As many or most people know, a baseball bat, a real one, can be a formidable weapon. An aluminum bat is much more dangerous than a wooden bat, because it's virtually unbreakable. A wooden bat can break the first time it hits something, and as soon as it has so much as a crack in it, it becomes much less leathal. But if someone advances on you brandishing a baseball bat, wood or aluminum, with the intent of hitting you with it, the most sensible course of action would be for you to run away. Screaming for help and covering your head might be good too.
A really stupid thing to do, if attacked by someone with a real baseball bat, would be to stand your ground and defend yourself with a miniature baseball bat, the kind which are sold at ball parks as souvenirs. To win in a fight with a miniature bat against someone using a real bat, you would just about have to be some sort of Jedi knight.
And chances are, despite your daydreams, that you're not some sort of Jedi knight.
The widely-reported story of a school district in Pennsylvania arming its teachers with miniature baseball bats and telling them to use the bats to fight back in case of a shooting reminded me that I have just such a miniature bat. It commemorates the Seattle Mariners winning their Division Series in 2001. I got it at a garage or lawn sale in Anchorage, Alaska in 2003 or 2004, for around 50 cents. I wrapped the thick end in scotch tape because it had a crack in it.
It's hard to imagine something which would be more useless in a fight, against someone with a firearm, or against anyone or anything else, than such a miniature bat. It is simply not designed for combat. The thin end, the handle, is so thin that the bat would snap in two the first time it was used to hit something heavier than a small rabbit. And maybe it would snap if you hit a small rabbit, too, if the rabbit was close to the ground at the time. If you missed the rabbit and hit the ground, it's hard to imagine you could use the bat again, unless you recovered one piece of it and swung with that, which would be much sillier still than swinging the entire miniature bat. Whether you were fighting a mouse or a squirrel or a rabbit or a human being armed with an AR-15 style rifle equipped with large magazines and a bump stock, I think you would be better off with nothing in your hands, just your fists, than with a miniature souvenir baseball bat.
The school district which distributed the miniature bats to be used in case of school shootings, and the school district which has given its students buckets of rocks for the same purpose, and those whose advocate arming teachers with guns and have mostly failed to do so, because in most cases the teachers had sense enough to tell them to forget it -- all of these people are emphasizing fighting back. And they are all fighting back, desperately. Against the very notion of stricter gun control in the US.
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Saturday, April 14, 2018
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Guns
I admit, I'm fascinated by guns, especially by contemporary double-action revolvers, I don't own a gun, I don't plan to acquire one, but I think about them a lot, daydream, even. For example, I have a recurring daydream of being a Sheriff in the southwestern US, somewhat like the character played by Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men. I've spent some time in stores looking at the revolvers in the display cases and talking about them with the people behind the counters. When I was a kid I upset my pacifist family by buying and carefully studying a few gun magazines. Shooting Times was the best one, in my opinion. There were also thick annual reference guides listing every sort of gun you could get; I think they were published by Shooting Times. My Mom wouldn't let me get those annual volumes. We couldn't even have toy guns.
I don't want to hurt anybody, much less shoot them. In the fantasies about being a Sheriff in some place like Arizona or semi-rural southern California, I sometimes have to resort to carrying a gun to protect the citizens whom I have sworn to protect from a bear or mountain lion. I imagine that some other government agency calls me and angrily tells me to stand down: they want to capture the animal and return it to a place more far away from people. I tell them that I hope they succeed in doing exactly that, but that I am still sworn to protect the people in the area, and if I get to the mountain lion or bear before they do, rather than risk a person being mauled and perhaps killed, I will shoot it. My office has a live satellite image of the animal, and we're glad to share it.
To those who have a zero-tolerance policy against shooting animals, whether by hunters or law enforcement, I ask whether they are vegetarian, or at least only eat meat which was raised free-range. I flunk that test, and I know that a lot of meat and poultry is raised under conditions much more cruel than anything anyone ever did when they were hunting.
I'm in favor of much stricter gun control. I think that people who show tendencies to violence or the potential toward violence or potentially violent mental instability should be separated from guns with all reasonable and unreasonable means.
And I'm autistic. And some people who've gone on mass-murdering shooting sprees may or may not have been autistic. So some people think that autistic people should be at or very near the top of the list of those who need to be kept away from guns.
