Gun Control

Hello, Internet. My name is John Wessel.

I had a little bit of frustration this morning. I just got back from Big 5 Sporting Goods where I was attempting to buy some ammunition. Some of what is supposed to be the most common ammunition in the United States: .22lr. But, at the present moment these seem to be the rarest ammunition out there. I think it is harder to hunt the ammunition than it is to hunt any sort of prey at this point.

Now, I'm not any great sportsman or anything like that. In fact, I'm trying to learn how to shoot, learn about guns. The recommendation that seems to be pretty universal across the Internets and shooters that I've talked to is start with a .22 rifle. They're cheap. They're light. They don't have a lot of recoil. They're accurate and perhaps most importantly, the ammunition is widely available and very cheap, so you can do a lot of target practice without spending a lot of money. It all sounds very good in theory but I'm starting to think maybe I got sold a bill of goods :)

At the present moment, there seems to be a run on ammunition and the worst run seems to be on .22lr. I don't know - I've heard a lot of things about 5.62 NATO rounds. The point about the .22lr is that since everyone owns a .22 rifle because that's the universal advice, when there's a gun control scare everybody is stocking up on .22 ammunition.

The proximal reason for the run is fear of gun control legislation being passed. The drive for gun control reached a fevered pitch after the massacre at the school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. There's a lot of interesting social phenomenon, a lot of interesting economics, going on in a run on a good and there's nothing sexier than a run on guns but I'm going to put that aside because I think there's something even more interesting and more on topic with what I've been talking about, which is to focus on the thought patterns of people when they think about guns and how to control them.

So, dear listener, I ask you to become conscious of what you are visualizing when I say the term gun. Are you thinking of a very specific gun, maybe one that you own or have shot yourself or that you've seen personally? Are you thinking about a type of gun? Are you thinking about a rifle or a shotgun or an assault rifle? The second is to think about a gun owner. There are a lot of different possibilities. Are you thinking of a hunter, or an infantryman, or a police officer, or just a guy dressed in jeans who's carrying a concealed hand weapon that you'd never notice unless you patted him down. How about shooting a gun? Do you visualize someone shooting a gun down at the rifle range at targets? Do you visualize people shooting skeet? Or do you visualize a person shooting at another person? What is the context for that violence? Is it a crime in progress? Is it a massacre at an elementary school? Is it a war zone?

My conjecture is that the visualization that you attach to gun terms will have a deep impact on your position on gun-related issues. If your instinct when you hear "gun" is to think of a mentally deranged teenager shooting up elementary school students then there's a good chance you're going to be for gun control. If, on the other hand, you visualize a gun owner as being your husband or your father who is using his gun to protect you from some mentally deranged person then you're going to be in favor of wide spread gun ownership.

I have played a minor trick on you by starting the podcast with a story of little old me trying to by some .22lr to go target shooting. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to be able to get that visualization out of your head when I subsequently talk about guns more generally. The prototypical example of this is when somebody tells you, "Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant!" Well of course, you have to think about an elephant. In fact, I can practically work you to a state of anxiety if I want to just by mentioning things. Think about your breathing. Breath in, breath out. Breath in, breath out. Right? Now you're thinking about it and you'll practically suffocate if you try not to think about it. Or, I can tell you to think about the position of your tongue in your mouth. Right? Now, for the next minute or two, you're tongue is going to drive you crazy because you're not going to be able to forget it.

So there's always a debate that's going on. Maybe debate is too dignified of a word because it's happening in the reptile brain. It's happening just in the base visualizations you associate with a topic. Our goal, as good thinkers, is to become conscious of that so that we can push our thinking from that raw association, reptile brain, into the more logical parts of our brain. Then, once we've processed a lot of emotions like fear - because gun is going to be associated with death which is going to be associated with fear. It has to be dealt with. So, once we more calmly and healthily deal with these emotions and logically consider what is the most common type of gun owner or shooting. We can then push these feelings back down into our reptile brain. Essentially what I'm saying is train your intuition.

For example, I looked up statistics on concealed carry weapon permits . Our intuition is usually pretty bad about things that are not seen. Out of sight, out of mind. Like, before the microscope was invented, people had very magical thinking for the reasons that people got sick. It wasn't until the microscope that they could see bacteria and little protozoa that they could train their intuition to look for some microorganism as the source of disease. A shooting like the Sandy Hook incident is very visual but we also want to look at the shooting that is not happening.

