Year: 2018

Note (May 19, 2022): The facts in this blog are correct and useful, so I will keep it here. However, I no longer agree with the conclusion. I still believe in regulation of firearms, but I do not think a ban of AR-15 is appropriate or useful. In principle, the Second Amendment, if we agree that it represents a personal right to keep and bear arms, protects the right of AR-15s as much as any other firearm.

Ted Nugent, limited rock musician, NRA board member, and general blowhard, says the Parkland kids don’t know anything about guns, that it’s a lie that semi-automatic weapons were or are ever used in war, and that, if they succeed in restricting guns, the Parkland kids will be responsible for more death and mayhem.

Parkland was the site of a massacre in which a high school student, armed with an assault rifled, murdered and maimed several of his classmates. The United States continues to be out of step with the world when it comes to gun control.

Nugent, like most rightwing gun enthusiasts, misleads the public about guns. He professes expert knowledge of the matter. Of course, whatever knowledge he possesses about guns doesn’t bear on the question of whether certain types of weapons should be banned. These types have no legitimate purpose and controlling them saves lives. But since the right believes expertise makes argument against gun control persuasive, let me set the record straight.

In the mid-1950s, the United States Army asked ArmaLite to develop a version of the AR-10 to replace the M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, which had been used in World War II and the Korean War, as well as the M-14 (semi-/fully- automatic), which was introduced in the late 1950s (becoming standard issue by the early 1960s). The Army wanted a re-scaled and lighter version of the AR-10. The result was the ArmaLite Rifle 15, or AR-15.

ArmaLite sold the design to Colt and Colt manufactured the AR-15 and sold it to the Pentagon. The Air Force started using the AR-15 in 1962. In 1963, with the approval of President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Green Berets made the AR-15 its standard issue rifle. Army airborne units, as well as CIA, soon followed suit. In other words, the AR-15 is a military-style weapon.

That same year, the US Department of Defense rolled out the M-16, which is a modified AR-15. The chief difference between the AR-15 and the M-16 is that the M-16 is selectable to be fully automatic. However, other modifications make the M-16 less reliable and effective than the AR-15 design. For example, the M-16’s increases spin (the barrel twist) which makes the bullet travel a bit faster than the AR-15 but, more importantly, increases its stability when entering the body, a relevant and horrifying difference that I will discuss in a moment.

Ted Nugent says the AR-15 was not used in war. Nugent says that the caliber (.223/.222 Special) is such a feeble round that it is illegal to hunt deer with it. He is right that the gun is not a hunting rifle. Cleanly killing large animals requires higher caliber bullets with greater stability and stopping power and less damage to surrounding tissue. However, the AR-15 is good for killing and maiming large numbers of people. Indeed, it’s even better for this purpose than the M-16 set to semi-automatic, as well as popular handguns.

A bullet from an AR-15 travels approximately 3300 feet per second, about three times the velocity of a Glock (handgun). Its range is more than eight times greater than a Glock. You can easily squeeze off multiple rounds with greater accuracy. When a person is hit with a bullet from, say, a Glock (much larger caliber), the projectile often passes straight through. If no vital organ or artery is hit, then more often than not a person can be saved and recovery is typically complete. A bullet from an AR-15 tumbles, wrecking organs (trauma surgeons describe affected regions as “exploded”). There are physics behind behind wound ballistics. A smaller high-velocity projectile causes more damage than a larger one because lower mass means greater instability when it hits the body. Moreover, because of instability, if the round leaves the body, it’s a danger not only to those directly behind it, but to potentially everybody around it. Because the spin is less than the M-16, the AR-15 is more unstable when it hits the body.

In other words, the AR-15 is so good at killing and maiming—even better than the M-16—because that is what it’s designed to do. It is an offensive weapon designed with wound ballistics explicitly in mind.

Ted Nugent says that the Parkland kids don’t know anything about ballistics. I think they do. Does Nugent? Or is he lying? 

* * *

Why does the NRA want people to have AR-15s and AK-47s in the face of school shootings? Money. Nugent says that the NRA is families. It’s also a lobby for the security and firearms industries. The fact is that school and other mass shootings are an effective marketing tool. It’s free advertising.

Before the Cleveland Elementary School massacre in Stockton, California (January 17, 1989), most people didn’t know these weapons were available. The shooter in that case used an AK-47, sparking a sharp jump in sales for that weapon. But the awareness of the availability of the AK-47 alerted consumers to the availability of the AR-15. The sales of the AR-15 also experienced a sharp jump. With every mass shooting, AR-15 sales spike. 

There was a break in this pattern: the 1994 assault weapons ban, which banned some semi-automatic rifles (as well as certain high-capacity magazines). However, Congress did not renew the ban when expired in 2004. Leading expert on mass shootings, Grant Duwe, who defines the phenomenon as any incident in which four or more victims are killed with a gun within a 24-hour period at a public location in the absence of other criminal activity (drug deals, gang killing, and robberies), familicide, and collective violence and military conflict. He documents that the number of people shot and killed has increased since the expiration of the ban. Louis Klarevas (UM-Boston) examined incidents involving six or more killed and found the following: 1984-1994: 19 incidents; 1994-2004: 12; 2004-2014: 34. That’s a 183% increase in the decade after the ban expired. (So much for debunking Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla.)