I don't think autistic people are more likely than average to go on shooting sprees, in fact, I suspect that we're less likely, and that those shooters mentioned above may not actually have been autistic. I don't think I'm crazy. I don't think that autistic equals crazy, or dangerous, or mentally unstable. Autistic people may sometimes seem crazy or dangerous or unstable, but, for the most part, that's because we're different and difficult to understand, and if and when we are better understood, we reveal ourselves to be mostly quite gentle and harmless.
So this leaves me with the very uncomfortable question of how I should react when -- I think it will be when, not if -- greater gun control comes to the US at long last, and it includes restrictions applied to autistic people. On the one hand, gun control is needed, badly, and I shouldn't try to slow it down. On the other hand, if we autistic people are kept away from guns, because we're thought to be crazy, does that also mean that we'll be prevented from driving, or having bank accounts, or from holding certain professions for which we may be well-qualified?
Life is sloppy and imperfect, and in emergencies -- the lack of gun control in the US is a huge emergency, just in case it wasn't entirely clear that that is my opinion -- in emergencies, some people's rights and privileges tend to get stepped on. Wars have collateral damage. We try to minimize it.
Today on Facebook, someone sarcastically said: if it's too soon to talk about yesterday's school shooting in Florida, can we at least talk about Sandy Hook now? That made me wonder whether Smith & Wesson have a Facebook page, and whether yesterday's shooting was mentioned on it. They do, they have a very popular page, and yesterday's shooting is not mentioned on it. Weak. And, unfortunately, hardly surprising. In the 1990's, an executive at Colt mentioned in a magazine interview that he was not opposed to all forms of gun control, and the gun buyers' backlash and boycott to that was so severe that it very nearly put Colt out of business permanently. Much like the Republican party, in its relationship to the NRA and Trump and many other things, the gun industry has very few people with the guts to stand up against the nuts. And that's truly shameful.
I don't want to hurt anybody, much less shoot them. In the fantasies about being a Sheriff in some place like Arizona or semi-rural southern California, I sometimes have to resort to carrying a gun to protect the citizens whom I have sworn to protect from a bear or mountain lion. I imagine that some other government agency calls me and angrily tells me to stand down: they want to capture the animal and return it to a place more far away from people. I tell them that I hope they succeed in doing exactly that, but that I am still sworn to protect the people in the area, and if I get to the mountain lion or bear before they do, rather than risk a person being mauled and perhaps killed, I will shoot it. My office has a live satellite image of the animal, and we're glad to share it.
To those who have a zero-tolerance policy against shooting animals, whether by hunters or law enforcement, I ask whether they are vegetarian, or at least only eat meat which was raised free-range. I flunk that test, and I know that a lot of meat and poultry is raised under conditions much more cruel than anything anyone ever did when they were hunting.
I'm in favor of much stricter gun control. I think that people who show tendencies to violence or the potential toward violence or potentially violent mental instability should be separated from guns with all reasonable and unreasonable means.
And I'm autistic. And some people who've gone on mass-murdering shooting sprees may or may not have been autistic. So some people think that autistic people should be at or very near the top of the list of those who need to be kept away from guns.
I don't think autistic people are more likely than average to go on shooting sprees, in fact, I suspect that we're less likely, and that those shooters mentioned above may not actually have been autistic. I don't think I'm crazy. I don't think that autistic equals crazy, or dangerous, or mentally unstable. Autistic people may sometimes seem crazy or dangerous or unstable, but, for the most part, that's because we're different and difficult to understand, and if and when we are better understood, we reveal ourselves to be mostly quite gentle and harmless.
So this leaves me with the very uncomfortable question of how I should react when -- I think it will be when, not if -- greater gun control comes to the US at long last, and it includes restrictions applied to autistic people. On the one hand, gun control is needed, badly, and I shouldn't try to slow it down. On the other hand, if we autistic people are kept away from guns, because we're thought to be crazy, does that also mean that we'll be prevented from driving, or having bank accounts, or from holding certain professions for which we may be well-qualified?
Life is sloppy and imperfect, and in emergencies -- the lack of gun control in the US is a huge emergency, just in case it wasn't entirely clear that that is my opinion -- in emergencies, some people's rights and privileges tend to get stepped on. Wars have collateral damage. We try to minimize it.
