found strong evidence for increased odds of suicide among persons with access to firearms compared with those without access (OR, 3.24 [CI, 2.41 to 4.40]) and moderate evidence for an attenuated increased odds of homicide victimization when persons with and without access to firearms were compared (OR, 2.00 [CI, 1.56 to 3.02]).”
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301?articleid=1814426
More armed teachers as a broad policy would lead, the evidence suggests, to more deaths — either the teachers themselves or people in their home. Not, of course, every teacher with a gun or even most of them. What the long term impact of increased number of guns in schools themselves would be, I can’t say. Luckily, there isn’t a lot of data on that. Correia would have us balance the likelihhod of more suicides against the possibility that in the rare event of a school shooting an armed teacher MIGHT reduce the total number of people killed. It’s like imagining a scenario where smoking a cigarette might save you from death (if I hadn’t paused to light that cigarette, I’d have accidentaly stepped in front of that bus!) and concluding that more ciggies mean more lives saved.
Correia goes on to defend his idea with an analogy:
“Armed teachers aren’t the surefire cure for school shootings, but they can help. No one single thing is going to make a place totally secure. It is about “defense in depth.” Multiple layers of security, working together. If one fails, hopefully the next stops the threat. Your car has brakes, lights, and mirrors to avoid collisions, but you also wear a seat belt for when you can’t. It is even better if your car has the additional level of airbags. And so on.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 31). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
This argument isn’t bad but let us expand the metaphor. Multiple layers of security working together! With car safety, these include not just seat belts (mandated by law), airbags, brakes, lights and mirrors but also mandatory driver training, licensing, speed limits, road rules, traffic lights, roundabouts (in enlightened countries only), and speed cameras. Correia ignores the bigger social and regulatory aspect of car safety (because the analogue would be gun control) and fixates on seat belts. However, to complete the analogy we would have to imagine seat belts that had a greater chance of strangling you or your family than the chance of them helping you in a car accident.
Next Time: Defence in depth and the magical good guy with a gun.
Facts, reason and logic are all well and good but what about emotions? In particular who has valid, genuine emotions and who doesn’t? The answer is that the vast majority of people have genuine emotions. Sure, actors are acting and politicians and salespeople fake emotional reactions but even they have genuine emotions. Former President Donald Trump managed to combine the triple role of grifter, celebrity and politician and yet even he showed some genuine emotions in public, albeit ones in a limited range of hate, frustration and confusion.
“Every time there is a mass murder event, the vultures launch. It’s fascinating in a sickening way. A bunch of people get killed, and within minutes the same crew of anti-gun zealots shows up all over the news and social media, pushing the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply can’t work.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 1). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Larry Correia will get to the “tired proposals” that he believes can’t work in Chapter 4 but logic is not going to play a big role.
Chapter 1 “Guns and Vultures” sets out Correia’s broad argument and covers briefly several of the themes that he will discuss at greater length in later chapters. Numerous points are made but I think it is reasonable to say that the overarching theme of the chapter is about who the true victims of American gun violence are from Correia’s perspective.
“Yet when anyone from my side responds to these ghouls, then we’re shouted at that we’re insensitive and how dare we speak about politics in this moment of tragedy. We should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead… while they are free to promote policies that will simply lead to a higher body count next time. If gun rights organizations say something, they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say anything, then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this, I’m called every name in the book, they say I want dead children in schools and malls, or they wish death upon my family. If I focus on logic or rationality, I’m a cold-hearted monster. If I become angry because they are promoting policies that are flawed and will accomplish the exact opposite of their stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (pp. 1-2). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Now, cards on the table, I think the circumstance in which people should be legally allowed to have a gun is very limited. I don’t think police officers should be routinely armed. So, yes, technically, if Correia and I lived in the same country then I would believe he shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun at all but not because of who he is or because he posts angry-sounding rants online. My views on gun control are genuinely impersonal and demonstrably have worked in the two countries I’m a citizen of. Perhaps there is something weird and unusual in America that would prevent such policies from working there. If so the logical and rational thing to do is to demonstrate that. However, without a doubt gun control in England and Australia (countries cited by Correia in this chapter) has NOT led to a “higher body count”.
