- roberturquhart37
- Jan 15
- 20 min read
Updated: Feb 28
I wrote this a while ago – maybe even two years – and the world has moved on, but I think there’s enough in it still worth reading to keep it on file.
2nd Amendment: What is a firearm for?
“It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.”
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
I begin with what Orwell says about guns because I feel it, they do make the heart leap. Or, at least, they make mine leap, and they have done so at least since I was a kid reading ridiculous comics about the essential superiority, against whatever odds, of the British (though mostly English) soldier, Tommy, morally and militarily, over the German, Jerry. Feelings about guns run very deep; not as deep as feelings about sex and sexual orientation, but, somewhere in the psyche, in the unconscious, the two, guns and sex, meet, and then there is trouble – even more trouble than the great amount of trouble that either on its own creates.
Also, though, beginning here focusses the question: what is a firearm for in wartime? And, of course, the answer is obvious: it is for killing human beings. Yes, but that answer is much too general and vague. Over time, military strategy has developed enormously varied and complex modes and techniques of killing: for example, wounding an enemy combatant may be better than killing them outright – the dead combatant is just one, the wounded will take others out of the fight at least temporarily. Warfare demands such calculations.
Anyway, firearms in warfare are made to kill human beings, but there are many different ways of killing, and different weapons kill in different ways.
One particular weapon that has a particular way of killing is the assault rifle, which has become the standard infantry weapon today. Since 1964, the standard assault rifle used by the US military is the M16. The M16 is a variant, specifically for military use, of the AR-15 rifle, first produced by ArmaLite and then by Colt. AR-15 type rifles have also become one of the most popular firearms among American gun owners: in 2021, more than 20 million AR-15 type rifles were in legal circulation in the US, out of roughly 400 million firearms of all kinds (the population of the US today is about 333 million). They are also the preferred weapons of mass shooters: Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, San Bernadino, Las Vegas, Orlando, Buffalo, Uvalde, etc.
The chief difference between the military and “civilian” versions is that the military has selective fire capability, that is it can be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, fully automatic, and burst modes. The “civilian” version is supposed to be limited to semi-automatic (the trigger must be pulled for each shot), however, fully automatic fire can be approximated by use of a “bump stock” (just Google the term if you want to see how one works).
The difference between semi and fully automatic is real and important. Nonetheless, a single bullet fired from a “civilian” AR-15 type rifle does the same damage as a single bullet from the military version. So what is that damage?
Because of its velocity, when a bullet fired from an assault rifle penetrates a human body it causes a cavitation effect: the shock waves create an explosion within the body so that a large volume of trauma erupts around the bullet’s path. This volume is increased by the yaw of the bullet, that is, its turn, on impact, from the line of flight: “bones are exploded, soft tissue is destroyed”. An organ merely close to the bullet’s path can be completely obliterated. Blood loss is enormous, often fatal just by itself. The entry wound will be small (assault rifles are typically of small caliber), the exit wound can be the size of a grapefruit. (NY Times, Guerrero testimony, see links below)
These effects are not at all accidental, this is what assault rifles are designed to do. Much thought, ingenuity and scientific knowledge went into their design, as into all weapons of war.
Velocity, not caliber, is what is so devastating. AR-15s, including the M16, are typically of the smallest standard caliber, .22 (5.56 mm); and the advantages, for killing, of small caliber arms are multiple: so, soldiers can carry far more small caliber rounds.
A bullet fired from an assault rifle has about three times the velocity of one fired from a handgun. The wounds inflicted differ accordingly. A handgun wound typically follows the path of the bullet, a tube, roughly speaking of the bullet’s circumference, entry wound and exit wound more or less the same: not something you want to happen to you, BUT, even if a handgun bullet hits a vital organ, it may be possible to save it, and so also, the life of the victim. A vital organ close to the path of an assault rifle bullet is destroyed, nothing left to save.
