Monday, December 17, 2012

Armed Teachers Be Playing Too Much Call of Duty: Despite the Dreams of the Gun Right a Well-Armed School is Not Necessarily a Safer School





I guess playing all that Call of Duty online ain't going to prepare you to be a badman in real life.

One of the canards and driving fictions of the Gun Right is the more guns equals less crime hypothesis. While there is little to no data supporting this hypothesis, it is one more example of the magical thinking that is conservatism in contemporary America. Plus, these claims are driven by sophisticated "studies" such as Dr. John Lott's--he used math and formal modeling so the argument must be accurate and correct--which was later eviscerated as a classic example of academic fraud.

Governments spend billions of dollars on training its soldiers to be lethal killers. Despite the development of  "killology," there is still no guarantee that a trained warrior will fire for direct effect at another human being. The Gun Right wants all of its members to believe that they can be the thin blue line, the person who stands in the breech, the person who does bad things in the night so that nice people can be safe, he or she who protects White Suburbia from the uncivilized predators lurking at the door and window.

The gun god wants it devotees to believe that a piece of metal and plastic can make them into a hero. As the above video, as well as this piece taking on Jeffrey Goldberg's claims that America needs more guns not less, demonstrate, a bunch of teachers, rent a cops, and other day trader types with guns are more likely to be Private Snafu than Dirty Harry.

As a helpful bonus, here David Grossman works through the psychology of killing and gun use in the BBC documentary The Truth About Killing. It is well worth watching in this post-Sandy Hook moment when the Gun Right wants to spin fictions about how a well armed school is a safe school.


4 comments:

jenicillin said...

siiiighhh. yes, yes. even tho 6 is definitely not a statistically significant sample size, EVER, yes, this is a good illustration of why arming teachers and everyone else is not an effective deterrent strategy. thanks. ive been a long-time lurker. i guess something made me recently decide to speak. and i dont think its the shooting... maybe the white male denial...! ha! thanks.

chaunceydevega said...

@jen. do unlurk. nice to hear new voices. i hope others chime in too.

jenicillin said...

well, tanks for pointing me at that killing vid. mad depressing. really just confirmed my inner convictions.... only 2.5 of real, human people are ok with killing ANYONE. war idealism and warishness just sucks poor young people (mostly young men, in the US) in hopes to get teh careeer or teh edumacashun, or the somehow-to-get-the-fux-out-of-poverty, so thusly the oligarchy war corprat machine uses them up, and SOME of them eventually get something out of it. ha. girl rant.

Helen Bushnell said...

Thanks for the video link. I am appalled that so many people don't think that it is hard to kill or that having killed someone would be stressful.