International comparisons are tricky and Correia will largely duck out of making them but chapter 1 starts with him stating that the reaction to mass-shooting fuels a specific process.
“We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw them succeed in England. We saw them succeed in Australia and New Zealand.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 1). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Gun rights advocates will make numerous claims about gun control in England and Australia in particular. These include the idea that gun control led to an increase in other forms of violence (assault or rape) or crimes like burglary. Alternatively, gun rights advocates will claim that gun control has led to a net loss of freedom in those countries. These arguments will appear in Correia’s book but for the moment he has asked for logic or rationality. Perhaps unwittingly, he has raised a relatively simple premise:
Antivulture premise: Gun control measures will make mass shootings worse.
England and Australia certainly have had mass shootings and genuinely did increase gun control measures in response to events like the Dunblane Massacre [in Scotland, but it led to changes in English law] and Port Arthur. Is there any evidence these measures led to more mass-shooting fatalities in either country? No and when I say “no”, I include weird number-wrangling-style arguments from gun rights advocates. We will see arguments that the prevalence of mass shootings is exaggerated for the US and Correia will, correctly, point out that mass shootings are a worldwide phenomenon. What he won’t do is provide any evidence that gun control measures enacted in England, Australia and New Zealand led to more or worse mass shootings. He won’t even really provide a vague hand waving argument on this point. He will cite “Paris, Mumbai, Beslan” as examples of events in other countries (Beslan being a particularly interesting one for him to raise but I suspect he didn’t think about it).
I’m setting a low-bar for gun control here but a relevant one. The antivulture premise is unsubstantiated and indeed gun rights advocates don’t ever really try to substantiate it.
To be affected emotionally by the mass murder of children does not make a person a vulture and to respond with unsubstantiated claims that gun control will make mass shootings worse? Well, yes, that does make you look like a bit of a dick.
That emotional asymmetry doesn’t make the side that looks awful in a disaster wrong per-se. We can look beyond mass shooting towards terrorism or other deadly events. In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, raising the question of whether US foreign policy was a contributing factor to the event would indeed make you look like a bit of dick or a bloodthirsty monster and be called every name in the book. Decades later and disastrous wars later, it is easier to discuss the complex causes of a murderous attack without it sounding like you are trying to blame the victims. Reacting to the mass murder of people emotionally is a reasonable reaction which, yes, can in some cases lead to bad policy decisions. However, the opposite is also true. The capacity for politicians, decision-makers and the public more broadly to dehumanise or just ignore mass death in other countries or even within their own country for some out-group is a key aspect for policies that further mass death either actively (for example by funding murderous regimes) or by neglect.
This takes us back to a question I raised in Part 1 of this review: who are the members of the “gun culture” that Correia describes as “my people”? Corriea casts himself as the true victim in the aftermath of a mass shooting in the US because people call him bad names (a terrible fate for Larry Correia who is naturally hurt when people say mean things about him).
“As soon as one of these awful events hits the news, my feed fills with “ban all guns,” “damn the NRA,” “hateful Christians,” “Republican murderers,” “evil MAGA,” “white men are the real killers,” or some other attack on whatever demographic is most convenient for the media to despise that week. Of course this demographic blame is assigned before anybody has a clue who the killer was.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 2). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Readers will note the progression from “ban all guns” to the NRA and then to “Christians” and then Republicans and then to MAGA and then to white men. Now, let’s be clear, the one feature we know about every perpetrator of a mass shooting is that they are somebody who possessed (legally or illegally) at least one gun that they knew how to use sufficiently well to shoot a lot of people dead. That’s the relevant issue when it comes to gun control. Correia later says that mass killers “come from all races, philosophies, and walks of life.” This is true even if proportionally they are far more likely to be men. Wide-scale gun control aims to keep guns out of the hands of all demographics and political allegiances.
What Correia is doing here is conflating related issues to define his in-group of grievance and victimhood. The related issues are:
All shootings are relevant to the question of gun control but only some shootings are relevant to the issue of right-wing violence. The use of violence and terror to further the goals of the far right is not confinded to guns. The deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the US was the Oklahoma City Bombing which was not a mass shooting. Gun control isn’t going to stop right wing violence any more than it will stop terrorism connected to other causes but it will, to borrow a phrase from Larry Correia, be “speed bump”, an additional obstacle in the path of those who want to express their anger at the world via murder.