So, according to this table, I can see that the ratio of the population that has a concealed carry weapon permit ranges from very low in my home state of California where it's 0.1% to pretty substantial numbers, like in Georgia, 11.5% of people have a concealed carry weapon permit. That's 600,000 people out of 6.9 million (rounded). Anecdotally, it would seem that most people who have a permit do not typically carry a gun because it's inconvenient. Those that routinely do carry a concealed weapon tend to be former police officers and military men who are used to the inconvenience of carrying a gun and in fact may feel naked without carrying one. Nevertheless, in any crowded place - that's every shopping mall or movie theater - there's statistically a handful of people carrying a gun. Yet, notice how much not-shooting is occurring. If everyone who is concealed carrying today decided to open carry tomorrow there would be a big social flapdoodle yet nothing functionally would be different. If anything, the rest of us would be in a safer position because if you can see who is carrying the gun, you can better watch out for that person.

The people aware of concealed carrying are those who have a permit themselves and those who are concerned with running into these people carrying guns: namely criminals. It is not a quirk of fate that massacres occur in gun-free zones. Good, law-abiding people obey the gun-free zone while those interested in committing a massacre are attracted to those zones because they know there's no one there to stop them.

So, to make good decisions, we need to get control of our intuitions and our visualizations. We also need to get control of our emotions or not necessarily control the emotions but control our actions even in the presence of strong emotion. For example, a lot of people have very bad tempers. Such bad tempers that they're worried that had they a gun on their person, they might use it shoot someone in a moment of rage. That is a very hard thing to admit to yourself. It's very hard to deal with mental problems. Even if you do not have a bad temper, you may be worried about people around you who have bad tempers and potentially guns. It would make sense that these are precisely the people who you wouldn't want to risk insulting by telling them that you don't want them to have a gun because of their tempers! Putting the blame where it belongs, on people, is uncomfortable. So, we tend to project the violence onto the gun. This is wrong and unnecessary. If we take a moment to consider the unseen again, we would notice how much shooting is not happening. In fact, people with bad tempers self-regulate. They don't carry a gun precisely because they're worried about using it, which is actually a very responsible decision. It turns out that when the decision to use lethal force is squarely put upon an individual's shoulders, the person is extremely unlikely to kill. This is actually very heartening. It means we don't have to be afraid of people having the option to have guns because they'll either handle them responsibly or take the option not to have a gun if they're worried about handling a gun irresponsibly.

The real danger is that fear will lead us into magical thinking. Specifically, instead of responsibly handling fear, people start to look for the easy solution, a savior to come and make all the problems go away, to relieve them of their responsibility. That savior figure takes the role of police commonly or, more generally, government.

Here's an observation I've made, a little tell when people are starting to engage with magical thinking with the government. When they discuss problems, it will be in the terms of individual people. They'll say a shooter, a criminal. But, when it comes to government, they will no longer talk about a police officer, an FBI agent, a politician. Instead, they'll to the collective institutions such as the government, the police. The problem with this type of thinking is that government is made up of people and all the flaws that regular people suffer from, members of the government also suffer from. They have tempers. They have greed. They have lapses of judgment.

If you only allow one group of people to have a given power then criminals are naturally going to be drawn to try to infiltrate that group. So, if you make police the only ones who can carry guns, unfortunately criminals are going to be drawn to try to become policemen. Whereas, if everyone is allowed to carry guns, granted they haven't been convicted of a felony or mental health issue, then there's no particular reason for criminals to go into the police. They don't have an advantage or at least a substantial advantage over other people.

This is a very difficult idea of people to swallow. I'm definitely going to be going over it more in future podcasts. It makes people feel very uncomfortable to imagine that those people who are depended upon to be the protectors may not be perfect. They may actually be a prime target for infiltration.

Thank you so much for listening. This can be very hard stuff so I really do appreciate the effort that you're putting in. That's what rewards me for the effort that I put into recording these podcasts. So go out there. Be conscious. Be aware of your visualizations. Don't be afraid to think about your fears and make corrections and be a better person. I'll see you next time.