This morning my friend Sam Levin (many of our friend, actually) tweeted that a Denver woman reportedly brought a gun to her child's elementary school classroom and threatened the other children with it. Presumably, she threatened them that they were not to bring guns to school themselves, as has been happening more in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. This incident in Denver represents a potential micro-example or exhibit of the dialectical implications of our gun culture.
By assuming that deterrence makes us all safer, we can become our own worst nightmares when the weapons capable of deterring seem threatened by law. But we have to sort out two messy conceptual issues, namely laws and culture, before we can address "gun culture" as anything but a mysterious process and thus hope to change it as a society. When we talk about society in general, and what society should do, the same should apply. Step 1 is acknowledging that the LAW is both founded and upheld with violence. Not always accidentally, but certainly so in this case, an act of violence creates the necessary social psychological (read: cultural) alignment for a law to get passed. These days, more laws get passed as a threat against abstract potential violence, such as terrorism and nuclear war, and revolution, than as a result of actual attacks by any of the above (9/11 being the big exception; Columbine being another). But the existing laws and their precursors have all been forged in the furnace of violence and sustained with the threat and use of violence, and because any violent act affects the legal landscape, however subtly, and thus the law itself, in a natural, almost organic way that is counter-intuitive to the romantic idea that our laws are scientific, rational, and perfectible. It was in this sense that Jefferson wrote that the tree of liberty must be watered occasionally with the blood of patriots. Note too that though there are no firearms mentioned in this statement, the statement itself is often used by survivalists and 2nd amendment extremists to advance their cause. But natural and organic evolution are quite contradictory to scientific legal design. If any individual or group can alter the law through its reaction to the use of violent means, then each attempt at a scientific legal measure will be based on a certain amount of myth. And the hybrid between the two main strains of power, namely might-right and rationally-derived laws, has been more than plain in cases since the dawn of modernity in America. Take for example the law used to justify our denial of the Cherokee application for Statehood at the Supreme Court, for those of you who think that such a dinstinction between natural and positive law is long-since-outdated in the course of world history. So we have this tension between our need on the one hand to perfect our laws according to the rational tools of the enlightenment, and on the other our incapability of ever capturing a prolonged period of social stasis wherein such a process might reach a coherent, scientifically-based rational conclusion. America represents one of the best, most prolonged, attempts, thanks almost in whole to one of the most static periods in legal history due to the industrial revolution, its victory in World War II, and its wisdom in creating institutions such as the UN and the World Bank that would bind the interests of others to our own. WIth that period of greatness came great responsibility, and we used that power, initially, for responsible ends; we not only acted to improve our domestic law, but also sought to improve international law and enforce them in the requisite role as world policeman, making international law increasingly positivist (scientific) and legal outcomes rational, as opposed to anarchic and might-right, the height of which was the system under either of the two world wars. We were wildly successful in this role as global policeman, in the sense of currying favor for that role while decreasing violence and violent rhetoric at the diplomatic level, until the height of the cold war, which I describe as the Vietnam war, at which point the rails truly came off the wagon and we began to pursue an overwhelmingly irrational foreign policy based on natural law and conquest. In doing so we had the hubris to think that our domestic positive legal system would remain intact behind the insurmountable ramparts of our military might. But violence abroad bread both violence and nativism at home, and a string of domestic regressions to the positive legal framework ensued, culminating with the events of September 11, which dealt what was to be the final blow to an era in which America was capable of driving overwhelmingly rational positivism-based legal outcomes both domestically as well as internationally. The fact that the use of non-state-sanctioned and unjustly state-sanctioned violence had made its own mark on our system both hurt our reputation as a leader abroad and undermined the efforts of rational-legal activists at home. It is frankly quite difficult to get excited about any gun control half measure that will unquestionably reflect that unholy balance between rationality and fear.
Both Gun Culture and Society as a whole contain this unstable interaction of law and violence, or as we might say for the sake of this discussion, law and culture, violence being a type or characteristic of culture. And culture itself has a material base and a psychological superstructure, meaning that the economic conditions of any individual or group proceed the culture or psychology of the individual or group causally. Small group processes demonstrate this in the laboratory; people perceive themselves as groups either out of real material interests or a false sense of common interest created through common symbols. For some nations, think of the flag. I am tempted to throw Iran out there, but who's to say whether their antagonism of the west is truly in their worst interest or not. At any rate, failing to appreciate these variables (law and violence, and materialism vs. psychology) could cause any movement to derail; even if we do get our preferred solution enacted, there would still remain countless unanticipated-and-thus-unaccounted-for-complexities, at the societal, communal, familial, and especially individual levels of evolutionary development and subjectivity.