“No amount of gun control matters to a jihadist. I’ve talked a lot about how criminals don’t care about the law. Terrorists are criminals on steroids. Militant, suicidally dedicated death cultists are in it to win it, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. But hey, let’s make even more places gun-free zones! That’ll show them.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 5). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Except gun control matters a great deal to jihadists, criminals, and right-wing mass shooters. We know this because when such people can access guns legitimately or semi-legitimately they will do so. Gun control laws are not the primary factor here but rather gun availability. It’s true that criminals can find ways to access guns but that is so much easier when there are more guns in general circulation. Terrorists also make use of weapons training when they can. Correia cites the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks as an example of a mass shooting in a country with gun control, ignoring the lengths the terrorists had to go to get weapons and combat training and that they had to sail into the city on a dinghy. Terror groups typically rely on arms supplies from sympathetic countries or organisations, and the broader illicit international arms trade.
Which takes me back around to both the NRA and MAGA:
“The United States will be revoking the effect of America’s signature from this badly misguided agreement,” Trump told a large audience at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Indianapolis. “The United Nations will soon receive a formal notice that America is rejecting this treaty.”
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-05/news/us-quit-arms-trade-treaty
The NRA have a long standing opposition to international measures to hinder the ilict arms trade regardless of whether it had a direct impact on US domestic gun laws or not. Which takes me to a broader issue. The NRA and US gun rights activists in general are not just a problem for America and it is not just an issue confined to the peculiar nature of the US consistution. The US gun rights ideology and the US gun lobby actively works against domestic gun control legislation in other countries and against measures to curb the licit and ilicit arms trade in general.
I’ve wandered off topic a little, so let me return to the poor put upon gun owners who suffer so terribly when somebody with a gun murders lots of people.
“The vulture punditry even attacks prayer now. A horrible thing happens, and people offer their thoughts and prayers. It’s just something that decent people do when they can’t actively change the situation. But now the vultures won’t even allow for that basic human kindness. It’s go all in on gun control with them or you are a terrible person.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 10). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition
.Shocking, I know. People being mocked offering prayers!
There’s more in this chapter than I’ve covered but much of it comes up again in later chapters.
Next Time: Chapter 2 which doesn’t have its own title but which is about Larry Correia’s background and arming teachers.
Beyond the front matter, the first part of substance inside In Defense of the 2nd Amendment is the Foreword. This is written by Nick Searcy, who is an actor in stuff that I don’t think I’ve watched. I’m not going to go through this book with tons of quotes but I’ll quote bits that will help you get a sense of the tone and the approach.
“I didn’t know who Larry was when I first befriended him on social media. I just knew he tore up silly leftist dumbasses on the internet the way Michael Moore tore up extra-large supreme meatza pizzas. And Larry did so hilariously, with biting sarcasm, incisive wit, and invincible logic. I immediately saw him as an irreplaceable ally in the never-ending Twitter War, and I felt a kinship, as both of us do not play with leftist idiots well. We both had waded into the social media sewer with all our guns blazing, laughing hysterically as we slaughtered stupid Democrat-worshipping brainwashed losers day after day, laughing all the way.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XIII). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
It is reasonable to say that Larry Correia uses biting sarcasm, opinions differ on whether his wit is incisive and I’ve always found that what logic he uses is supremely vincible. Maybe that’s me. However, Searcy does focus on the central quality of Correia’s approach to examining topics of the day: mockery. Michael Moore is a large man and hence somebody who can be mocked and once mocked his opinions can be dismissed. In reality, Moore is far from infallible and his documentaries are far from flawless but engaging with them takes effort and it is so much easier to make a quick dig about over-eating and be done.
Mockery is a recurring rhetorical device in Correia’s style of argumentation and it is what his readership enjoys. He does attempt some arguments of substance but the overall thrust of his approach is not to show that an opinion is incorrect but that it is an opinion that can be mocked or dismissed. To this extent, Searcy is accurately getting to the guts of this book. The point is not to show gun control adherents as wrong but as foolish and contemptible.
Searcy also has a point to make about law and order.