* * *

Most concepts and definitions are contestable. However, there is a strategy in avoiding hard truths by problematizing some thing that reasonable people all know to be solid into vapor. Without a basic consensus on what a thing is, no rational discussion is possible. Before Congress allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, the law defined this type of weapon according to a broad consensus among experts: “In general, assault weapons are semiautomatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition that were designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use.” 

The truth is that the AR-15 is essentially the domestic version of the M-16. These are semiautomatic firearms with large magazines of ammunition designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use. The difference between the AR-15 and the M-16 is that the latter is selectable between semi-automatic and fully-automatic. But this is not the difference that makes the former not an assault weapon. The point is what the weapon is designed to do—that is, what its purpose is. This is what the law spelled out. It continues to be a useful distinction and, given that the AR-15 and other assault-style weapons are the weapons of choice among mass shooters, because the weapons does what it was designed to do, that definition should govern the government’s response to the sale, distribution, and use of these weapons.

Four of the five deadliest mass public shootings in U.S. history have occurred in the last five years: the 2017 attack at a music festival in Las Vegas (58 dead); at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 (49); at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (27); and at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas (26). The weapon used in each case was an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle. It’s time to ban the sale and possession of these weapons.

The United Nations Genera Assembly in A/RES/43/150 75th plenary meeting 8 December 1988, in laying out “[m]easures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities and all other forms of totalitarian ideologies and practices based on apartheid, racial discrimination and racism, and the systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” contains a statement that “calls upon all Governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence.”

Our educational system is failing in this task. While many schools teach about the Holocaust, they do not honestly present the reasons why the Holocaust and other acts of fascist and totalitarian action occur or what can be done to prevent them (other statements in the resolution quoted in part above detail the program). Failure to present the reasons for genocide is worse that failing to dwell on one or another genocide. Focusing exclusively on the effect makes particular episodes peculiar and forgettable. Slavery fades from memory when exploitation and oppression are rationalized or ignored. We have to explain the cause and identify those who contribute to it.

The reason why educators fail the world on this matter is timidity. It is a fact that much fascist and neofascist thought draws upon religious ideologies, criticism of which draw the ire of religious fundamentalists. Parents and partisans are quick to stifle teachers who approach speaking truth to power, (hypocritically) arguing that value neutrality and nonpartisanship are values to be asserted over history and social studies that accurately identify the sources of authoritarianism. There is a fear of calling things as they are: religious ideologies are cruel, hateful, and lethal. Until people are prepared to tell the truth about things, the risk that history repeats itself remains great.

In my university course Freedom and Social Control, I read the UN directive cited above and then proceed to tell the truth about authoritarian and totalitarians ideologies and political and legal systems, including theocratic arrangements, such as Islamic states, which are essentially fascist (and I’m not using “essentialist” here as a hedge, but in its actual meaning). I see it as my duty as a member of a global society that must stand for democracy over against autocracy to teach this. Many of my students don’t know about these things. I understand why. Those of us who know better have to step up our game.

I wish to make two points about my antitheism and then reflect upon the matter. First, in addition to criticizing belief in impossible things as its own problem, my antitheism primarily concerns the problem of exclusive and oppressive ideology, especially those religious doctrines that put so-called “divine law”—which is, in fact, man-made or natural law either seeking false legitimacy by appealing to a fiction or estranged from its actual origins. Systems based on such doctrines are intrinsically totalitarian, as they are the product of the cleric who pretends to divine the wishes of an imaginary entity—that is revelation—over against law developed through considered reason and self-correcting method. Defending freedom and reason from such tyranny is necessary work for anybody who truly believes in democracy, human rights, and social justice—and the individual in which these universal values and needs inhere.

Second, there is a view that criticism of such theism must keep its aim on the idea system and leave alone those who advance or embrace this idea system. But this is a rather odd requirement, since, if nobody were advancing or embracing a given form of theism, then confrontation with its ideas would take a different form, namely the scholarly study of and popular interest in ancient mythology for which no significant number of contemporary devotees exist, for example Norse, Greek, or Egyptian mythology. Zeus is not the problem that Jesus is because very few people believe in Zeus while billions believe in Jesus. However, if, for example, Norse mythology and its ritual practices and social attitudes were to make a comeback (and there is some concern that it may), the problem we would be facing would not merely be myths and rituals, but people who were advancing and embracing terrible ideas. Vikings are fascinating historical subjects, to be sure. But the prospect that Vikings would be about, behaving in the ways Vikings behave, is a rather frightening one. We have the pleasure of romanticizing them because we don’t have to deal with them.

