House of Eratosthenes

I get the distinct impression that we’re all arguing about something here that doesn’t have anything to do with guns. Like Mencken said, puritanism is the fear that someone somewhere is having a good time; liberalism is a fear that someone somewhere is taking charge of a situation, protecting themselves, making a profit, doing something to adapt to reality or make life better for themselves in some way.

I was thinking that during the health care debate. I see them pushing toward a single-payer plan and I think…okay…your cousin or your niece or somebody, got a blood condition and ended up dying because they couldn’t get medicine, now you want a guarantee for everybody, I can certainly understand the motive. But then they go on to: After we provide this public “insurance” coverage, you can’t go and supplement that by buying your own plan, or if you go see a doctor and pay for it out of pocket, then you should be fined or jailed. And I think, well, what’s the motivation there? I can only conclude that their passions are tied up in this other thing — nobody should ever be able to help themselves.

Of course, I’m talking about the modern, post-1968 American liberalism, not the classic liberalism.

I was inspired to go down this road because of this article he put up about what’s going on in South Dakota…

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard on Friday signed a bill allowing teachers to carry guns in school, making his state the first to enact such a law since the Newtown shooting tragedy.

The bill was pushed by gun-rights supporters who say arming teachers could help prevent tragedies like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 students and six educators died. The law, which goes into effect July 1, will allow school districts to arm teachers and other personnel.

But the measure prompted intense debate in the capital, as several representatives of school boards, school administrators and teachers opposed the bill during committee testimony last month. They said the measure could make schools more dangerous, lead to accidental shootings and put guns in the hands of people who are not adequately trained to shoot in emergency situations.

I can just see it now: Eek, a gun-carrying madman, he’s shooting us, do something. Sorry, I have my pistol and I have my bullets, but I have not been adequately trained to shoot in emergency situations. The whole pattern of thinking suggests someone who wouldn’t know an “emergency situation” if it walked up and kicked him square in the ‘nards. Doesn’t the very phrase itself implore whoever might be present to do something fer Chrissakes?

This is the kind of thinking you get when people pay a lower social penalty for yelling “no” than for yelling “yes.” I think I can pretty well guarantee, nobody at the meeting, or interviewed, would stand behind the statement: We think if the situation arises, we will get a better result if the new policy is not in effect. At least, I think that might be true. I think, it isn’t that they actually believe a no-guns policy will bring a better result; I think, in their minds, the objective of bringing a better result is a ship that’s sailed out of sight, it isn’t on-topic anymore.

That’s why I get frustrated when committees decide too many things. We all like to pretend it isn’t true, but committee decisions are mostly about social victories and social defeats. Committee decisions, therefore, tend to be meaningless but nice-sounding, boring bromides. Training! Yeah, you have to have training!

Just like the firefighters who didn’t save that drowning guy. The deep thinkers go through all the right motions and put on this appearance that they’re thinking things through in this “emergency situation,” but their decision ends up being one of “if I’m dangling off the cliff and there’s nobody to pull me up who’s attended the proper training, I’d rather fall.” Just complete balderdash.

I’m trying to understand this thinking. I think what they may be trying to do is point our society in the right direction; like, if we say “you can’t save that guy unless you have been properly trained,” a few years following such a proclamation we’ll have a bunch of people running around who’ve been properly trained, when otherwise, we might not. So they don’t mean to say, I want the guy to drown. They mean to say I want lots of trained people. Kind of like me, when I put my car keys or sunglasses in a very, very special place and thereby force myself to recover my deteriorating abilities to remember things, then end up completely panicked when I can’t find them again.

But I take that sort of silly “opportunity” because it’s a situation in which nobody will pay the penalty if it doesn’t work, save me. That’s the whole point. And it isn’t that I’m trying to do right by others, it’s more like I don’t want to be embarrassed: If I’m losing my faculties and a disaster must ensue, let it be a controlled disaster, which I must endure and sort out in solitude, so I can at least see where I stand.

This does not apply to complete strangers, standing around helplessly, waiting to be mowed down by a guy with a gun. By the only guy around who has a gun…because the teachers might be lacking in the proper training, and so have been disarmed. This makes no sense to me at all. And then you have those other issues. The health care. We have lots of big cars around my area, which annoy me just as much as they annoy the liberals. But you know, a V-8 pickup truck with a ball hitch, say what you want about it, but it is capable. You can’t tow a boat up to Folsom Lake and launch it with one of those silly smart-cars. And the liberals are not annoyed by the same thing that annoys me. They’re seeing someone poisoning the planet — read that as, somebody who has been told what to do by liberals, and failed to obey. I see someone who is extremely likely to not own a boat, who bought a big car so they can sit way up high, feel safe, and drive like a jackass.

Could it be jealousy? The way I was raised, if you and I are doing something and some special challenge emerges, you fix it while I cannot because you prepared yourself somehow…to me, that is a message that I should go get hold of whatever that thing was so that next time I can be ready. So if pliers are needed, you have just taught me I should carry a Leatherman or something. Could it be there are other people out there who, going through the same experience, react with something like “he should not have been able to do anything I can’t do”? That’s about the only way I can make sense of this. I remember the first Mrs. Freeberg used to get upset with me if I used “big words,” which caused a lot of tension because I didn’t know what a big word was. And, if I learned how to do anything she couldn’t do, or grow facial hair, or do anything she couldn’t do. Years after the divorce, I discovered to my surprise that I’d been married to a democrat.