“In reading Larry’s Monster Hunter novels, you realize that underpinning all the exciting action, banter, and bloodshed there is a strong, sensible moral code—a code that goes beyond mere legality and enters the realm of right and wrong. Often the hero in a Correia work steps outside of the framework of the law—which, if followed to the letter, would have allowed evil to triumph—and makes a moral choice that might technically be illegal.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XIV). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I guess that’s true of Correia’s characters. It’s also true of Paddington Bear and Bilbo Baggins but I digress. The point Searcy is making is that Correia’s characters and the character that Searcy plays the boss of in the TV show Justified have to step outside the law because the law can only punish evil not prevent it.
“Which is why the Second Amendment is the only thing that makes Americans capable of preventing pure evil from victimizing them. A law will not and cannot do it.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XIV). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Now a roving internet pedant might point out that the 2nd amendment is also a law but that’s why roving internet pedants aren’t characters played by Timothy Olyphant. The point is…actually, I’m not sure what the point is here, back to Searcy:
“Because the ultimate goal of the Left is to outlaw self-defense. They want you unable to defend your life with deadly force, even when a criminal is coming for your life with deadly force. Why? Because then they know you will be totally dependent, for your safety, for your health care, for your food, for every single thing that makes you able to exist, on the totalitarian government that they intend to install. Think I’m exaggerating? Leftists have done this all over the world, in North Korea, in Cuba, in Venezuela, in the USSR, and now even in Australia, England, and Canada. And they will do it here if we let them.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XV). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Apparently, Australia is a totalitarian government these days, indistinguishable from North Korea. At this point, I did wonder if we were going to get some Covid-19 era anti-Australian rhetoric in the book and indeed we do later but it is actually fleeting.
Searcy ties this back to Correia’s fiction.
“Larry Correia understands this, and he imbues his fiction with this powerful idea, and that is why it has resonated with so many throughout the world—because, unlike leftist fiction, it makes sense.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. XV). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I assume the powerful idea is that a hero often has to step outside the framework of the law to make a moral choice to defeat evil, just as Paddington did in Paddington 2 when he escaped from prison.
OK, now I’m mocking Searcy after being dismissive of arguments that are just mockery but there is so little substance here that it really is laughable. I’m also struck by the descent in the quality of right wing thought. In recent months I’ve been reading all sorts of right-wing punditry from the 80’s and 90’s and while those works were packed full of bad and appalling ideas, there was at least substance. Maybe that was worse! Maybe the fact that Jerry Pournelle could write incisively and plausibly and string genuine facts together with his opinions was worse for the world we ended up in as he gave better foundations for terrible ideas. Yet, I can’t help missing the days when the right had more in their rhetorical quivver than just fat jokes and nonsense.
Running through current right-wing rhetoric is this deep malaise about a world in decline and a world that is nonsense (e.g. the term “clown world” for modern society). To some degree that’s just a long-held tenet of conservatism: everything was better in the past. it also reflects the genuine damage that conservative policies have done to public services and infrastructure to intentionally make so many things in our lives that bit crappier. However, I can’t help but notice the sharp contrast between this 2020’s book by Correia and the 1980’s book by Newt Gingrich. It’s only two points but I think they exemplify a genuine cognitive decline in right-wing thought over several decades.
The right genuinely have become clownish. Evil, scary clowns but clowns nontheless lurking in the sewers laughing hysterically.
Next Time: Vultures.
Being an examination of In Defense of the Second Amendment by Larry Correia, in several parts.
An electronic copy of Larry Correia’s first non-fiction book arrived at Felapton Towers a day earlier than I expected. It’s a quick read, I read through it in about 2 hours including a few pauses to check some of the footnotes. You could skim through it in about an hour.
It is seven chapters long plus an introduction and a conclusion and the writing style is “Monster Hunter Nation Blog post”. I haven’t checked how much of it is a lift and shift from his blog, it feels like a lot of it but it may well be none at all and just feels familiar. There are references at the back but given the scattershot nature of the work, they aren’t that relevant to the arguments advanced.
I’ll be looking at in more detail over the next few posts but I think the tone and nature of the argument the book puts forward is best exemplified by this paragraph in Chapter One:
“Every member of the gun culture watches as these events unfold and thinks, Hell, here we go again. It is sad, but when these things happen, my people are following the news, and before we can even begin to process what’s happening, we all end up thinking some variation of Please don’t let the bad guy be someone the news can somehow make out to be like me… Even though the vast majority of the time the shooter isn’t one of us, has nothing to do with us, and (in reality) people like us are the last line of defense against them, it doesn’t matter. We know we’re going to get blamed.”