The damage done by a single bullet from a “civilian” AR-15 is the same as that done by a single bullet from a military version. The fully automatic capacity of the military version certainly does make it more lethal. But, first, the bump stock (that has been used by some mass shooters) brings the “civilian” AR-15 very close to the fully automatic military version, especially given the entirely different conditions of engagement. Second, even semi-automatic fire can be rapid, as fast as the finger on the trigger, inflicting multiple wounds on one victim.
AR-15 type assault rifles are the weapons of choice of mass shooters – individuals (overwhelmingly men) who plan an assault with the intent of killing as many people as possible. Many of these assaults – especially by men aged, roughly, 18-24 – are on schools, especially the high schools that they attended, and elementary schools. The victims of these attacks are children and their teachers. Children’s bodies are smaller than adult bodies – the younger the child, the greater the difference in size, but the wound from an assault rifle will be of the same size whether the victim is child or adult, large or small.
The testimony of Dr. Roy Guerrero, pediatrician, and lifelong inhabitant of Uvalde, Texas, at the US House of Representatives hearings on gun violence is almost unbearable, and yet, he bore the experiences he describes, he did his job, and he came to Congress to tell all US legislators to do theirs, and all of us who can vote to do ours. (See link below) Called, with no warning, to the Uvalde Memorial Hospital, at about 12:30, May 14, 2022, he found a girl he’d known and treated since infancy in stable condition, and so, he hoped … but the other children brought to the hospital: “Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized, decapitated by the bullets fired at them, over and over again, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.” The AR-15 type rifle gives little chance of survival to an adult, to a child, almost none. Dr. Guerrero and the other doctors and nurses of Uvalde Memorial Hospital were faced with the corpses of 19 children and 2 adults. The weapon used did exactly what its maker, and the shooter, intended it to do.
Assault rifles are weapons of war, designed for war. They are designed not only to kill the enemy, but to kill each single enemy combatant in the way that will most incapacitate the fighting ability of the enemy as a whole. Today’s assault rifle is a technological triumph in the realization of its purpose. It is so in the explosive damage that it does to the internal organs of a human body.
All AR-15 type rifles, military or “civilian”, are designed to inflict such damage: this is their only reason for existing.
Should war be fought in this way? That’s another question. Outside of war – and never take war as inevitable – there can be no justification for the use of weapons of this kind. To understand this, nothing more is needed than to read descriptions (you don’t even have to look at pictures) of what bullets from these weapons do to children’s bodies: read Dr. Guerrero’s testimony: We all know, and wish that we could forget, and yet know that we must never forget, that one little girl could only be identified by her green sneakers, a black heart on one toe.
Firearms are the number one cause of death of children in the United States today.
But remember, assault rifles are a small minority of all firearms in the US (20 million out of 400 million); deaths by assault weapons are a small minority of all firearm deaths; children’s deaths by assault weapons an even smaller minority of all children’s firearm deaths.
…
…
…
… so, how do you feel about those numbers? For example, if it’s 20 million out of 400 million, what’s the big deal? What about 400 million firearms for a population of 333 million?
The assault weapon is a self-proclaimed enemy of human life. It will always be this and nothing else. Every one of those 20 million AR-15 type weapons is always ready and waiting to do what the rifle at Uvalde did to children on May 24, 2022, and what so many M16s did to the people of Vietnam. It is the enemy of human life, but who made it so? Not God, not Nature … we made it so, we, human beings, homo faber, so clever with our hands. We make things and they are our tools, they do what we tell them to do, make what we want them to make. So practical and convenient. We make things on purpose, to realize specific purposes. These things have our purposes built into them, they are purposive things.
Every time an assault rifle tears a human body apart and kills it, it is enacting its own vocation, embodying the purpose of its makers and its users alike (hence the stupidity of the “guns don’t kill people” defense). Every time one of them only wounds and maims, or misses all together, it has failed in its vocation. To use an AR-15 type weapon merely for target practice is to dishonor it and the motto on its coat of arms: Viva la Muerte – Long Live Death, motto of the Spanish Legion, a notoriously brutal unit of the Nationalist/Falangist forces in the Spanish Civil War.
