I have only one minor quibble. Although I don't own one (other matters having required my money for a while now) I feel that I can intelligently discuss the basic AR-15 and its cousin, the M16A1. The latter was my assigned weapon for most of the sixteen years I spent in different parts of the Army, and even after 30+ years out of uniform, I am familiar enough with it to give an informed opinion - possibly more so than my Makarov pistol, which I have not spent nearly as much time on ranges with. I need to find some time to go out in the desert with Masha and do some plinking. Maybe after tax season.
You have such a strange sense of "stoic". The stoic doesn't presume their experience has authority over other people's experience, even those who don't have an experience the stoic recognizes. The stoic isn't offering guidance to others or upbraiding them. They're just narrating their own experience, they're curious about the world as they experience it directly. They don't make a distinction between people who have no right to speak and people who do; they make no strong claims about the "evidence of experience". The stoic is fascinated by people who have strong feelings in the absence of what seems like direct experience and by people who do make such claims. Curious, not commanding. Testify, work from what you see, don't draw boundaries. "Nothing human is alien to me."
Rule #7 - Do not reply via voice transcription while driving.
The universe does not care about motives. There simply be people who know what they are doing and people who do not. I only presume that 'my' denotes 'my skill'.
So this is about me approaching the ethics of handing a deadly weapon and the discipline required to do so which is part and parcel of the skillset to which I refer. It is the skillset I expect of police officers and sought myself. Ethics at the Barrel of a Gun puts this in sharp relief and I was transformed by it.
In observing this class of people from the perspective of their skills and rationales, I think I do the service of putting abstract debates about guns themselves into a more proper context. The question of 'who needs an AR-15' is answered, because the entire moral weight of the matter falls upon the individual holding the firearm, not the configuration or even the legality of the weapon itself.
I'm not sure I'm in a good position to defend my Stoicism. When I finally figure out the right terms to finish 'The Stoic Citizen' we can pick that up again. But what is clear to me now is the the abstract casuistry of anti- or pro-gun rhetoric evades the most salient aspect of our liberty which is our inherent right to make life or death decisions, whether or not we are competent. As far as I'm concerned that competence can only be demonstrated one way - a way that many sworn officers have not demonstrated and citizens have not even bothered to approach.
It seems to me a strange thing to wait, in an existentialist fashion, for every individual to make life or death decisions because we have an absolute right to do so, regardless of competency, and take no note of what the accumulation of those decisions looks like afterwards. Do I have an absolute right to hurl myself off a skyscraper on to the ground below? In some sense, yes--if I'm determined, I'll find a way, and you can't do anything to me once I've done it. But if I do, I'm deciding not just for myself but the people below, who did not decide that they wanted to take the risk of walking under me as I fell. So where we have skyscrapers, we tend to make it somewhat difficult to hurl oneself off--we make it hard to open windows, we make high rails. Both to prevent someone from falling who had no desire to but also to forestall a leap.
Do I have an absolute right to perform neurosurgery if I can convince someone to lie down under my scalpel? There was a brief time in the history of American clinical medicine where there were a considerable number of unlicensed people performing surgical procedures, and there are still some doing so if you know where to look (say, for cosmetic surgery). Is licensing just protecting people from making their own decisions about performing (and receiving) surgery? Should the entire moral weight of the matter fall upon the individual holding the scalpel and the forceps?
We intrude on what you're calling an inherent right in so many domains all of the time, and mostly for actuarial reasons (which are really just a slightly longer way round to utilitarian reasoning). There are all sorts of requirements in the built landscape, in technologies, etc., that circumscribe your inherent right to make life or death decisions in a cleanly existentialist way, all alone in the castle of your individuality. There are licensing regimes that say "you must have this training in order to make this class of life-and-death decision" or "you must have this degree of financial protection to make this class of life-and-death decision". All of them exist because in a mass society we have tallied up what happens when they don't and have recognized that the absence of those circumscriptions means that the inherent right of one individual to make life or death decisions will trespass mightily on the inherent right of other individuals to do the same.