Consider fascism. Fascism is a detestable ideology, one that has all the characteristics of the most exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines. In fact, as I have shown in my writings, fascism is a quasi-religious doctrine, which incorporates reactionary Catholic and Protestant ideas. We are, rightly, eager to engage in criticism of fascism as a set of ideas and practices, albeit often, and wrongly, downplaying its religious features. At best, the Ku Klux Klan are “bad Christians.” But the sometimes anemic approach to identifying the religious dimension of reactionary ideologies is made up for by an eagerness to criticize those who advance and embrace fascist ideas. To be sure, those of us who are committed to free speech and expression and open society protect the right of persons to be fascists (I have sharply criticized those who confront fascists with violence), but we also don’t worry about being called “bigots” or “racists” for criticizing—even protesting—persons who advance or embrace fascist ideas and practices.

It is only because the religious species of ideology has been given a privilege in society that other forms of exclusive, hateful, and oppressive ideologies do not enjoy that the public not only doesn’t grasp the necessity of opposing religion with the same vigor and in the same way as we oppose fascism and other pernicious ideologies, but finds something untoward about vigorous antitheism.

This double standard is an accident of history. Religious identity was lumped with other categories of civil rights at a time when secular consciousness was still underdeveloped. Liberals were right to marginalize religion vis-a-vis secular institutions, but they allowed the concept of religious liberty to be conflated with freedom of conscience, and liberalism’s negative conception of freedom warped the understanding of freedom to religious doctrine and institutions (seen, for example, in the failure to tax churches). Religion, unlike other hateful ideologies, was cast as universal, essential, and necessary.

And so an oppressive system became confused with an oppressed category. The homophobe became the victim in the struggle against homophobia. The sexist became the victim in the struggle against misogyny. Corporal punishment was a justified as a moral practice. Moreover, ruling elites continue to find religion advantageous to controlling mass thought and behavior, taking advantage of a deep-seated and long-standing anti-democratic development, a barrier to enlightenment, a political and moral weapon primed to undercut individualism and secular control over cultural, political, and economic systems.

Anticipating what, for some, will be subterfuge, and, for many, a persistent habit of bad thinking, countering oppressive ideologies and their advocates and devotees has nothing to do with oppressing those who wish to organize their lives around absurd and self-harming and self-limiting ideas. With reason, we strive to educate them in this regard, but we should not actively move to control them. One is free to believe in and express belief in impossible things. As Thomas Jefferson noted, government can’t reach opinion. However, extending freedom and human rights to every individual does mean confronting the harm the religious cause others by banning or restricting behaviors (such as circumcision, family and community relations, forms of education, treatment of animals, and so forth), as well as preventing political and legal attempts to undermine the secular forms of government and law that the West has established. Antitheism does not require barring entry to or expelling persons belonging to religious (or other pernicious ideological) persuasions. But it does seek integration and assimilation of all persons into Western understandings of freedom, rights, and justice.

Unfortunately, there is a movement on the left, decades old now, that works at cross-purposes with the enlightenment project to liberate human beings from oppressive thoughts, practices, and relations. It is based on the postmodern notion, represented in deep multiculturalism and notions of cultural and moral relativism, that all cultures are equal in terms of their capacity to meet the universal needs of human beings and should therefore not merely be tolerated, but embraced and allowed to shape the West. This notion often comes with a self-loathing of Western values that often suggests and sometimes asserts that Western culture is evil, racist, and colonialist, and therefore wrong to defend its institutions and practices from those seek to reorganize the West along non-Western lines – that is, raising theocratic ideals, values, and practices above secular and democratic ones. This movement tells the West that it is as undeserving of its values as those who do not presently enjoy them.

One can see this tendency in Michel Foucault’s celebration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—not a revolution at all, but a conservative and reactionary countermovement that reversed secular progress and forced Iranians back under the veil of ignorance. It was here that the term “Islamophobia” was invented, used by the all male clerical “authority” to psychologically batter women who did not want to return to the chador. The anti-humanist Foucault confused a patriarchal, antigay, and atavistic assault on human freedom and progress with a “movement from below.” But I am being too charitable. After all, Foucault writes, “It [the Islamic Revolution] impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” As if human beings need a spiritual dimension in the rational and compassionate governance of their affairs. Although he attempts to hide his enthusiasm for tyranny, chalking up his interests to an academic fascination with “political will,” the Nietszchean element running through left French philosophy (and previously in German national socialism), pining for heroes against the forces of science and secularism, and full of self-hatred for their own contributions to humanity, pokes through. The “will” here is not so much political in any liberating sense, but rather the will to power. The nihilist rejects the possibility that human beings can design an egalitarian and democratic system from individuals, and dreams instead of supermen and the irrational. The spiritual dimension in politics. This is the mark of totalitarian thinking. This is what Walter Benjamin warned us about.

Multiculturalism, by tolerating the subordination of the individual to irrational ideologies that absorb, redirect, and drain cognitive, emotional, and moral energy, is an elite strategy designed, or at least functioning in effect to undermine class solidarity, weaken democratic possibility, and blunt human being.