On 2012-12-25, at 11:24 AM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> Ames is presenting an entirely new approach to the subject. I haven't digested it completely yet -- and I'm not sure he has, either -- but it's an interesting idea that supports neither your Chomsky quote nor anything else you've said on the subject this week.
You would like to read this into the Ames piece Doug posted, wouldn't you? But in fact, the article is of note precisely because it announces Ames' break with the very position you've been arguing here in your rather snide schoolboy manner for days - a position Ames describes below as his formerly "reflexive contempt for people…who tell you that gun control laws are the answer." Or at least that was the view you were tenaciously clinging to until the day before yesterday, when you suddenly declared with doe-eyed innocence: "Who said I was against gun control?" That mild retreat constituted progress of a sort, although I'm still awaiting a reply to my query about which gun measures you now favour.
In any event, here is Ames:
"There’ve been other massacres like Newtown in the past — where the killer has no direct relationship or grievance to the victims or the site of the shooting, a lone and severely mentally ill adult for some reason chooses to massacre school children in their school. They’re rare and often spectacular. It happened in Stockton in 1989, leading to California’s assault weapons ban; it happened in Britain in '96, leading to a total handgun ban; it happens in China more and more lately, the adult attacker always uses a knife rather than a gun, meaning lower to nil death counts, and astronomical numbers of wounded.
"Until now, I have largely avoided getting dragged down into the gun control debate, in part because gun proliferation doesn’t explain why 'going postal' first exploded into the culture in the late 1980s, and has worked its way into the American DNA ever since. Gun control or lack thereof doesn’t explain why these kinds of rampage shootings only appeared in the late Reagan era and spread ever since then. And there must have been my own personal prejudices too — I grew up with guns, and despite a couple of bad episodes involving guns and a drunken violent stepfather, I have a reflexive contempt for people who haven’t gone shooting and tell you that gun control laws are the answer.
"Well, guess what? Their knee-jerk solution is more right than mine.
"Passing gun restrictions today probably wouldn’t do much to slow down rampage massacres, at least not for awhile — but the politics of sweeping gun control laws could have a huge transformative effect over time. It’s no longer possible for me to ignore that fact."
As Ames shows, it's ok to change your mind - for whatever reason. Those who have lived their lives on the left, including myself, have been required to do so frequently as circumstances changed, and there is no shame in that.
So if you're as enthusiastic about Ames' article as you profess to be, this can only be understand to mean that you concur with his turn from opposition to support of the growing demand for effective gun control legislation. If you want to claim this to have been your position throughout the entirety of this discussion, and that you've simply been "misunderstood", we can leave it at that. I'll consider there there is no longer any daylight between us on the fundamental question, no need to create artificial differences where none exist, and that we can finally put this tiresome and mostly unproductive bickering behind us.