Correia, Larry. In Defense of the Second Amendment (p. 3). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The unspoken question is who are the members of the “gun culture” that Correia describes as “my people”? He states unambiguously that “the vast majority of the time the shooter isn’t one of us”, so we have something quantifiable. It isn’t simply that the murderers he is referencing have committed an illegal act because he concedes in that statement that a minority of such killers ARE sometimes one of his “people”. Which ones?
That’s a question I’ll get into as I look into the book in detail.
One thing that is not covered in much detail, is the actual second amendment of the US constitution. Correia broadly asserts that it is a good thing and that self-defence is a human right. There are good arguments to be made that self-defence is a human right regardless of the Second Amendment but Correia avoids the weeds of such discussion. That’s not a terrible choice because really such debates are not the actual substance of gun control v gun ownership arguments in the US but it is an odd choice given the title.
Is there a clear, coherent chain of argument in the book? No, but I’d have been surprised if there had been. Instead, we get a kind of relay race of points that do not add up to a cohesive whole. It’s a mix of emotive arguments about how his opponents use emotive arguments or similar condemnations for a given style of argument only to employ that same style in the next chapter, paragraph or sentence.
Is it all nonsense and strawmen? No, there are some legitimate points. Few people manage to be wholly and consistently wrong and sometimes Correia slips up and puts together a valid point. However, when he does so it also serves to undermine previously asserted points.
More tomorrow.
Back in August, I promised you all that I would be reading a non-fiction book and pulling it apart to see how it works. The book, from conservative publisher Regnery is a pro-gun rights book by a longtime notable figure in truculent science-fantasy, Larry Correia.
The book is due to be released on January 24, and for timezone reasons, I’m likely to have a copy by Wednesday my time as I’ll need to read at least some of it to write about it, I probably will have the first post up by Thursday my time.
As always, I’ll try to be engaging with the material as fairly as possible with a focus on the reasoning used and the available data. Their may be some sarcasm though. I don’t know how many posts there will be as that depends on how boring writing about the book turns out to be. If it is just angry ranting about liberals then that will get tired very quickly.
Am I just contributing to Correia’s own hyping of his book? Minimally I think. Firstly, the audience of this blog aren’t the audience for his book and if you read this blog you probably already have a well-formed opinion about Mr Correia. However, Larry has used criticism of his work or actions in the past to fuel an outrage spiral that helps enthuse his supporters BUT this is likely to happen if I write about it because contrariwise ex-Sad Puppies regard me and this blog as beneath their contempt 😌. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, The Daily Caller, a right-wing opinion site founded by Tucker Carlson and with multiple links to white nationalists, has published an “exclusive extract” from Larry’s book which you can read as an archive link here https://web.archive.org/web/20230122053247/https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/21/good-guy-with-gun-defensive-gun-control-larry-correia/
The extract suggests that the book is pretty much what I am expecting. There are anecdotes, some old arguments and aged factoids. We learn that Larry has “pulled a gun on another human being one time” in his life.
The thrust of the extract though is defensive gun use:
“One of the most commonly cited studies estimates that there are around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which is orders of magnitude higher than our number of murders. “
https://web.archive.org/web/20230122053247/https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/21/good-guy-with-gun-defensive-gun-control-larry-correia/
That is a commonly cited figure. There’s no reference to where the figure comes from in the extract but it is almost certainly the 1995 paper Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. You can read it here https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6853&context=jclc and the study surveyed just under 5 thousand people. A small proportion of those people responded that they had used a gun defensively but once you multiply that proportion by the population of the US, you get a 2.1 to 2.5 million estimate. An earlier National Crime Victimization Survey had come up with a much lower estimate (65,000 which Kleck discussed in his paper) but this variation hits on the very squishy notion of defensive gun use. Use stricter criteria which verify a crime occurred and the estimates drop sharply. However, Kleck (and Corriea) not unreasonably argue that many cases of defensive gun use are cases where a potential crime is deterred before it reaches a point where a crime could be reported.