So back to Orwell: “the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do.” Anyone who holds a gun in their hands feels its power, and, somewhere in themselves, longs to use that power. Such a feeling is not unique to guns, it holds for a violin also, or a screwdriver. Things that we make for a purpose have the purpose in them – built into them – they demand us to use them for that purpose, why did we make them otherwise? We broke the eggs to make just this omelet, was it all just a waste? The complaint of the purposeful thing – why aren’t you doing with me what you made me for – is dynamic, it is a movement in us of the thing’s potential, what it is able to do, what it is for:
The thing pushes us from potentiality to actuality. Yes, the actuality of an AR-15 assault rifle is not the same as that of a violin, but bringing in the violin (and the screwdriver) is not arbitrary: what happens with the assault rifle is only different in its specific capability, we engage with all of the products of our hands in this way – and, indeed, with much that is given to us by nature. I think that this is a universal experience, often not recognized, sometimes repressed. But that’s just me, more substantial support is provided by recent neurophysiological work on mirror neurons, which began with the mirroring in one individual’s brain of the actions of another individual, but which has now been extended to a brain’s mirroring response to things (I have plenty of references, but why don’t you look it up). Just as the producer’s purpose was conducted by the instruments of production into the product, so the product conducts its purpose into the one who holds it.
I know all this, with regard to guns (not violins) from: a .410 bore shotgun that I actually fired (yes, I killed a grouse with it); a completely antiquated, non-functional Boer War period .303 Lee-Enfield rifle that my school made us parade with; and what I think must have been a Browning .38 automatic (pistol), that my father somehow wandered off with at the end of WWII, no ammunition, and with which my brother, sister, and I played throughout our childhood (we eventually turned it in during an amnesty for such weapons). And then, since childhood and always, as a passionate lover of Western movies … well, above all, the Winchester rifle – the Winchester 1873! – I have never held one, but I know what it is like to do so.
The point of this tedious autobiography is to admit the power that guns have over – I will not say all of us, how could I know? – but the power that I know that they have over me, and that I believe is one with the power that they have over, for example, the owners of those 20 million AR-15 type weapons. This power goes far deeper than the normal claims for gun ownership, hunting, self-defense, the Second Amendment. (I don’t know how valuable I am as a data point in this argument (I’ll have to ask my friend Markus), but I stopped being interested in hunting when I was maybe 11 or 12, and, due to my comfortable class position, the idea of needing a gun for self-defense has never occurred to me. And yet, I remember holding those guns in my hands …) My own view is that the attraction that guns have for us is sexual, so is bound to our deepest psychological conflicts: I come to this view from Freud. But you don’t need to have any interest in Freud or in psychoanalysis to see that something is happening beyond the stated claims, the desire for guns by those who desire them most cannot be explained by the rational arguments that they present. So, what is to be done?
Action to prevent the pre-planned mass shootings of which Buffalo and Uvalde are among the most recent is absolutely necessary; it must not stand in the way of action to prevent all the other kinds of shootings – that do make up the majority of firearms deaths – nor vice versa: no ranking of one kind over another, action must be against all of them.
In 2020, 59% of gun deaths were by handguns, 3% by “rifles” (a category that includes assault weapons), 36% involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated” (so, possibly, any kind of firearm). Given the overall breakdown, handguns presumably make up a significant share of the 36%. (Pew Research Center, see link below)
In 2020, 54% of firearms deaths were suicides, 43% were murders (this includes mass shootings), 3% “other”. (Pew Research Center, see link below)
Suicide is the most ignored form of gun violence, and yet it counts for the majority of gun deaths. Mental health concerns are clearly relevant. But mental health care is appallingly underfunded. Since the gun lobby, including the Republican Party, likes to hide behind the pretense that gun violence is above all a mental health problem, they must be pushed to put their money where their mouth is (I’m not holding my breath).