I find little to disagree with in that. I undertook serious training above and far beyond what was required for licensing, without which under California's ponderous bureaucracy, I could not legally possess my shootin' irons. The gun permit test has 30 questions and you can get a couple wrong, if I remember correctly. Currently the CCW test by the Utah standard is accepted in 36 other states. I haven't bothered with that because I don't feel under threat, California does not reciprocate and I'd have to recalibrate my pistol training for a smaller, unholstered gun.
My own training has made me wary and skeptical of most public firing ranges. As with amusement parks, the crowds at these places tend to make me curl my lip in disgust. Overheard conversations a Retting, my favorite gun shop, also bunch my panties. There are many paranoid Defenders who don't even look like they have the dexterity for chopsticks, let alone a short barreled revolver. Nevertheless their lives are worth defending with deadly force. As with everything, there is something of an aristocracy of merit, but we cannot wish to have the formality of dueling with swords. The arrow of consumerism democratizes everything. "All power to the people." So I aim to steer clear of such public watering holes. As it stands, I've been on a waitlist for 3 years to a private club.
I would suggest that any and everybody with some gripe against policing submit themselves to a shooting simulator given the standard rules of engagement issued to sworn officers. It is something very few people do, relative to the volume of complaint. In that manner they will be exposed to a blunted scalpel and determine, under supervision, whether they have a modicum of talent required to prove useful in the exercising of their rights. In the hierarchy of public education I wouldn't put it very high and wouldn't required it in highschool, but every decent university should have some formal martial education as a requirement.
I have no expectation, given the nature of our politics that there are any critters calling themselves our duly elected representatives to cull out any practical details from the impractical rhetoric around guns to mandate martial education. I'm sure they'd rather have us all tethered to Zuckerberg's virtual amusement park while silently upping the budgets for law enforcement agencies oblivious to the 4th Amendment. I'm actually all for defunding the TSA, but how likely is that?
In all this, I am aiming to fuzz the blue line and direct folks towards the discipline of sworn officers, such as they are. Should I be optimistic, or should the monopoly of force be granted only to a tightly reigned subclass of citizens?
your journey over the last year mirrors my own, although its 18 months. I appreciate the thoughts and the challenges to think.
I have only one minor quibble. Although I don't own one (other matters having required my money for a while now) I feel that I can intelligently discuss the basic AR-15 and its cousin, the M16A1. The latter was my assigned weapon for most of the sixteen years I spent in different parts of the Army, and even after 30+ years out of uniform, I am familiar enough with it to give an informed opinion - possibly more so than my Makarov pistol, which I have not spent nearly as much time on ranges with. I need to find some time to go out in the desert with Masha and do some plinking. Maybe after tax season.
You have such a strange sense of "stoic". The stoic doesn't presume their experience has authority over other people's experience, even those who don't have an experience the stoic recognizes. The stoic isn't offering guidance to others or upbraiding them. They're just narrating their own experience, they're curious about the world as they experience it directly. They don't make a distinction between people who have no right to speak and people who do; they make no strong claims about the "evidence of experience". The stoic is fascinated by people who have strong feelings in the absence of what seems like direct experience and by people who do make such claims. Curious, not commanding. Testify, work from what you see, don't draw boundaries. "Nothing human is alien to me."
Rule #7 - Do not reply via voice transcription while driving.
The universe does not care about motives. There simply be people who know what they are doing and people who do not. I only presume that 'my' denotes 'my skill'.
So this is about me approaching the ethics of handing a deadly weapon and the discipline required to do so which is part and parcel of the skillset to which I refer. It is the skillset I expect of police officers and sought myself. Ethics at the Barrel of a Gun puts this in sharp relief and I was transformed by it.
In observing this class of people from the perspective of their skills and rationales, I think I do the service of putting abstract debates about guns themselves into a more proper context. The question of 'who needs an AR-15' is answered, because the entire moral weight of the matter falls upon the individual holding the firearm, not the configuration or even the legality of the weapon itself.
I'm not sure I'm in a good position to defend my Stoicism. When I finally figure out the right terms to finish 'The Stoic Citizen' we can pick that up again. But what is clear to me now is the the abstract casuistry of anti- or pro-gun rhetoric evades the most salient aspect of our liberty which is our inherent right to make life or death decisions, whether or not we are competent. As far as I'm concerned that competence can only be demonstrated one way - a way that many sworn officers have not demonstrated and citizens have not even bothered to approach.