There are also questions about the methodology that over-sampled both men and people in the south and west of the US. The paper itself notes the oversampling but claims that the results were weighted to account for that.
“To gain a larger raw number of sample DGU cases, we oversampled in the south and west regions, where previous surveys have indicated gun ownership is higher. We also oversampled within contacted households for males, who are more likely to own guns and to be victims of crimes in which victims might use guns defensively. Data were later weighted to adjust for oversampling.”
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6853&context=jclc
So, there are legitimate reasons to doubt the 2 million defensive gun uses a year figure but let us take it at face value for a moment. The broad criteria used mean that this tells us very little about defensive gun use that would have made a difference in the events that followed and while 2 million sounds large, Kleck’s study shows that defensive gun use is proportionally rare. The oversampling was something the study had to do to detect it!
In the extract, Correia sees this figure as being of great significance though for a simple reason: it is much higher than the number of murders.
Case closed! Except…how does that comparison make any sense at all? Defensive gun use being greater than the number of murders makes very little sense as a comparison, particularly with a very generous definition of defensive gun use. Larry is comparing a very broad criteria with a very specific type of event: a murder. Crime stats have many confounding factors but murders tend to have better statistics becuase dead bodies are more countable than anecdotes.
Kleck’s 2 million+ figure for defensive gun use is large partly because it includeds cases that were not reported to the police. Not all gun use has a reported crime! But that is true of OFFENSIVE gun use as well. Not all cases were somebody used a gun to threaten, intimidate or otherwise act nefariously againts another more innocent person gets reported to the police. What do the stats say about that? Let’s ask Harvard School of Public Health:
“Using data from a national random-digit-dial telephone survey conducted under the direction of the Harvard Injury Control Center, we examined the extent and nature of offensive gun use. We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense. All reported cases of criminal gun use, as well as many of the so-called self-defense gun uses, appear to be socially undesirable.”
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
Larry then moves on to a different statistic:
“The thing to remember about vulture statistics is that they’re always twisted for emotional impact. Mark Twain talked about lies, damned lies, and statistics, but our modern anti-gun zealots would have blown his mind. Their goal is to toss out something that sounds lurid and ghastly, truth be damned, and by the time it is debunked it doesn’t matter, because liars and useful idiots will just regurgitate it forever. Like the infamous a gun in the home is forty-three times more likely to kill you or a loved one than an intruder. That one is straight up nonsense, created with embarrassingly flawed methods, from a tiny sample, that even the author has since revised down to a tiny fraction of that (and he’s still grasping at straws to get there), yet they’ve been unabashedly repeating this thoroughly debunked lie since 1986. I was in sixth grade. Original Top Gun was in theaters. They’ve got no shame!”
Debunked since 1986! Which I guess is worse than debunked since 1995 when the original Clueless was in theatres. Luckily, I do my homework in advance of the deadlines and in this case I de-debunked (debunked?) this one already. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/just-putting-this-here-for-when-i-need-it-in-january/
Science is an iterative process and early studies on anything are more likely to have questionable figures. Estimates of a figure should improve over time and sure enough there have since been many other studies of the risk factors in gun ownership.
Data from a US mortality follow-back survey were analyzed to determine whether having a firearm in the home increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or number of guns in the home. Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method (adjusted odds ratio = 31.1, 95% confidence interval: 19.5, 49.6). Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.”
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda, Marcie-jo Kresnowhttps://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwh309https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858#ref-30
Guns are used defensively by many Americans. That usage is relatively rare even based on Kleck’s figures. Larry Correia sites three cases in his lifetime for him and his wife (one involving a dog) and he’s got a lot of guns. However, the power of guns to intimidate and threaten without actually firing the gun works both ways and the data points towards guns being used for nefarious purposes more than defensive ones. On top of that guns are genuinely a risk factor in people’s homes.
Anyway, more of this on Thursday I guess.
Susan’s Salon is posted early on Monday Australian Eastern Standard Time (which is still Sunday in most places).
Topics can cover anything from troubling news to pleasant distractions. Links, videos, cat pictures etc are fine! [but please, no cranky conflicts between each other in the comments.]
It’s fine to be sad, concerned, resolute, indecisive, angry or happy (or all of those things at once).
Camestros Felapton 