However, there is a very clear relation between suicide and access to firearms: for all other kinds of suicide attempt only about 4% result in death; and the great majority of those who survive a suicide attempt do not die by suicide. By contrast, about 90% of suicide attempts with firearms are successful. (Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, see link below) Suicide rates for gun owners, and for members of households with guns, are far higher than for non-owners, and households without guns. (Stanford Medicine, see link below) Reducing access to firearms has proved to be an important way to reduce the number of firearm suicides; or, anything that reduces access to/possession of firearms will reduce deaths by suicide.
This is encouraging, if, and only if, it can lead to relevant gun control policies, especially in light of the alarming increase in the suicide rate among young Americans (ages 10-24). (Everytown for Gun Safety, see link below) But other trends show the difficulty of implementation. So:
The number of shootings on school grounds, or at school events, has been on the increase since the 1990s, with an enormous jump in 2021; 2022 is on track to equal it. (Statista, see link below) But the overwhelming majority of these are nothing like the pre-planned shootings at Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook … Many of them have taken place in parking lots after school events, proms in particular; and the pattern is a long-standing one: fights break out among students, for any number of reasons – this has always happened, especially, but not exclusively, among male students. What is new is the number of students carrying handguns, and as soon as one of these appears a mere brawl becomes fatal. Why are more high school students carrying handguns? Because so many more other people are carrying: this is, of course, something like a refutation by empirical test of the “the more guns the safer everyone will be” claptrap, although it’s hard to believe that anyone, including those who spout it, take it seriously. At the same time, we can only sympathize with teenagers who feel and act in this way. They are in danger.
And this brings us to the “there are just so many guns already out there, how can anything be done?” argument, which, unfortunately, is not easy to answer. The first thing to say is that even the “best” policy will need time to show results, and, on its own, will be merely incremental. A coordinated policy that sees the commonalities among different forms of firearm violence – for example, shootings of domestic partners (overwhelmingly males shooting females), shootings breaking out in a parking lot among high school students, pre-planned shootings by an isolated shooter – while also analyzing the differences, is obviously required, yet, in the US today, seems utopian fantasy. But we do know of effective policies, and it should be possible to try out others and see how well they work. Let us all work together, arguing, disagreeing, experimenting, why would anyone disagree with such a process, what could stand in the way?
What stands in the way? The answer is absolutely obvious, and, in some way, everybody knows it – those who stand in the way know it, proudly, better than anyone else – and yet, even those whose proper task is to fight it, won’t say so, or, at least, not nearly forcefully and unrelentingly enough, and of course, the “mainstream, liberal media” (who brought Trump to power), won’t, because they have to adhere to both-siderism: As with taxes, labor law, as with environmental catastrophe, and so many fundamental issues, the Republican Party has made any rational discussion of gun control impossible. This is not a partisan statement (by the way, I am not a supporter of the Democratic Party). Just look at events:
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn), who made one of the two most important statements after the Uvalde shootings (see link below), has made a desperate, and as far as I know, unprecedented, attempt to find common ground with Republican senators, knowing that it would fall far, far short of the kind of meaningful, common sense legislation favored by large majorities of the American public: but it would be something, and, maybe, a beginning. And what happens? The Republicans say they’ll work with him – Mitch McConnell gives his blessing (a bad sign actually) – now, yesterday (June 16, 2022), John Cornyn (R-Texas), supposed to be the lead Republican negotiator (anointed by Mitch), does a flamboyant walkout – we need a new term, primo don, rather than prima donna, to use for men, who, in the public sphere today are the ones who most exhibit the stereotypical behavior, never ever actually gender specific: “I’m done with talking”, as though he and the Republicans are the ones who have been working for real and significant legislation …
Ok, fresh from his walkout, Cornyn was booed at the most recent Trump-fest, whatever it was, can’t remember, don’t care, for working with Democrats on gun control – poor guy. But yes, the gun lobby polices its own, including every Republican elected to any public office: so what are you going to do guys (in the gender neutral sense), how are you going to decide between your Sugar-daddy’s money and your constituents’ lives? The Texas GOP has made an absolutely clear, and principled … cough, cough, must be something in my throat … stand … cough, sorry, must still be there … on this in its new platform, approved a few days ago: wait, what? did something just happen? Wait, just let me concentrate … YES!!! it certainly did, good honest (white, male) Texans are again having their right to something or other, but it absolutely necessarily involves the right to own and use weapons designed with the single purpose of maiming the human body as much as a single bullet can.