So, maybe that explains everything. “I can’t do that, so I don’t want you doing that either” is the real sentiment, “not unless you’ve been properly trained” is just the window-dressing, the sheep’s-clothing. Helpless people, who’ve lost their ambition for ever extricating themselves from their helplessness, want everyone else to be helpless.

This would fit my operating theory that left-wing politics, in our day and age, are nothing more than failure to mature past about middle or high school. It’s all about doing what you want. The other guy does something you can’t do, you want to go all tall-poppy on that guy and chop him down to size; if you can do something he can’t do, you want to climb to the highest mountain and shout it and brag about it. Obviously, acting on both of those wants is injurious to the long-term functioning of your society, because it requires disparate levels of social allowance — you must be privileged to do things the other guy can’t do. A more egalitarian alignment is required, for the good of a long-functioning and peaceful society. In one of those situations, or another, you must behave in ways not necessarily to your own liking at the time, to be patient, and/or improve yourself. As normal people mature, they learn things like this. But, of course, nobody ever said we were all required to.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Sometimes the “training” thing is about worrying that amateurs will do more harm than good. At least some of the concern about unlicensed doctors and lawyers must have to do with this reasonable motive, rather than about creating a price-fixing monopoly.

But the business of prohibiting people from paying out of pocket for an upgrade over the publicly available service is about (1) envy and (2) locking down the borders. There’s a reason totalitarian countries have their gun turrets pointing in at the border: the system doesn’t work if people are allowed to leave it. For the same reason, we can’t have school vouchers, because families that care about education will cherry-pick their kids out of the public school, leaving it unfairly without support. The public school system can’t survive if it’s got to compete with alternatives and can actually lose a share of its tax support for every consumer that chooses to go elsewhere.
- Texan99 | 03/11/2013 @ 11:16
Yeah, well-said. I think the paranoia against nominally skilled but clumsy amateurs has some reasonable thinking behind it, but I’m always a bit perplexed (since I’m the guy they’re worrying about) at what an incredible head of steam is channeled behind this concern, without anyone even claiming to have some anecdotes to offer, even to help establish a credible priority.

To my way of thinking, the trolley’s left the tracks if the system is laboring under problems with both supply and demand, at the same time. A “free” market, after all, should suffer from one of those or the other. But not both at the same time. But that’s my definition. They won’t let me decide that for everybody else. And they shouldn’t, since I have a stake in it. But it does seem to me that, in the focus groups, glittery words like “trained” and “training” receive much more positive feedback from the thoughtless and low-information participant than they should, and it further seems like the rest of us are paying a lot of hidden prices for this. Everybody likes “trained professionals,” nobody really wants to pay for it, either in terms of the cost of training, or the cost of leaving the service unfulfilled for lack of success in finding these trained people.
- mkfreeberg | 03/11/2013 @ 11:31
Ve must haff experts!

No one should be allowed to do anything without a proper license, and everyone is entitled to endless supplies of expert services at no cost.

Check out the Coyote Blog excerpt I just put up at Rotten Chestnuts, about not trusting the hoi polloi to tie their own shoelaces.
- Texan99 | 03/11/2013 @ 12:23
Another part of it, I think, is the plague of credentialism. It’s in a lot of people’s economic self-interest to pretend that “training” — i.e. a piece of paper saying you’ve passed this or that class — is valuable in itself. How else would art history majors ever get a job doing anything?
- Severian | 03/11/2013 @ 16:52
By going to law school, if my own experience is a guide.
- Texan99 | 03/11/2013 @ 17:41
Really? The teachers?
Oh goody, put the only defense in the hearts and minds of the group folks who disproportionately are Testosterone challanged, Liberal, and supplanted to the “teach” zone rather than the “Can” zone.

How about this…
ANYONE who has reached at least the default position (based on age) of “adult” deemed to need “special training” in firearms, probably should NOT be put in the position of “stewardship” of firearms in a designated “Gun Free Zone”. Let alone the whole “Could you establish suitable cover, ignore incoming fire,stop, consider the backdrop,take careful aim, , and double-tap at center body mass, another person of ANY (fill in all “Affirmative Action” qualifiers here), move, and repeat as necessary?”

IMHO, most, not all, folk that have migrated to the “teachers” paystub station in life
won’t “feeeel comfortable” with that. Adding the range/hit miss ratios of most “trained” police/soldiers doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy either.

Some folks seem to concede to the issue of guns, ONLY as long as they’re issued to folks with “proper credentials” AKA “Gub’mint paystubs/permit to “practice”.
But…but…if the National Progressive “Education” Workers folk, credentialed with a union card, were to be required to (ie) take Anger Management Classes to (ie) procure ammunition, (a mandatory psych evaluation might be in order as well, whackos tend to gravitate toward “exposure” in otherwise honorable careere positions with “captive” charges- teacher/priest/counselor/party clown/psycologist/professor etc. etc. ad nauseam ) wouldn’t that “Any mandated treatment for potential mental issues …?” question on permit/licence applications, red flag such folk for concealed possession of a Pistol/Revolver suitability?
- CaptDMO | 03/12/2013 @ 15:42
Because the issue is control

They can’t control you if you have the ability to help yourself
- Fai.Mao | 03/13/2013 @ 00:30
If someone were there to intervene, then you would eliminate the opportunity for the innocent to become victims.
- chunt31854 | 03/14/2013 @ 02:11

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Don’t Help YourselvesMonday, March 11th, 2013

Don’t Help Yourselves
Monday, March 11th, 2013