Screeds
Monday, September 20, 2004
Scapegoating In The 21st Century
December 19, 2003
Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority has been hosting an extended discussion of hoplophobia: the fear of weapons. The seed for this interchange was a comment made by a gentleman named Barry in response to this Michael Williams post about having been denied a concealed-carry permit. To spare his readers excessive linkabout, your Curmudgeon will reproduce the salient part of Barry’s comment here:
If I were to take a live, armed weapon and carry it on my person, in public, it would eat away at my sanity just as if it were emitting lethal radiation. To know that I carried an instrument of sure and certain death on my person, available and ready to be pulled out and used at a moment’s notice to possibly kill...a child. A homeless person. An innocent.
[...snip...]
The radiation would rot my brain and I would never be able to live with myself.
Maybe it’s different in California. Maybe it’s different in Tennessee. Maybe I don’t love my family enough...maybe I love them too much. But I know myself, and know that if I surrendered to the paranoia - and I mean that in the most basic sense - there would be no turning back.
I’ll stay in the light, thanks.
What strikes your Curmudgeon at once about this extraordinary bit of prose is the way it slides cleanly past—nay, the way it directly denies the inanimate nature of a weapon. Barry quite baldly states that possessing a firearm would drive him insane. Your Curmudgeon has never encountered an object with that sort of psychoactive potency, nor does he know anyone who has.
Wait, there is that movie series about an evil ring...but let’s stay on point.
In a subsequent post, Kevin draws the necessary contrast for anyone who might have missed it: Barry’s fear of inanimate weapons versus the more legitimate fear of persons inclined to prey on others.
This is an example of one of the most widespread and pernicious irrationalities of our time: the displacement of human maleficence onto inanimate objects. It’s gone so far that it’s permeated our law, which now permits inanimate objects to be charged with crimes and seized from their rightful owners on that pretext.
Any American with three functioning brain cells would realize at once that, with the exception of accidental discharge, a weapon requires a wielder to do harm. The wielder, assuming that he were not psychotic, would have to choose to harm someone, whether for a good reason, a bad reason, or none. But about half of those cortically-adequate Americans would “solve” the problem of gun violence, not by prosecuting the criminals who perpetrate it, but by banning guns.
There’s nothing new here except the psychological angle. A man smart enough to realize that it’s the wielder, not the weapon, that commits the crime must have some reason for focusing on the weapon rather than the wielder. What is it?
Could it be unwillingness to believe in the malevolence of the criminal?
The civilizations of classical and pre-classical times often made use of special rituals and sacrificial animals to stay on the right side of their gods. Whatever transgressions the community had committed in the season just past were transferred by ritual to the soul of the chosen animal. The beast was then dispatched into the wild with its new burden, nevermore to trouble the “absolved” people, who would of course then celebrate their purified status. Among the classical-era Hebrews, the animal was usually a goat; hence the term “scapegoat.”
Well, offloading one’s guilt onto a defenseless animal is no longer politically correct. But the desire to find something to blame for one’s own shortcomings remains with us. Today, we satisfy it by blaming inanimate objects. Guns. Drugs. Money.
As appalling as this practice is in the abstract, its practical consequences are far worse. Rivers of blood have been spilled in the attempt to undo violence by banning weapons, and to thwart dissolution by banning drugs. Today’s crusade against the political applications of money, which goes by the innocuous name “campaign finance reform,” is of a piece with those others, and will bring equally dreadful results.
Men do not kill because they have guns. At most, guns make it easier to kill. Men do not abandon uprightness and abrogate their responsibilities because they can get drugs. At most, drugs provide a convenient distraction from reality, and an excuse for not behaving as one knows one should. Politicians do not become corrupt because they’ve been offered money for their campaigns. The corruption was already there in the politician’s soul, waiting for an offer to arrive.
But to allow oneself to see evil in another opens the gates of self-doubt. Were our positions in life exchanged, would that have been me in the dock? is a question few of us can answer with perfect confidence.
So, instead of condemning the sinner for his violence or dishonesty, we prefer to condemn the occasions of his sin. We blame the weapon, rather than the wielder, and hope that by driving it forth from our midst, we might be spared any encounter with the demons we share with him.
It has never worked. Whatever moral burden the community bore remained with it even after the scapegoat was banished. The proof was in the recurrence of the very deeds for which they’d sought absolution.
Barry and those of like conviction are morally flaccid souls, incapable of seeing strength in others where there is weakness in themselves. A gun is only a tool. A tool for creating injury and death, but a tool nevertheless. A self-respecting man would never descend to blaming a tool for the weakness of its user. Not when the tool has been taken up by millions of other users to good effect.
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