Scattered Thought: Gun Control

There was a very succinct summary of the gun control situation in the US in Le Monde this morning. Here's the fancy blog-citation thing in French:

"La diffusion de masse des armes à feu aux Etats-Unis favorise leur utilisation routinière"
LE MONDE | 18.04.07

©

Here's google's attempt to translate it into English.

Basically, it says that Americans are very protective of their guns and the NRA is one of the nation's most powerful lobbies, so it's unlikely that the Virginia Tech massacre is going to result in gun control legislation. I appreciated how succinct it (the article) was and the clarity of a non-American perspective saying, essentially, "Americans are insane about guns. As a result, this kind of thing is going to keep happening."

I'm genuinely torn. I think guns are idiotic. I've never even fired a real gun, ever. But I'm also an adherent to the idea that one should pursue politics pragmatically, and one of the only points of convergence between the left and parts of the right in the US is civil liberties. It's a kind of trade-off; I'll let you stockpile assault weapons, you let me think dangerous thoughts and you let my friends have sex with whoever they want to - that kind of thing. Back in the corporate days, the major thing my former Navy SEAL boss and I had in common was a shared contempt for religion and a shared belief that people should be allowed to live their own lives more or less as they pleased.

I'm not so sure on the gun issue anymore, however. On the one hand, it would be practically impossible (I mean that literally; it would be impossible in a practical way) to disarm America. On the other, there's no question that the reason we have homicides on an order of magnitude above any other developed nation is that guns are easier to get than, well, jobs.

In class today we had a brief discussion of the Gramscian notion of a War of Position, in which a political movement aims for an aggregate of local victories rather than big one-off sweeping victories. It was a nice enunciation of how I'm starting to consider possibilities of practical leftist politics. So I'm left to ponder whether gun control would be something worth struggling over in lieu of other issues.

P.S. Needless to say, I was just as horrified as everyone else about the massacre. When Columbine happened, which was during my year in England, it turned out that a friend I had recently met was from there, just as one of my friends here went to Virginia Tech. Close to home, as were the pictures of the grad students who were victims; they were probably busy worrying about rent and groceries and dissertation topics, too, until the point was made moot by some maladjusted fuckwit

P.P.S. If someone says something snotty in my comments about me calling him a maladjusted fuckwit, I will come over to their house and kick them in the shin, hard. So don't. Yes, it's already ridiculous how the media is focusing on the fact that he was Asian. I, personally, don't care if he was black, white, yellow, blue, or purple. He was a maladjusted fuckwit.