Just so we're clear, subjectivity relates closely to the question of agency, as in, the subject is the unit of self-conscious action, the agentive I or WE that acts. Although we tend to think of our whole selves as subjects, nothing is ever that simple and subjectivity is always interacting with structure to create new forms and mixtures of subjectivity. Society is intersubjective, in that sense, and strives to forge a balance between two archetypal forms of subjectivity, the premordial, premodern anarchic individual subject and the Kingly subject. The latter is much more like what exists in China, while the former is, for better or worse, much more like what exists in America; one could certainly make a good case that the primary unique function of American society is to preserve as much individual subjectivity in our culture and individual psyches as possible. But even though we certainly try to encourage personal liberty (Judith Sklar defined liberals as those who sought to maximize the freedom of the individual without making any utilitarian compromises limiting the freedom of any other individual) in our laws, customs and psyches, there are tradeoffs that must take place that limit that freedom. A single example of this is the Patriot Act, which allowed warrantless wiretapping by the Government and a host of other "utilitarian-style, Benthamite encroachments" on individual subjectivity in favor of a government capable of acting (a kingly subject) in what is purported to be the collective good. And perhaps it was. I do not happen to think so. I am a staunch liberal interested in no utilitarian compromises. I am a post-Lenininst in that sense. I would not have disbanded the Russian Parliament after elections didn't go my way. The main perceived tension with the gun control law is between individual and collective subjectivity. Creating a China-style gun control regime might not be a popular thing in America for reasons that are purportedly based on the notion that the individual should have as much autonomic agency as possible, a very culturally American idea that has been with us strongly despite the 1892 closing of the American frontier.
So there is embodied in every law a necessary tradeoff between individual and kingly subjectivity that can manifest itself institutionally in a myriad of forms, forms that are both culturally and materially moderated. We tend to place our faith in solving the REAL issues in the institution of our courts. This is a fairly kingly form of subjectivity; the decision-making power comes from one's station and position in the hierarchical structure, with medical and correctional institutions just some of the myriad additional institutions being captured under that pyramid. This is taking place at a rate that few have grasped the implications of; the best works exposing it have been in the Continental school of philosophy, starting with Nietzsche and moving on through Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Arrendt, Deleuze, Gauthari, Adorno, Horkheimer, Altheusser, etc. The great kingly institutions that are still de-facto democratic are distinctly modern; their laws are also distinctly modern, and their enemies, their tactics, and their effect on the legal framework of US society are especially modern. In this situation, it difficult to imagine how any agency any longer exists, whether kingly or individual, at the hands of the massive institutional machinery of modern society. I think that in its best manifestation, 2nd amendment support is wary of this modern machine. But aside from remaining in a holding pattern of potential insurrectionary violence, there is little gun owners can do to undo the machinery of modernity.
So there is nothing the libertarian or anarchist or Marxist can do to stop the march of modernity or favorably change its outcome. Ironically, every violent move seems to create the opposite of the intended effect. Every non-violent protest creates the opposite of the intended effect as well, to the extent that it uses strikes or other forms of coercion to extract demands. Likewise, "going along to get along" and making changes in our own lives is an incredibly objectifying experience for the individual. It is this objectification that I think speaks to the state of mental health and its implications on gun policy. People are told to be happy with their miniscule stake in political outcomes and enjoy the culture of objectification, to be objects themselves, whether political objects (those the political society captures) or sexual objects (those the objectified culture of individuals pine for), ironically the most powerful are by nature the most docile, and are offered as sort of a sedative to quell the more unruly factions of our society.
In this sense, neither mental health funding nor tighter gun control are capable of alleviating the frustration that the experience of objectification and non-agency, and the loss of subjectivity, can bring. We can look at these things as consequences of the definitive victory of capitalism over socialism, where the choice between the two might have forced both systems to compete to create the most liberty. Moreover, capitalism creates the first fallacy by failing to acknowledge the primacy of material relations in moderating institutional and cultural outcomes. But America has traditionally been able to counteract that fallacy by an almost occult-like devotion to the myth of pure individual agency, even though this has created structural problems with human well-being by making individuals falsely responsible for their own lot in life. Still we have little choice but to work within this system and hope that when it does destroy itself, it doesn't take the majority of us with it. In this context, that of an inevitable systemic malfunctioning of the capitalist system, I think a system with less guns would be more ideal. As for helping young people deal constructively with the uniquely American sense of powerlessness, objectification, and false sense of cultural entitlement, I think parents have the majority of the responsibility with the exception of cases of real mental illness, where I would defer to the psychiatrists, etc. This is where I bring it back to the student