Tool Time

"There must be some kind of way out of here,"

said the joker to the thief.

"There's too much confusion here, I can't get no relief."

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Almost a week after the latest catastrophe the aftermath is in a fairly familiar place.  After a few days of silence the obfuscation and steady turning of the issue has begun.  Whether it is Russian bots stoking our already overheated dialogue or just the revival of many of the same old intractable arguments, things seem to be getting back to normal in America.  Some hope that maybe this time will be different, but I suspect that is going to fade as well as we remember that the righteous and prophetic voices of the Florida survivors get swept under by the constant stream of emotional arguments.

I'm not going to talk politics today.  I'm going to talk tools, because one of the strongest arguments concerning guns and gun control is that the guns are just tools.  As a gun owner and someone who enjoys shooting just for the sake of shooting, I would like to express my appreciation for a wide range of firearms.  I have shot one of the much maligned AR-15 (Armalite Rifle not Assault Rifle).  I have shot a .44 magnum, "the most powerful handgun in the world" according to Dirty Harry, shut up Desert Eagle people, your .50 caliber hand cannons are ridiculous.  Honestly these sort of extreme shooting experiences have their place, but as for what I actually need to own...

Well, let's talk about guns as tools, and the emotional response a lot of men have to tools.  A few years ago the comedian Tim Allen made a lot of money with comedy about how men love tools.  He got his own TV show where he played a man who had a TV show about tools called Tool Time.  A lot of people, including me, get pretty stoked about tools.  Last year I went through the proper legal process in Maryland to purchase a handgun.  All told it took about two months and involved fingerprints and background checks, but in the end I got my Ruger American 9mm and I have spent many happy hours at the range punching holes in targets.  It was a good feeling, and strikingly similar to the feeling I got when I went and purchased a new Stihl chainsaw to save myself the vexation of trying to keep my old Poulan saw running, which seemed to require increasing amounts of sorcery.  I noticed that the feeling of being in control of a new chainsaw, an extremely useful tool, and also a dangerous thing, was very much akin to the feeling I got from shooting a gun.  So I've been thinking about this for a while.

Good tools are a joy, and in my experience the AR-15 in all it's variations is a good tool, but it is a tool whose primary purpose is to kill people, that's what it was designed to do.  My chainsaw could kill people too, but that is not what it is designed to do.  My 9mm handgun, well you could make the same argument about that as you can the AR, but it is different in some important regards.  First of all has to do with ballistics, a 9mm handgun round is deadly enough, inside about 20 meters I can plug away pretty accurately.  Outside that range it becomes more about luck than anything else, unless I'm bracing my hand on a bench, even then, a 3-4 inch barrel just doesn't give you the control over your bullet that a 15 inch carbine barrel does.  Also, a handgun round is relatively low powered, and the slug is sort of big and slow (for a bullet that is).  Mythbusters have done several interesting experiments on ballistics and the penetrating ability of various rounds, if you want, look them up.  The .223 round that the AR platform uses is really different.  It's a fairly small caliber bullet, if you notice .223 is only 3/100 larger than a .22 LR, which is the standard plinker round and far from high powered (deadly enough in the right circumstances still though).  Here is a side by side comparison of a .22 LR and a .223 round: 

You will notice that the .223 has a LOT more room for something very important: gunpowder.  The .22 LR sounds like a little crack when it is fired, the .223 sounds like a righteous boom.  Not quite like a big old 30-06 or some kind of monster gun, but noticeably more violent than a .22 LR.  The .223 is, in my opinion, just about the perfect round for people who like to shoot.  It's relatively cheap, it produces little recoil, and it shoots straight and true.  It is also capable of penetrating through car doors and various sorts of walls.  Then only place you can shoot a .223 in my part of the world is at the range.  You're not allowed to hunt with rifles where I live, because in the flat lands bullets like the .223 or even the .22 can travel a long, long way.

So there is a reason why the people who commit these mass shootings like the .223 as opposed to handguns or other sorts of rifles, they obviously want to do the most damage and tool wise the .223 is a champ for that.