Today on Facebook, someone sarcastically said: if it's too soon to talk about yesterday's school shooting in Florida, can we at least talk about Sandy Hook now? That made me wonder whether Smith & Wesson have a Facebook page, and whether yesterday's shooting was mentioned on it. They do, they have a very popular page, and yesterday's shooting is not mentioned on it. Weak. And, unfortunately, hardly surprising. In the 1990's, an executive at Colt mentioned in a magazine interview that he was not opposed to all forms of gun control, and the gun buyers' backlash and boycott to that was so severe that it very nearly put Colt out of business permanently. Much like the Republican party, in its relationship to the NRA and Trump and many other things, the gun industry has very few people with the guts to stand up against the nuts. And that's truly shameful.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
14th Century: Empires Fade Away While Clocks And Guns Appear
I notice things sometimes.
I'm re-reading Steven Runciman's Sicilian Vespers, determined to read it much more slowly this time, in hope of retaining more. On pp 23f Runciman says that in the mid-13th century, the old Medieval empires were coming to an end: Frederick II gave the Holy Roman Empire a last appearance of splendor; the Papacy was losing its claims to Empire; the Byzantine Empire was in steep decline; the Abassid Caliphate was near its end, while its erstwhile rivals, the Ommayads of Spain and the Fatimid of Egypt, were already gone; and the Sung Empire in China would be gone by 1279. Only the Mongol Empire was still strong, but soon it too would break up into national parts.
Multinational empires were giving way to nation-states. (In the 13th century, "nation" was still very similar to "people who shared one common language.") But what also rose in Europe along with the nation-states, most notably and strongly in England and France but also in Spain and elsewhere?
Mechanical clocks, and guns. No-one knows for sure when they were first made, and there is often controversy over what part of the world can claim to have invented what, but wherever and whenever they were first invented, guns and mechanical clocks were definitely in use in Europe by the early 14th century. By the end of the 14th century there were clock-towers in churches at the centers of towns all over Europe, and guns were known all over Europe and gaining in popularity in European armies.
Is it a coincidence that empires went away at the same time that mechanical clocks and guns appeared?
I have no idea if there's a causal relationship there. It could be a complete coincidence.
A couple of notes: some people say that Ghengis Khan, born around 1162, died in 1227, had huge cannons. This is a linguistic confusion: when guns first appeared, and also for a considerable time afterwards, they were often described with terms which had been used for thousands of years to describe things such as catapults. There can be very little doubt that Ghengis Khan had huge catapults. Whether there were any guns in the world during his lifetime, however, is far from certain. Also: the Chinese were using gunpowder and rockets for centuries before there were guns in Europe.
I'm re-reading Steven Runciman's Sicilian Vespers, determined to read it much more slowly this time, in hope of retaining more. On pp 23f Runciman says that in the mid-13th century, the old Medieval empires were coming to an end: Frederick II gave the Holy Roman Empire a last appearance of splendor; the Papacy was losing its claims to Empire; the Byzantine Empire was in steep decline; the Abassid Caliphate was near its end, while its erstwhile rivals, the Ommayads of Spain and the Fatimid of Egypt, were already gone; and the Sung Empire in China would be gone by 1279. Only the Mongol Empire was still strong, but soon it too would break up into national parts.
Multinational empires were giving way to nation-states. (In the 13th century, "nation" was still very similar to "people who shared one common language.") But what also rose in Europe along with the nation-states, most notably and strongly in England and France but also in Spain and elsewhere?
Mechanical clocks, and guns. No-one knows for sure when they were first made, and there is often controversy over what part of the world can claim to have invented what, but wherever and whenever they were first invented, guns and mechanical clocks were definitely in use in Europe by the early 14th century. By the end of the 14th century there were clock-towers in churches at the centers of towns all over Europe, and guns were known all over Europe and gaining in popularity in European armies.
Is it a coincidence that empires went away at the same time that mechanical clocks and guns appeared?
I have no idea if there's a causal relationship there. It could be a complete coincidence.
A couple of notes: some people say that Ghengis Khan, born around 1162, died in 1227, had huge cannons. This is a linguistic confusion: when guns first appeared, and also for a considerable time afterwards, they were often described with terms which had been used for thousands of years to describe things such as catapults. There can be very little doubt that Ghengis Khan had huge catapults. Whether there were any guns in the world during his lifetime, however, is far from certain. Also: the Chinese were using gunpowder and rockets for centuries before there were guns in Europe.
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