How can you negotiate with people like this? I don’t know how to express my admiration for Chris Murphy (I would have spontaneously combusted weeks ago). But he is right to go on, and get anything through the Senate. Yes, use this against Republicans, but, also, make some, however small, advance towards policies that will save lives, and maybe, just maybe, it can be the beginning of more. He may well not want an old Marxist like me, but, if he’ll take me, I stand with him.
What were they talking about that led Cornyn to his grand primo don walkout? Well, as far as we know, it was about closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole”: at issue here is nothing other than how many women will be killed by intimately known men, nothing else is involved, and yet Republicans use it to obstruct regulation. So, what is it (you all probably know this, but just to keep things straight)?
Under current law – the Federal Violence Against Women Act (1994, expired 2018, reauthorized 2022) – an individual convicted of domestic violence against a spouse, a co-parent (one with whom the individual has had a child), or one co-habiting with the individual, is prohibited from owning firearms. I say “individual” because the law applies equally to male and female assailants, but, as a matter of fact, overwhelmingly, the assailant is male, the victim female – hence the title of the act.
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a great milestone in the struggle for women’s rights. As with all significant legislation, time calls for adjustments. Since 1994, patterns of intimate relations have changed, dating relations, without marriage, children, or co-habitation have increased.
Intimate partner homicides have been increasing since original passage of the Act (1994), and now account for about half of all women’s deaths by homicide. And about half of all intimate partner homicides are now committed by dating partners – that is, they are not married to, nor cohabiting with, nor have children with the victim, and so they are not covered by the VAWA prohibition of gun ownership for convicted domestic abusers. This is the “boyfriend loophole”. (Intelligencer, NCADV, see links below)
Intimate partner homicides with firearms account for more deaths than all other means combined. There is clear evidence that reducing access to firearms reduces intimate partner homicides, as it reduces suicides (see above), and, indeed, all deaths by firearms. (Everytown Fund, NCADV, see links below)
How can Republican opposition to closing the “boyfriend loophole” be explained? “Second Amendment” defense of the “fundamental constitutional rights” of violent men just doesn’t cut it. No, the intersection of the property rights of men, including the (non-existent) right to the private ownership of firearms for private purposes, with Christian, White Supremacist ideology, in which the man, by divine right, dominates the woman, makes everything clear: what else can a true, white, Christian man do? A woman resists him, he shoots her. “Respectable” Republican members of Congress, our friend Mitch, say, would never put things as crudely as that, but, if they don’t hold to some such view, how can closing the “boyfriend loophole” possibly be a problem for them? Well, of course, taking a stand for life against death will lead to boos from the MAGA crowd and its clown-führer, but why do people who have stood for, and been elected to, office in the nation’s legislature, men and women alike, demean, degrade, and dishonor themselves, as all but a small minority of Republican members of Congress have done?
However daunting is the prospect, simply in itself, of reducing gun deaths in a country with a human population of 333 million and a gun population of over 400 million, it could be faced with good heart, BUT … The real problem, including the amassing of firearms, lies with the gun lobby, that is to say, the NRA and its adjunct, the Republican Party, willing to hold the country to ransom, against the clear will of the people expressed in poll after poll.