But the bullet alone is not the whole issue, the platform also has a lot to do with it.  I'm going to use a lot of pictures here to explain exactly what I mean.  First let's start with a much more basic tool/weapon, the good old knife, one of man's oldest and most important implements.  Here are pictures of two knives that I own.  I purposely did not include a kitchen knife because I want to try and keep this as apples to apples as I can.  First, here is a Condor Bushlore:

 This is a great knife to use in just about any circumstance, it is a carbon steel blade with any number of uses.  You can chop down small trees with this thing and it is razor sharp.  It's blade is thick enough to do heavy work, but the overall balance and structure of the knife is versatile and can be used for fine carving or cutting up food if you want.  If I am going into the wilderness, I want this knife with me.  I could, in many circumstances, wear it on my belt and have it be pretty unobtrusive.  I could also kill someone with it, if I was so inclined.

Then there is this thing: 

I bought this when I was 17 and had been reading too many Ken Follett novels.  This knife is beautiful to be sure, but it is not good for much except stabbing things.  If I were to wear this on my belt, unless it was part of a Halloween costume, I would look like an utter psychopath. To be honest, I don't really need to own something like this, but I do, and that leads me to what I've been thinking about with regard to guns.
The reason why some people will dig in and resist gun control measures of any sort is because of an emotional attachment to things like that second knife.  An AR-15 is the firearm equivalent of that stiletto knife, it is designed for a purpose, it is good at that purpose and it is a beautiful thing in its own way.  In the hands of a person bent on violence, either knife could be deadly, but I'd be willing to bet that if you gave most homocidal folks a choice between the Bushlore and the stiletto, they would take the stiletto more often than not.
Handling an AR-15 is a different experience than handling a comparable weapon.  Here are more pictures, this is a Ruger Mini-14, which is also a .223 semiautomatic rifle:

It is a close cousin of the AR-15, but it is marketed as a "ranch rifle." and even though it can be dressed up in some pretty tactical gear:

It has not gotten the attention or the ill-use of the AR-15, which looks like this: 

I will be honest with you, shooting this thing makes you feel things, it really does. Honestly, I wouldn't mind owning one, but I can also understand that, if I was of a mind to harm others, putting this gun in my hands would make me more likely to do so.  That's the thing that is so damning to "the gun is a tool" argument, it's not that you couldn't use a Mini-14 to shoot up a school, you absolutely could, it's that, in almost every high profile shooting episode of the last several years from Sandy Hook to Las Vegas to Stoneman Douglas, some variant of an AR-15 has been involved.
As I've said before, there is not a simple solution to this problem.  I am not particularly a fan of prohibition as a means to preventing bad behavior.  I think that our prohibition on various sorts of drugs is a disaster, I think that alcohol prohibition was a disaster, I suspect that just trying to flat out ban guns would also be a disaster.
Most of the people that I know who own an AR-15 or something like it have never shot anything but targets with it. In some hands the gun is safe, in some hands the gun is a beautiful tool, to those people a ban sounds punitive and intrusive. Here is something I firmly believe about our current gun situation: if we are going to make meaningful progress on the state of affairs concerning guns, we need people who really understand the relationship we have with firearms from the inside.  The threat of prohibition is nothing but a shutdown inducing rage button to people who are willing to own guns by the rules.
So the gun control crowd has this problem of alienating the very people who would be and probably should be on their side.  I did not mind at all that I had to fill out some forms and wait a minute to get a gun.  I certainly don't think that that AR should be any less regulated than my pistol.  The reason it's not is because humans are emotional animals, plain and simple.  We should be able to plainly tell that this:

While it may be not that much different in principle from the AR, is probably not going to be quite as emotionally attractive to someone who has broken loose from the moorings of their humanity enough to decide that shooting up a school is a thing they want to do. How can we, as a society, take sensible measures to address that reality?  Slippery slope arguments and false equivalencies are not helpful.  Overheated emotions and increasingly polarized rhetoric are not getting us anything but more dead kids.  Every gun owner I know, and probably most of the ones that I don't, hates what happened last Wednesday, this should not be gun owners against the world, that way lies madness.  We have to find sanity on this issue and we need to find it fast, kids are dying.