It seems to me a strange thing to wait, in an existentialist fashion, for every individual to make life or death decisions because we have an absolute right to do so, regardless of competency, and take no note of what the accumulation of those decisions looks like afterwards. Do I have an absolute right to hurl myself off a skyscraper on to the ground below? In some sense, yes--if I'm determined, I'll find a way, and you can't do anything to me once I've done it. But if I do, I'm deciding not just for myself but the people below, who did not decide that they wanted to take the risk of walking under me as I fell. So where we have skyscrapers, we tend to make it somewhat difficult to hurl oneself off--we make it hard to open windows, we make high rails. Both to prevent someone from falling who had no desire to but also to forestall a leap.
Do I have an absolute right to perform neurosurgery if I can convince someone to lie down under my scalpel? There was a brief time in the history of American clinical medicine where there were a considerable number of unlicensed people performing surgical procedures, and there are still some doing so if you know where to look (say, for cosmetic surgery). Is licensing just protecting people from making their own decisions about performing (and receiving) surgery? Should the entire moral weight of the matter fall upon the individual holding the scalpel and the forceps?
We intrude on what you're calling an inherent right in so many domains all of the time, and mostly for actuarial reasons (which are really just a slightly longer way round to utilitarian reasoning). There are all sorts of requirements in the built landscape, in technologies, etc., that circumscribe your inherent right to make life or death decisions in a cleanly existentialist way, all alone in the castle of your individuality. There are licensing regimes that say "you must have this training in order to make this class of life-and-death decision" or "you must have this degree of financial protection to make this class of life-and-death decision". All of them exist because in a mass society we have tallied up what happens when they don't and have recognized that the absence of those circumscriptions means that the inherent right of one individual to make life or death decisions will trespass mightily on the inherent right of other individuals to do the same.
I find little to disagree with in that. I undertook serious training above and far beyond what was required for licensing, without which under California's ponderous bureaucracy, I could not legally possess my shootin' irons. The gun permit test has 30 questions and you can get a couple wrong, if I remember correctly. Currently the CCW test by the Utah standard is accepted in 36 other states. I haven't bothered with that because I don't feel under threat, California does not reciprocate and I'd have to recalibrate my pistol training for a smaller, unholstered gun.
My own training has made me wary and skeptical of most public firing ranges. As with amusement parks, the crowds at these places tend to make me curl my lip in disgust. Overheard conversations a Retting, my favorite gun shop, also bunch my panties. There are many paranoid Defenders who don't even look like they have the dexterity for chopsticks, let alone a short barreled revolver. Nevertheless their lives are worth defending with deadly force. As with everything, there is something of an aristocracy of merit, but we cannot wish to have the formality of dueling with swords. The arrow of consumerism democratizes everything. "All power to the people." So I aim to steer clear of such public watering holes. As it stands, I've been on a waitlist for 3 years to a private club.
I would suggest that any and everybody with some gripe against policing submit themselves to a shooting simulator given the standard rules of engagement issued to sworn officers. It is something very few people do, relative to the volume of complaint. In that manner they will be exposed to a blunted scalpel and determine, under supervision, whether they have a modicum of talent required to prove useful in the exercising of their rights. In the hierarchy of public education I wouldn't put it very high and wouldn't required it in highschool, but every decent university should have some formal martial education as a requirement.
I have no expectation, given the nature of our politics that there are any critters calling themselves our duly elected representatives to cull out any practical details from the impractical rhetoric around guns to mandate martial education. I'm sure they'd rather have us all tethered to Zuckerberg's virtual amusement park while silently upping the budgets for law enforcement agencies oblivious to the 4th Amendment. I'm actually all for defunding the TSA, but how likely is that?
In all this, I am aiming to fuzz the blue line and direct folks towards the discipline of sworn officers, such as they are. Should I be optimistic, or should the monopoly of force be granted only to a tightly reigned subclass of citizens?