As I was trying to control the flood of feeling, misery, rage, despair hearing of the Uvalde shootings so soon after the Buffalo shootings, two people, above all, gave me help: Chris Murphy in his Senate speech of that day, and Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, of whom I had never heard (but one of my students, and TA, who, as an elementary and high school basketball player in California, had known of him all her life, quickly explained to me his greatness) in a press conference before a key game that evening. (Youtube links below, please, please watch them, if you haven’t already) I hope it won’t seem flippant to say that between Steve Kerr and Brittney Griner, I, a lifelong disparager of team sports, am going to have to start watching basketball, especially the WNBA and the Golden State Warriors.
Steve Kerr pared the issue down to the bone: 50 people are holding the nation hostage, for what? For power. Who are these 50 people? The members of the Senate who oppose common sense gun control. The practical task of working out effective measures for reducing gun violence and gun deaths is difficult, time-consuming, and will have to include a lot of trial by error, learning by doing. But only when those 50 people and the corrupt interests for which they stand are voted out will the real, practical task begin.
Events are unfolding rapidly. I am going to leave everything I’ve written as it stands, including dates of writing, but here is where we are now, as far as I can see, June 28, 2022: I was wrong about Cornyn and McConnell, they kept to the deal, the Bill passed the Senate, with 15 Republican votes (including theirs), June 23, 2022; it passed the House, 234-193, the next day, and it has now been signed into law by Biden: it is the law of the land, and it closed the ‘boyfriend loophole’! First such bipartisan bill in 30 years. For what it is to be a Republican now, it must be said that the Republicans both in Senate and House who voted for this important, but very restricted and inadequate legislation, deserve to be credited with good behavior, though always remembering that the bar for good behavior in “what it is to be a Republican now” is so low that it is impossible to measure it without a microscope. But, yes, they voted for the bill. BUT:
On June 23, 2022, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court overturned one of the most important, and oldest, gun laws in the United States, the New York State Sullivan Act (1911). Right now, it is unclear quite what the legal ramifications of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), will be, including for the gun control legislation just passed, except that they will be catastrophic. Equally catastrophic, though, are the practical effects, already seen in long queues for concealed gun applications: millions more guns.
In the same week – the week that just ended – the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has gutted the Miranda decision, severely damaged the separation of church and state – and there’s another decision to come that will probably damage it further [June 26, 2022, yes they did it] … AND, OF COURSE, and as we all knew it would, it overturned Roe v. Wade (1973).
Putting it all together – and with previous rulings, notably Heller (2008) – the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has put the American people on notice that it is entirely free to decide cases on the basis of its own, extreme, religio-political agenda, without regard to texts or intent, and without regard to precedent. To anyone who paid attention it has always been obvious that the claims of conservative Supreme Court justices to be originalists or textualists was a lie, Heller proclaimed that lie to the world, Dobbs glorifies the proclamation. Utter contempt for precedent, so for the fundamental principle of stare decisis, is the practical outcome of this lie.
All this week’s decisions hang together, and just as it is vital never to put one form of gun violence above another, so we must confront the onslaught on bourgeois democracy coming from the Supreme Court; from the Republican Party; from the extreme white supremacist groups that now have become mainstream associates, or members, of the Republican Party; from extremist corporate lobbying groups, of which the NRA is one of the most important, but far from the only one; from the extremist media groups, of which, again, Fox News is the most obvious, but very much not alone; and, of course, from the clown-führer, and his more and more pathetic hangers on, who continues to have such inexplicable power over people every one of whom has been betrayed by him over and over again.
When I say the onslaught on bourgeois democracy I mean just that: some of us see ourselves as in a struggle for what is beyond bourgeois society and the capitalist mode of production. But let me say to my bourgeois friends and relations we are a Sunday school picnic compared to what those listed in the previous paragraph want to do to all of us, including you. You know this, but here’s the thing: if any of us are going to get out of this alive the first thing is to save bourgeois democracy. Let’s do that first, and worry about the rest later. And one thing that we all can do is to VOTE, and also REGISTER others to vote (as Amy is doing)!
I believe that if Roe v. Wade could speak, she would say, with Joe Hill:
Don’t waste time mourning, organize!
“Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin