Searching for Meaning in Failure

Two years ago, I made the abrupt decision to end my library career. If you combine that career with my previous time at a bookstore, I spent over 30 years working for institutions that either lent or sold books. My decision was abrupt in that it came earlier than I had planned, but I’d seen it coming for a long time. In fact, it was a moment of failure that I had feared for almost as long as I can remember.

As far back as elementary school, I would wake up and face almost every day with at least some amount of dread and resentment—dread for the places where I didn’t want to be doing things I didn’t want to do and resentment for the crushing sense of obligation that made me go there and do those things anyway. I feared that one day, I just wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, so I tried to keep my momentum going. In my professional life, I rarely took more than a day or two off at a time largely for this reason.

Not every day was bad. I found moments of triumph and happiness along the way, but problems big and small never stopped piling up. No one thing broke me. I can’t blame my employers. I can’t blame my family. I can’t blame unfortunate events. I can’t blame anyone or anything but myself.

I opened 2020 with a professional victory, but it was a victory I’d pursued for almost all of my supervisory career. I can’t take credit, but it was an achievement I’d wanted—recognition and compensation for the talented individuals I had recruited, trained, and led. However much this long overdue victory added to my momentum, though, it was immediately absorbed by the covid emergency and the chaos that followed.

By 2022, my nominal “retirement” date was just over four years away. Early as that might seem, I had already pushed it back when I decided to leave California a decade ago. Nevertheless, my feared crash finally came that March, and it came in a question from my wife. Why do you care so much more about work than about your family?

My momentum failed, and I fell flat on my face. I pounded my fist on the table, shouting my answer. I don’t care about work more than my family. I prioritize work because I feel like I have to, and I have fucking hated it almost every single day.

Those who know me also know that hate is not a word I apply lightly.

But I was well and truly broken. I may as well have been 10 years old again, sitting in the principal’s office at my elementary school, shedding hopeless tears, and wondering how I could make it through even one more day. I wondered that once more, but this time I couldn’t go forward—at least not on the same path.

We don’t get what we want, and I know that. Life is unfair, and the universe is completely and utterly indifferent to our concerns. The things I actually wanted out of life have been achieved only fleetingly at best, and most remain out of reach or appear permanently foreclosed at this point. Caveat: I acknowledge that permanence and foreclosure may be artificial limiters, but that’s not a topic for this post.

Call it a midlife crisis—or an existential crisis, as my daughter would say—but I had to make a change. I had to find another way to live. Much to my wife’s disappointment, I had to find something that was about more than just putting another paycheck in the bank. Money was never the most important thing for me, and I know that’s too easy for me to say as someone who has almost never wanted for the lack of it. Nevertheless, my decision was about much more than a career change.

And that brings me back to why I worked in libraries and bookstores. These institutions sit at the end of the literary supply chain, but I’ve always wanted to work at its beginning. Ever since I first decoded the written word, I have imagined writing my own fanciful stories. Of course, throughout all those years of imagining, I had made essentially no progress.

I told myself that I needed more time to focus. I needed opportunities that I didn’t have due to all of my other responsibilities. Well, quite unintentionally, I’ve managed to carve that opportunity into my reality. I still have plenty of things to do, but now I can find a few hours for writing without stealing them from tomorrow. No more excuses; it’s time to put up or shut up.

Ironically, though I just pointed out my perpetual lack of progress, I was starting to make actual headway during the last few years. While that progress had come mostly to a halt during all the recent stress, I had accomplished something that I never had before. I had plotted a complete story arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end—and I had started drafting chapters.

It’s funny, embarrassing even, because this project was completely unexpected. Instead of my usual dabbles in science fiction and fantasy, something my daughter said inspired a “realistic” idea that became the story of an awkward romance between a struggling writer and an ambitious academic. Yes, in part and on multiple levels, it’s going to be a novel about writing, which has been done many times before, but I think my approach will at least follow a less well-traveled route.

This novel will almost certainly be trash and will probably never see the light of day, but plenty of trash does get published. Either way, I’m going to finish it. I’ve written hundreds of pages of story notes and character profiles, and I now have 12 more-or-less complete chapters in draft, covering the story’s first act.

I have a long way to go, but at least I have a map to follow this time. Nothing stands still either, and life has accelerated again since the end of my wage-trade career. My business and other responsibilities demand more and more of my time, so my writing has predictably slowed. Though I started them over a year ago, Chapters 11 and 12 remain unfinished—in part because I’ve been trying to write them in the wrong order.

My novel itself has also become just one segment of a larger tapestry. I follow inspiration where it takes me and am usually but not always pleased with the results. My characters have minds of their own and won’t necessarily do what I want them to. Shocking, I know.

Whether or not it’s only my first installment, I’ve given myself a rather luxurious five-year deadline for completing the project. This is partly for historical reasons. Early on, I decided that the story would be set in 2024, perhaps because I thought I could mine some droll political humor from an election year and add another source of interpersonal conflict to a story that lacks even a little dash of fisticuffs. Well, that detail turned into something more … interesting than I had predicted, but now I’m committed to the bit.

So, after a lifetime of dreaming, I’m finally poised to achieve some literary success—however personal it may be. I don’t have to publish. I just have to finish the novel. Whether it’s trash or something special, that’s what matters. Either way, then I can move on.

I wish doing so would solve all my problems, but of course it won’t. Leaving all the bullshit of public-sector employment behind didn’t solve my marital problems. Indeed, I’ve wondered more than once since then if I quit the wrong institution, but as my fictional heroine’s mother will remind my would-be narrator, nothing is ever perfect.

When I wake up tomorrow, though, the new day won’t fill me with dread and resentment. I think I’m done with that … forever.

On Pandemics and Psyops

I have mixed feelings about the covid pandemic and the surrounding hysteria—but I suppose this fact exposes my thesis. The global pandemic was both a real health emergency and a manufactured crisis. Whether or not the offending virus was engineered in and escaped from a lab, its effects were and still are undeniable. As I recover from my second round with the resulting disease, I figure it’s time to reflect on this duality.

First, though, I give my caveats. I’m not a scientist, nor am I a medical professional. I’m merely a historical observer and just another anecdote among billions. I have no special or secret knowledge and can’t judge the veracity of the many competing claims about the virus itself or about its vaccines.

Second, for the record, I was vaccinated in May of 2021. I received the traditional single-dose vaccine produced by Johnson & Johnson. I did so willingly, but I’ll come back to this later.

Third, I should acknowledge where I was in my life when the pandemic began. In 2019, after several years of gloomy uncertainty, I had consciously chosen to be optimistic about the future. Indeed, as 2020 opened, I reached a new professional high point in my public-service career. The pandemic thus became the opening act of my own two-year crash back to the mean.

As of today, covid has been blamed for over 6.9 million deaths worldwide since January 2020 (Worldometers). We’ll probably debate whether these estimates are too high or too low for many years to come, if not forever. Canonically, George Floyd may have been the only person to die with but not from covid, so while I’m clearly in the too-high camp, I also have no doubt that the disease killed many people. If I take Switzerland as a representative example of a developed nation that didn’t suffer significant concomitant social unrest during the pandemic, she still experienced an all-cause mortality rate six percent higher than expected in 2021 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Six percent may not seem like a lot, but my own arbitrary threshold for concern in such matters is one percent. Nevertheless, the Swiss example was a rate change, not an absolute mortality figure. Averaged over the last three years, covid has had a gross mortality rate of less than one percent overall—or about 0.34 percent per year—assuming the high numbers I cited earlier. I’ll note that this is still over three times higher than the best worst-case scenario I described in January of 2020 (Twitter).

Accordingly, while the pandemic was arguably worse than my blithe expectations, it also demonstrably fell below my threshold for concern in retrospect. Hindsight is great, but I had only suspicions at the beginning of the outbreak—though I consider these confirmed at this point.

For many years, I had watched what I took to be psychological operations come out of China and spread through the Western media. Stoking fear of an invisible threat was an easy, low-cost strategy for a socialist state to attempt to influence geopolitical rivals without resorting to the risks of kinetic warfare. Before covid, there was bird flu, SARS, swine flu, and other potential pandemics. These diseases were all real and had real victims, but the psyops never took hold.

Covid was different, whether because the media ecology had changed or the virus itself was more infectious than previous examples. This time, we fell for the psyop. Remember the videos of people dropping in the streets of Shanghai? Obvious theatrics, looking back, but even I went along with the official narrative, despite my skepticism.

I participated in the efforts to limit the spread of the virus when they were voluntary but bridled when they became mandates. Still, I set aside my principles to enforce the mandates—and got sued for the privilege. That this took a moral toll on me shouldn’t have been a surprise. I broke somewhere along the way, but that’s another story.

I never feared for myself, but I worried for the more vulnerable. I was glad, for example, that both my parents had retired before the outbreak. They could more easily avoid dangerous environments while the virus attenuated and vaccines were developed.

I took the vaccine with the protection of others in mind. I didn’t want to become a vector for something that would hurt other people. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it didn’t work. It didn’t provide immunity at least.

Did the vaccine mitigate the danger of the disease? I don’t know. Without positive test results, I couldn’t have distinguished my two bouts with covid from any other common cold I’ve had over the years. On the other hand, my reaction to the vaccine made me sicker than I’d been in at least a decade.

Thousands and thousands of people have reported vaccine injuries. Again, I don’t know the veracity of these claims, and some number of adverse experiences have to be coincidental. What I do know is that I won’t be taking a booster anytime soon. I hope I did make the right decision, but I have to allow that it’s a toss-up at best. Either way, the man I tried to become in 2019 died during the pandemic, if not because of it.

My psychological injuries aside, other damage from the pandemic response was less subjective. Businesses were destroyed. People lost jobs. Children were cheated.

The current educational paradigm is collapsing—which is another topic entirely—but the slapdash approach to “protecting” children during the pandemic robbed the model of what little benefit it still had. Academic outcomes went down across the board (Education Week). I watched my own daughter struggle in online classes. Despite my encouragement and help, her grades suffered during these, her middle years of high school. She bears some of the responsibility for her shortcomings, but I’m sure many of the problems would have been resolved had she actually been in the classroom.

Nevertheless, I remain cognizant of the human negativity bias. It helps you survive in a dangerous world, but we’ve made ourselves so much safer than ever before from privation, from disease, from predators, and even from each other that our natural threat-detection algorithms are out of balance. We now too easily see small risks, dangers, and obstacles as existential threats. Maybe this was another reason why the covid hysteria was able to grab hold of us.

Therefore, though I regret what we lost and lament the damage done, I hope—I think—we will learn from the pandemic. As always, there are positive agents and forces at work, and our arc of history has shown that these succeed over time. Humanity’s unlimited future may be a victory harder to win than even I expected a few short years ago, but all of the ingredients are still there. We just have to put them together.

Cellular biology is mostly about chemistry, and we can do chemistry. If we don’t throw civilization away in some tantrum or another, it’s only a matter of time before our technology can mitigate all biochemical threats. I understand now that the price will be almost unbearably high—even if I hope this perceived downside of up is my own negativity bias spinning out of control—but I also have to see success as baked into the equation.

That is what remains of my optimism from 2019. The pandemic changed my course and undoubtedly helped push me onto a darker path, but painful as this blow was, it broke chains too—which is yet another topic for yet another day. The truth behind the emergency may never be fully known, and we probably won’t agree on it if it ever is, but we did learn a little more about ourselves and our world … for better or for worse. 

The Civil Right to Bear Arms

Yes, you have the natural right to bear arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, and in the United States of America, that right has finally been confirmed as a civil right.

It has taken a long, strange journey to get to this point. Never mind that the first battles of the American Revolutionary War were sparked by an attempt to seize American arms. Never mind that the U.S. Constitution was explicitly amended to protect the right to keep and bear arms. Never mind that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that if black slaves were recognized as free citizens, they would have the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Never mind that the racist, slaving traitors who provoked the worst war in American history didn’t hang—but that’s a battle for another day.

In less ancient history, it’s been 14 years since the U.S. Supreme Court finally, reluctantly confirmed that the Second Amendment really did recognize an individual right to keep and bear arms—to own and carry weapons for self-defense and other lawful purposes in other words. Unfortunately, due to a quirk of American jurisprudential history, that fact still had to be incorporated among the several states. Never mind that the U.S. Constitution is still “the supreme Law of the Land.”

Nordyke v. King, an unlikely case about gun shows out of California, suddenly took center stage. For a moment it looked like the litigation would quickly establish incorporation for the Second Amendment right. Hopeful, naïve civil libertarians predicted that the citizens of California and similarly benighted states would win their rights within 18 months—but instead we got an education in en banc review. Instead we saw the lower courts in prohibitionist jurisdictions—where the unrepentant traitors’ bigoted poison had so long festered among otherwise liberal minds—revolt against the plain language of the Supreme Court.

What was supposed to be a quick victory for individual liberties became a long, exhausting and divisive slog through the courts—and even through the White House. Once we did eventually win incorporation in McDonald v. Chicago, constitutionalists, right-to-arms advocates, and civil libertarians lost again and again when we tried to make something meaningful out of the Second Amendment. Coalitions rose and fell, friendships were made and destroyed, and the Supreme Court seemed content to allow the lower courts to ignore its guidance and continue to treat the right to bear arms as “a second-class right.” That is … until today.

In the majority opinion for New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.… New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.” Moreover, the ruling insists upon textual and historical analysis alone when determining the constitutionality of any laws regulating the right to arms, negating the “intermediate” approach used by the lower courts so often during the last 14 years.

You have the right to carry firearms for lawful purposes … but under Justice Thomas’s reasoning, licensing regimes and other categorical prohibitions should all fall. Of course, time will tell, and the price to get this far has been steep.

However, for those of you in the six states most affected by today’s ruling, if you worry about “blood in the streets” when law-abiding gun owners are allowed to carry their weapons, you shouldn’t. That fear has always been based on propaganda. After the ruling has been implemented, you won’t notice any difference. In fact, after a few months, you will probably forget all about this … or maybe you will decide to exercise the right yourself.

Going Post-Political

In 2015, I wrote: “I was recently told that I’m too political, which is ironic given how strong the temptation always is to disengage from politics. However, doing so might be as dangerously unwise as trying to eliminate politics altogether. That said, the present political gulf seems to be widening to that point where it becomes unbridgeable, destroying friendships, dividing families, and ruining nations.” Unfortunately, the situation has only grown worse.

Despite my own confidence in language and the written word, there is apparently nothing that I can write or say that is going to change anyone’s mind … or even sway perceptions away from preconceived positions. Instead, everywhere I look, the political vitriol seems to be increasing. There is less and less interest in dialog or discussion—and the few who do call for reasoned discourse with political opponents are often ostracized or attacked by their own factions. The “other side” has simply become evil … something that must be destroyed by any means necessary.

The implications are unsettling. There are only two ways to resolve any dispute. We can reason with each other, relying on rational conversations to discover mutual benefit … or we can apply force, whether outright violence or mere coercion. In the current political climate, the opportunity for the former option appears to be diminishing rapidly. Differences of opinion have become existential threats … as it were.

Much of my own political motivation has been about avoiding violent conflict. We live in historically exceptional times, so the conflicts shaping up around the world threaten to be catastrophic beyond any previous experience. Furthermore, violent revolutions rarely accomplish whatever noble goals their leaders may espouse, even when they succeed from a military standpoint.

Violence is inherent in current political systems. It may be veiled or controlled, but it is always there, lurking within governments, no matter whether they are corrupt or benevolent. How can I change that fact? How can any one of us?

In truth, I think there are very few who want to change this situation. State power is seductive. The temptation to apply force when you have overwhelming amounts of it at your disposal is undeniably strong. Just a little coercion here or a little violence there … Couldn’t that solve any perceived ill? Even generally non-violent people aren’t willing to give up that option … especially when they can exercise it by proxy.

In light of this, violent conflict seems inevitable. If nothing I can do will change any of it, then why subject myself to the anguish and frustration of political vitriol?

… This piece has been in the hopper for over a year now. Obviously and unfortunately, some of my primary worry has come to pass. Cities have burned, and good people are alarmed as we approach another election in the supposedly United States. This piece was supposed to announce my political silence …

I didn’t publish it … until now … which is probably good, because I failed in my goal to be silent. I had to speak out at a certain time and place … and we’ll say that it didn’t go well.

Properly chagrined, I will admit that there is only one socially acceptable choice in the upcoming American election …

Revisiting a Heated Debate

Once upon a time, the debate over global warming and climatic change was mildly amusing to me. I could point out the false assumptions, the inadequate science, the contrarian historical evidence, and the typical human arrogance wrapped up in the matter, but I’ve grown very tired of it all now. As I noted several years ago, the obvious and most practical “solution” is already at hand, and I will revisit that in part today.

First, though, I put solution in quotes above because the most important potentially false assumption is that global warming is a problem at all. It may well be, but the facts are not yet in evidence for such a conclusion. Our models are inadequate and have failed to accurately predict outcomes thus far. Alarmism simply isn’t warranted.

Nevertheless, as I’ve previously stipulated, climatic change is something we should be concerned about. There is ample historical evidence for this, and in the longest term, we will have to actively manage the climatic conditions of our habitats, wherever or whatever they may be, if we would have human life and civilization continue indefinitely into the future. The short-term risks, though, are minimal and probably self-correcting.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that legitimate scientific inquiry and concern have been co-opted by political factions that are anti-capitalist and to some degree anti-human. They would slow, halt, or even reverse economic development for a variety of reasons, ranging from misguided environmentalism to outright misanthropy. These factions have spread the dubious alarm and fanned the flames of fear to engender public support for their political goals—and if their most radical proposals are enacted, billions of people will have to die. We will have replaced a remotely possible climatic catastrophe with a very certain political catastrophe.

For the most part, the way to mitigate potential climatic disasters is to keep doing what we have been doing throughout much of the modern era: lifting more and more people out of poverty through global economic development, reducing environmental pollution through improvements in energy technologies, and adapting to ecological changes when necessary. While our times are historically exceptional, these processes aren’t anywhere close to their theoretical limits. Taking the optimistic view, human civilization is only at the end of its beginning.

No! We’re at the beginning of the end! If we don’t do something right now, global warming will lead to mass extinctions and render the planet uninhabitable! Or so the alarmists would have us think. This doomsaying would be laughable … if it weren’t becoming the mainstream narrative believed by so many otherwise reasonable people.

That brings me back to the most obvious and practical solution to the technical problem of climatic management. The primary driver of climatic effects and cycles is solar radiation, sunlight. If we want to control or at least manage the terrestrial climate, the simplest and most direct way would be to control insolation, the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface.

There are several so-called geoengineering proposals that could achieve this, but the safest and most straightforward would be a series of orbital reflectors or shades. A constellation of such satellites could regulate global temperatures in a dynamic and very controllable manner, decreasing or increasing insolation as required. It’s a solution that would be both elegant and permanent.

The cost of such a program would not be insubstantial, but it wouldn’t be outrageous either. The technological concepts are decades old and would require no scientific breakthroughs to implement. I expect that initial development and deployment of the system would require less than $100 billion. Ongoing maintenance should be considerably less expensive, and follow-on benefits could likely repay the investments.

An array of solar reflectors would work well in conjunction with another proposed space-technology asset, the solar-power satellite. A fleet of these spacecraft could collect solar energy in space and beam it as microwaves to receiving stations, where it would be converted to clean electrical energy. While certainly not the only way to improve solar-power generation on Earth, space-based collection and re-transmission would overcome the reliability/availability problem that local ground-based collectors will always face.

Solar power holds a lot of promise even without on-orbit generation, but it probably can’t supplant hydrocarbon fuels in all applications. The real breakthrough in energy technology will be controlled nuclear fusion. Effective long-term implementation of that technology will also almost certainly require the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, but the implications of essentially unlimited energy are staggering.

The availability of energy is at the root of all economic systems. The modern economic revolution is due in large part to the high energy density and relatively easy accessibility of our hydrocarbon fuels. Again, despite the doomsaying, petroleum is not going to be exhausted anytime soon. In fact, given unlimited energy, non-terrestrial resources and high-energy conversion methods can deliver virtually endless supplies. That’s when pollution and climatic effects should become our primary concerns.

A fusion-powered infrastructure would open a range of possibilities. Indoor, climate-controlled farming would become viable almost anywhere on the planet … and beyond. High-intensity water-purification and desalination processes would become affordable. Pollution reduction and capture technologies would become similarly inexpensive. And, of course, as basic survival needs became vastly easier to meet, societies would have more wealth to direct toward solving secondary and tertiary social problems.

In fact, the chief dilemma human civilization will face in the future may be surviving its own prosperity.

American Political Dénouement

Since the unexpected election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, I have been struggling to frame my thoughts on the matter. Plenty of others have already described the electoral strategies and polling errors that explain why the political prognosticators got their predictions so wrong, so there’s little for me to add there … though I was equally wrong. Instead, I keep returning to the concept of an historical inflection point—a point at which things begin to change more rapidly than usual, whether for better or for worse. Recognizing the beginning of this inflection point drove one of the most dramatic decisions of my life, so the remarks that follow will be both personal and historical.

While many commentators have explained the electoral results accurately enough, only a few have touched directly on some of the deeper social and cultural issues. These are historically and politically interesting, so I will add my comments to the record here before indulging in more personal and philosophical commentary. However, my interpretation is no doubt incomplete … and keep in mind that where I impute political motive, I do not imply malevolence. Political organisms are fundamentally amoral, but I assume that individual political actors are pursuing good intentions—even if their would-be leaders are in fact sociopaths.

First, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee orchestrated the most impressive propaganda assault in American history, if not in all of human history. As frightening as it was, I do have to confess my awe. In collusion with the predominantly “liberal” mainstream news media, the Democrats engineered Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nomination over the more populist Bernie Sanders and positioned the obviously unelectable Trump as her opponent from the Republican Party.

Once he had secured the Republican nomination, the media launched an all-out attack upon Trump’s character. Donald Trump is boorish and impolitic, but that doesn’t make him a racist or a sexist. The allegations and “news” stories that I examined collapsed under minimal scrutiny, though I remain ready to be convinced by solid evidence. Again, very little malevolence is implied … at least below management levels. Would-be journalists pursued salacious stories until their political biases were confirmed and no further. In short, their work was lazy and incompetent, but I have no doubt that they thought they were serving the common good.

Of course, that is the historical irony. The mainstream media exercised their greatest moment of influence just when they lost control of the public narrative. Even though they couldn’t sway the overall architecture of the electoral cycle, alternative media sources on both the political right and the political left could and did point out mainstream propaganda on countless occasions. Though this honesty didn’t change my own curmudgeonly vote, I’m quite sure it did influence many, many others.

Here, I must also note that no grand conspiracy was required. Both parties were simply acting in their own interests. The Clinton campaign worked hard to make sure that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be displaced by another upstart, and the left-leaning media wanted to actualize its vision for the arc of history. As the WikiLeaks releases showed, there was direct collusion to some extent, but general goals were shared regardless.

Second, political kinisthesis had its effect, if barely. Voters have been sorting themselves throughout the United States. “Liberals” have been migrating to the coastal and urban bastions of restrictive regulatory schemes, high tax burdens, and generous public welfare benefits. “Conservatives” have remained in or moved to the rural reaches of “flyover” country, where governments are a little less intrusive. These latter voters tipped enough of the right states in Trump’s favor to win him the Electoral College, even though Hillary won the more populous states.

I retreated from California partially in acknowledgement of this effect just over three years ago. While my adopted state of Washington also went to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party has been losing ground in this arena, dropping 3.4 percentage points since AD2008. Other electoral results suggest political change, as well. For example, my county commission tipped from Democratic officers to “independents” this time around. Contrast this trend with California, where an even more dominant Democratic Party held onto its position or made moderate gains … and where the Republican Party lost 5.5 percentage points since the AD2012 Presidential contest.

This process is ongoing and may in fact accelerate in the coming years, as “conservative” cohorts of the baby-boom generation retire and migrate out of expensive “liberal” states. (I may have been ahead of the curve on this particular social surge.) The importation of left-leaning future voters has been exposed as the Democratic Party’s main countermeasure to this trend, but it will probably be stalled for at least the next four years. Even then, efforts to normalize illegal immigration have mostly affected states that the Democrats already control—but I will return to demographic transitions a little bit later.

My study of history has broadly focused on identifying causal relationships or their agents and their long-term social effects. This holistic examination of historical causation has given me the faintest glimmer of understanding for the historical forces and possibilities that act upon human civilizations. As usual, these are easier to recognize in hindsight, and no one has advanced a satisfactory theory of historical prediction to my knowledge, so what I attempt might best be described as metahistorical analysis.

At least, it is a means to understand why your initial prediction was wrong. What you thought would happen—or wanted to happen—just wasn’t historically possible. That’s where I was at the end of AD2013, when I made the decision to leave California. The historical model I was working to actualize collapsed. California was not going to become the state I needed it to be within my lifetime … or more importantly within my daughter’s lifetime.

The arc of American history had entered an inflection point. Therein, the possible outcomes became especially murky. Dramatic change comes out of inflection points. They can be times of glorious revolution or of horrific social disaster. We’re seeing the beginning of that now—and human civilization may lie in the balance.

Global historical trends may be better served in some future post, but as we emerge from the inflection point, they will all become relevant. The United States has merely been on the leading edge of Western history by some combination of luck and genius, becoming the bellwether of Enlightenment culture. If we Americans fail, the odds of Western civilization surviving the 21st century drop considerably, I suspect.

What did the election mean in this respect? Will President Trump and a Republican Congress tip us up the positive curve? Would a President Hillary Clinton have sent us down the negative curve? I don’t know. I expected terrible developments under a Clinton administration, but these also might have stoked the political will to make real positive change—or they might have literally destroyed the republic. The Trump years will avert any immediate disaster, I’m quite sure. We have at least a second chance to shore up the institutional safeguards that protect constitutional governance and individual opportunities and freedoms. However, if that fails to occur, I doubt the political will can ever again be rallied to fight for those values.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be—and there has been no shortage of jokes wondering about what’s happening on the “real” timeline. Impressive as it was, the collusion to put Hillary Clinton into the White House backfired. An honest election would have seen Bernie Sanders, championing progressive socialism for the nation, facing off against someone like Rand Paul, advocating for individual freedom and opportunity. Important issues would have been discussed … and the future of civilization would have been decided in an informed manner.

Instead … we called each other deplorable names.

What is historically possible? We’ve accomplished many great things in the 300 some years since the Enlightenment, and we’ve made some terrible mistakes. Some of these mistakes are obvious in retrospect (unnecessary wars, ethnic pogroms, and other episodes of unjustified violence). Others were more subtle, and some were metahistorical in nature, beyond the scope of individual or corporate actors to manage. For example, the direct political empowerment of women occurred almost as soon as it was historically possible, but the institutions of democratic governance built up by men over the last few thousand years were not designed for women’s different decision-making priorities and processes. Without adequate safeguards, a certain amount of social damage has resulted from this political transformation, affecting crime patterns, family cohesion, and perhaps even cultural survival. Again, little or no ill intent was involved. The sociological basis for human male and female behavioral differences had not been studied at the time of the universal suffrage movements, and the ongoing and almost religious refusal in some quarters to acknowledge that these differences even exist remains a significant part of the problem.

No one expected D. J. Trump to be elected, but his election moved us out of the inflection point—as would have Hillary Clinton’s. I was wrong. The political prognosticators were wrong. We all forgot the underrepresented demographic in American electoral politics. Right or wrong, we’ll be living with the consequences for at least several years to come. The question that remains is whether American political factions can still settle their differences peacefully in the long run.

Metafictional Musings

Around the same time Loyal Sedition officially launched, I began a new fiction project that I intended to publish episodically at my static website. I imagined that I would occasionally post my thoughts about the writing process on this blog, both for my own edification and for the possible amusement of any readers. Instead, Loyal Sedition has focused mainly on politics and philosophy, touching on entertainment but rarely. It became almost my only personal writing outlet.

Meanwhile my fiction project languished … for all the usual reasons and more. The science-fictional concept behind it was beyond my ability to execute, which I quickly realized as I started to write the first couple chapters. Though I wrote the leads for several chapters, I let myself be stifled by the need for a more traditional narrative structure. The dynamic, engaging opening that I had imagined—one that would be simultaneously intensely intimate and spectacularly grand in scale—turned into disconnected scenes bracketing the characters sitting around a table talking about orbital mechanics and international treaties.

Beyond that, all I have are excuses. I don’t have enough time between working full time, establishing a part-time business, failing to maintain a satisfactory household, and all that. In truth, I lack the discipline to pursue my writing amid these and other distractions. Maybe that would remain true even if I had the wide latitude I presume to need.

Nevertheless, I’ve tried to break the impasse again and again over the years … but mostly I’ve just tinkered when the mood struck. I’ll write a sentence or a paragraph here … a page or two there. (I wrote pages and pages for my shelved Third Millennium opus.) I’ll dabble in science fiction, magical fantasy, or alternative reality. (I wrote the heartbreaking background for a bloody-handed anti-heroine from a place called Hearth.) I’ll write notes or treatments for various story ideas. (I wrote dozens of now lost pages summarizing an SF story that I eventually decided was too derivative to pursue.) In other words, I’ve toyed with many projects … but still haven’t produced any significant results.

This year, I was inspired to take a different tack. I started to write a screenplay adapted from one of my favorite novels. Building on another author’s work has freed me from the usual doubts that restrain me and lead me to surrender to other distractions. Intellectually, I know that I have to start by placing the plot elements into the story, even if I later have to rearrange, polish, or even remove some of them. Emotionally, though, I too often fail to lay that first course of storytelling bricks … and instead succumb to frustration.

In this case, the building blocks have already been placed. Working within the constraints of a different narrative medium, I can rearrange, rebuild, or even replace the plot pieces that don’t properly fit. Otherwise, the job is akin to editing a completed manuscript. I still need to provide a good measure of creativity due to the aforementioned narrative limitations, but the adaptation process will get me over that first emotional hurdle.

Already, I have made much more progress than usual, drafting about 200 pages of a probable 600-page project. I’m now confident that I can carry the exercise through to completion. Being an adaptation of other copyrighted work, this project is very unlikely to see publication. As much as I would love to see it produced as perhaps a 12-episode television series, I’m hoping that the exercise itself will prove valuable to both my desire and ability to write … even if the work must remain out of general view by design.

This post may not rise to my usual “high” standard of entertaining or thought-provoking fare, but it seemed a worthwhile milestone to place for future reference. Will it mark a meaningful change to my unrequited aspirations as a writer? Or will it mark yet another dead end in that pursuit? We shall see.

Terror and Tragedy

I had planned to report on the Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision in Peruta v. San Diego … but then came the horrific events in Orlando. The appellate court denied the right of law-abiding citizens to bear arms in public … while a Muslim terrorist simply ignored such prohibitions in order to murder dozens of people whose homosexuality offended his religion. If you don’t understand why both of these things were constitutionally and morally wrong, then you are a self-deluding fool … or an Islamic terrorist.

Even in shall-issue Florida, the killing still took place in a gun-free zone. Firearms are prohibited in bars and other drinking establishments. Now, given the clientele involved, the victims in this incident were reasonably unlikely to be armed even if weapons weren’t prohibited, but the prohibition certainly did nothing to stop the murderer. Moreover, as he was apparently a licensed security guard, the killer knew full well that his intended victims would be “legally” disarmed.

The outcome might have been different … but probably not.

This isn’t about tactics, political or otherwise. It’s about fundamental principles and natural rights. What we saw both in California and Florida were violations of principles and attempts to suppress rights. Both events should be seen as abhorrent to their own degrees in what was supposed to be an enlightened, egalitarian culture—but I know they won’t.

The American experience came so close to that egalitarian dream, but now that light will fade. Our divisions will widen, our misguided envy and misplaced jealousy will fester, and we will slowly but surely tear ourselves apart. The only real question at this point is the magnitude of our fall.

A Deepness in the Sky

While not exactly a new work, A Deepness in the Sky remains one of the most important novels I have read. Even after 15 years or so, it has continued to influence my thinking on the human condition and the historical processes that constrain it. Rereading the book this year, a review seemed apropos.

Written by Vernor Vinge, the novel is science fiction, set many thousands of years in the future, when human civilizations have spread into interstellar space. It serves as something of a prequel to his earlier work, A Fire Upon the Deep, making it for the most part both less operatic and more realistic. People still face the physical and temporal limits of slower-than-light travel—and their historical consequences. The economic expense of interstellar flight is even more staggering. The details of interstellar trade aren’t explicated quite so well, but I will return to that problem in my criticisms.

The plot itself is a swashbuckling tale of conflict between different human factions set amid first contact with an alien species inhabiting an anomalous star system. Vinge splits the narratives between the humans and the aliens. He anthropomorphizes the aliens through a clever storytelling device that allows the reader to identify with them while still recognizing their unusual biology and culture.

The characters form an ensemble cast. However, the almost mythical figure of Pham Nuwen towers above the rest. A man from humble beginnings who sought to unify human civilizations and to prevent their inevitable cycles of collapse, he finds himself tempted with a second chance to achieve this goal. His internal battle represents the novel’s primary moral conflict, the struggle between the desire for libertarian individualism and the impulse toward a totalitarian pursuit of the common good.

Perhaps the novel simply came along at the right time in the evolution of my own political philosophy, but it was this moral dilemma that I found so affecting. Pham Nuwen’s personal evolution is not dissimilar to my own, though his tragedy is played out on interstellar scales. To accept and embrace freedom is to also accept the consequences that may come along with it. The alternative, however good the intentions may be, is to reject fundamental morality and to control others through violence and coercion—to provide for the common good by somehow abusing power more justly, as I have lately taken to describing the conundrum. Civilizations may fall, but history has already proved that force cannot long maintain them.

As much as I love this novel and would recommend it to the canon of philosophically meaningful fiction, it isn’t without flaw. First, there is the unambiguous nature of the characters. As I described earlier, the story’s moral conflict is personified by Pham Nuwen. Almost everyone else of importance is clearly good or evil. It isn’t enough that the villainous human faction is composed of treacherous would-be conquerors. Its leaders have to indulge in torture and rape as well.

Next, though Vinge goes to great lengths to describe the interstellar trading culture, he ultimately fails to explain how it would actually be profitable. With most of the sum knowledge of human experience and technology being freely broadcast throughout inhabited space, the marginal value of the additional technical information carried aboard a starship would be negated by the enormous expense of interstellar travel itself. That said, I think he is still closer to the mark than most. Thus far, we’ve seen only the first inklings of economic or political theory being applied to explain why our galaxy isn’t already teeming with interstellar civilizations, so the paucity of fictional representations is understandable.

The final problem is a plot hole that follows from the preceding fault. After the human factions nearly destroy each other in battle, they choose to lurk, conceal their presence, and wait for the alien civilization to mature. This would seem like a prudent, non-destabilizing strategy. However, why can’t the aliens already detect the ongoing broadcasts from human space designed to promote common language, culture, and technology?

The lessons of A Deepness in the Sky seem more relevant to me than ever. I still can’t say whether our civilization is at the beginning of its end or the end of its beginning, but it has become increasingly clear that some great transformation is imminent. Vernor Vinge himself would probably argue for the advent of a technological singularity, though this novel was written to describe human fate in a world where such has expressly not occurred. While I think the concept of the singularity is useful when examining changing historical paradigms, I also think that Vinge and the likes of Ray Kurzweil are wrong. Humans and our technologies may be capable of amazing things … but nothing that fantastic. If we make it that far in the present historical epoch, we may try, but we will fail. However, in the current moral paradigm, human civilization itself will fail. No hero can prevent it. No government can prevent it. Indeed, they will be its authors.

So … do read this novel … while you still have the luxury to do so.

A Question of Migration and Assimilation

Americans, Europeans, and anyone else who values egalitarian multiculturalism, I would like to pose a question. If you found yourself as an immigrant, how quickly and how thoroughly would you adopt the cultural values and practices of your new country? Would you assimilate easily?
 

Let’s say, for example, that circumstances compelled you to emigrate to Saudi Arabia in pursuit of a better life for you and your family. Would you try to learn Arabic? Would you embrace Saudi cultural values? Would you encourage your sons to adopt Islam so that they might become successful in Saudi society? Would you be happy that your granddaughters would have to wear the hijab and lose the legal rights and privileges they would have enjoyed as women in the West?

Now, let’s also imaging that the Saudi kingdom were as generous to you and other immigrants as European and American governments are to their immigrants. The kingdom would pay to meet your basic needs at least modestly and would cater to the educational needs of your children. In fact, you and tens of thousands of other immigrants could subsist without ever integrating with your host nation. How eager would you be to assimilate into this alien, sometimes antithetical culture without any real economic pressure to do so?

I submit that you probably would not assimilate and neither would you try. On the contrary, you and the other immigrants would leverage whatever political power your numbers gave you to change Saudi culture to more closely match your values and practices. That’s what large groups of related people (tribes and nations) do.

Mass migration is conquest by other means, and history records such events as invasions, even when actual warfare is infrequent. Just ask the Celts or the Khoisan or the Ainu or the Australian aborigines or the Dravidians or the Maori or the first nations of the Americas. It is a political and cultural truth that none of us can escape.

As a libertarian humanist, I would celebrate the free movement of people and ideas … but as a historical realist, I also have to recognize, however grudgingly, that a borderless world is a last-order freedom. Only when other liberties and responsibilities are firmly in place or adequately protected by institutional safeguards can we safely open our borders to welcome anyone who would come. To do so now—with our massive, irresponsible welfare states—is to finance the diminution or destruction of our own egalitarian cultures.

Toward the Voluntary Society: An Introduction

All too often, political philosophy is an exercise in utopianism, the construction of imaginary, idealized societies. On their face, these visions are impossible to realize given disparate human motivations, actions, and desires. The processes proposed are also frequently illogical, invoking non sequitur after non sequitur in their explication.

Marxism is perhaps the most famous example. On his projected path to a stateless, classless communist society, Karl Marx predicted that, despite their own rising standards of living, the working classes in prosperous capitalist economies would revolt against the owning and ruling classes. Thereafter, socialist dictatorships would be established to control every aspect of cultural and economic development in order to eventually eliminate all human inequality. Then, somehow, this totalitarian state would simply surrender all of its power, giving way to a completely free society, where each individual person would produce according to his ability and consume according to his need. Though all attempts at its practical application have failed at every step, Marxist ideology is still immensely popular for obvious reasons.

The reasons why Marxism would never work should be equally obvious, but I’m not writing today to critique Marx. Rather, I want to introduce another political philosophy and explicate it without magical thinking or utopian idealism. The voluntary society I will describe may be no more achievable than Marx’s communist paradise, but I think it can be approached much more closely through the application of ideologically consistent libertarian philosophies and realistic political processes.

All of this presupposes that human freedom is a desirable outcome. I can understand and accept that not everyone shares this goal. Indeed, slave states have flourished throughout human history and have created widely revered cultural landmarks. For those who see such states as the superior way to live, nothing that I can say or do will ever change their minds. Instead, I want to chart a possible course for those who do value human freedom but struggle to understand why the current paradigm also appears to be failing to deliver it.

I will follow with a series of essays discussing various aspects of the voluntary society and how they might realistically be achieved. None of these will demand the adoption of any one model of social or economic organization. In fact, I will argue that all organizational models are permissible within a voluntary society so long as they adhere to just two fundamental moral principles.

On that moral foundation, we can move toward the voluntary society in a logical fashion. This will also account and allow for human differences that other political philosophies have simply and improbably hoped to erase. The choices demanded won’t be easy by any means, and some of the ancillary outcomes that will be implied may be disconcerting where they can’t be mitigated, but this is the only path toward lasting freedom—one that won’t vanish in the mirage of utopian fantasy.

Of Wolves and Men

The photograph above has been circulating on social media in recent weeks. It purports to show a wolf pack, wherein the old, sick, and weak set the pace for the group from the front, the young and strong make up the center, and the dominant male watches over everything from the rear. Some of my “liberal” friends have commented favorably on this social structure. One even remarked that it’s “how we should act …”

While the picture is beautiful and illustrates how different social groups can survive, I find it deeply ironic that compassionate “liberals” would recommend it as a model for human society. Let’s look at the wolf pack more closely to see why.

The old, sick, and weak are placed in the vanguard of the pack. This may let them set the pace, but it also puts them at the greatest risk for attack by hostile wolves or other predators. Should an attack come, then the stronger members of the pack have the option to flee safely or to counterattack the distracted enemy.

When the pack makes a kill, the wolves usually feed by rank. The dominant pair eat their fill, followed by the lower ranks. The old, sick, and weak get whatever scraps are left when the stronger wolves are done. As a result, they may grow weaker still.

Rivals for dominance within the pack are often expelled or killed. Outcasts face great difficulty surviving on their own—much greater difficulty than a single, able-bodied human would face. If these lone wolves manage to survive but can’t eventually start their own packs, the may turn to poaching and other desperate pursuits, making them the criminals of the wolf world.

Wolf packs are also highly territorial. When they meet, there is usually hostility. In other words, the primary relationship between different wolf populations is warfare. These conflicts are one of the main causes of death among wolves, accounting for over half of all fatalities in some cases.

And when the old, sick, and weak wolves can no longer walk, they will ultimately be abandoned by the pack to die in isolation and suffering. In lean times, they may even be killed and eaten by their own pack mates.

When our old, sick, and weak can no longer move, we will carry them—sometimes to a fault. Human groups can be just as competitive as rival wolf packs, but we thrive through cooperative competition (at least within free markets). We try to shelter our outcasts and to protect our defenseless. Despite our self-ascribed penchant for violence, the trend for advancing human civilizations has been the pursuit of peaceful relations between nations.

Our principal failure, at least in the enlightened portion of human society, is not a lack of compassion. It is misplaced and misdirected compassion. We have allowed the hand extended in help to be used to pull all of us down. We have failed to properly understand social problems, and we have repeatedly failed to learn the lessons of history.

Ironically, wolf society is exactly the harsh, dog-eat-dog paradigm that so many “liberals” falsely accuse “conservatives” and libertarians of desiring. Those of us on the political right (nominally or otherwise) who advocate for individual freedom, personal responsibility, and equality of opportunity do so because of our compassion for others and because of our desire to reduce human suffering. We want to see the weak grow stronger, the disadvantaged become prosperous, and the downtrodden regain dignity. Through no ill intent of its ideological proponents, the left would expand poverty, helplessness, and subjugation as a cause and consequence of its pursuit and application of political power.

And when the leftists finally succeed, human society may indeed begin to resemble the brutal reality of the wolf pack once again.

The M&P Project

The polymer-framed handgun was pioneered by Heckler & Koch in the 1970s but wasn’t popularized until Glock began manufacturing its series of pistols a little over 10 years later. By the turn of the century, they were everywhere. Military and police forces around the world adopted the new weapons readily, and they soon found a place among recreational and defensive shooters in the civilian market as well.

Today, almost every major firearms manufacturer has plastic-framed offerings. Even the first generation of such weapons had some obvious benefits. They offered high ammunition capacities at lighter weights than comparable steel or alloy-framed pistols, and Glocks in particular gained a reputation for unbeatable reliability. They were also bulky and, to some eyes, ugly.

The former problem was why I eventually dismissed my own Glock 19. The pistol’s awkward, oversized ergonomics simply didn’t suit my smaller hands. I wasn’t alone, and by the mid-1990s, pistols with modular frames began to appear in the marketplace. These guns provided a degree of built-in customization, allowing the weapon to be adapted to the user rather than demanding the opposite.

Smith & Wesson was one of the first major manufacturers to adopt this innovation. The new Military & Police series (recalling the M&P revolvers introduced at the dawn of the 20th century) features an interchangeable backstrap insert. A shooter can select small, medium, or large inserts to modify the overall size of the grip. In short, the M&P pistols implemented the Glock-style striker-fired action and passive safety mechanisms in a more elegant, ergonomic package.

This is what had intrigued me about the M&P pistols for several years. I even handled them at gun shows to confirm their favorable ergonomics, but I could never justify the restricted-capacity, dumbed-down (and possibly less safe) versions “legally” available in my native California. Meanwhile, aftermarket solutions also began to appear for some of the platform’s known weaknesses.

When I effected my escape from California last year, the legal barrier was removed. After a few months, I finally succumbed to curiosity and purchased an M&P9 Pro Series pistol, which supposedly has an improved sear over the standard models. As usual, though, I compared the new pistol to my dimensionally similar SIG-Sauer P220, which serves as my standard all-around sidearm. With the slimmest grip options installed on both pistols, the 17-round, 9mm-NATO M&P9 felt almost identical in my hand to the eight-round, .45-ACP P220. (In fact, the grip circumference differed by only about an eighth of an inch, favoring the big-bore, single-stack pistol for trimness.) With magazines loaded, the P220 outweighed the M&P9 by less than two ounces, contributing to the similar feel. (The pistols both weighed less than 2.5 lbs.) The Pro Series’ trigger break was also comparable, only slightly stiffer than the SIG-Sauer’s advertised 4.5-lb. single-action break.

However, trigger pull and trigger reset are the primary known weak points of the M&P pistol. Its standard trigger tends to feel mushy, and its geometry pulls the sights off target too easily—at least for me. The reset is also nearly imperceptible, which can slow down followup shots or cause the shooter to short stroke the trigger. Luckily, the marketplace has already provided some solutions.

Investing a couple hundred more dollars, I installed three components from Apex Tactical Specialties: an aluminum trigger, competition springs, and their reset-assist mechanism. The Apex kit replaced the highly curved S&W hinged trigger with a flatter, Glock-style trigger (complete with pivoting safety lever), which improved the trigger geometry, in my opinion, and gave a cleaner break. The new springs also reduced the overall trigger pull weight, further enhancing control. Finally, taking ingenious advantage of the unused channel for S&W’s internal locking system, the RAM provided the pistol with a tactile and audible trigger reset.

When the northwestern weather produced a warm, dry winter day, I finally headed to the local wet, muddy shooting range for some live-fire testing. Again, I put the M&P9 up against my trusty P220. Both guns performed well in my somewhat out-of-practice hands, shooting 2⅛-inch groups at approximately 10 yards, and that’s where the comparison ended. While the P220 may have slung the vaunted .45-caliber slugs very effectively, the S&W pistol put more than twice as many bullets down range and did so more easily.

This review, such as it is, would have been completed much earlier, but I also wanted to evaluate potential holsters for the pistol. As a mid-sized handgun, I thought that the M&P9 could prove suitable for everyday concealed carry. I tried variations of Kydex and hybrid holsters but found them lacking for my needs. In the end, I returned to traditional leather, selecting a highly canted inside-the-waistband holster that kept the pistol easily accessible but conveniently out of my way.

 
Now that I’m involved in the business of selling firearms with Dancing Giant Sales, I will be even more curious to see how the Smith & Wesson compares to other competing offerings from the latest generation of polymer-framed pistols, but the M&P series has demonstrated that the technology itself has improved from its rough beginnings. While not perfect out of the box, the M&P is meeting demands for a flexible, ergonomic pistol in effective calibers. These requirements will persist well into the future, if the defensive handgun continues to take its rightful place in civil society.

November 13th

The barbarians have drenched another date in blood. Democratic theory aside, innocent people were again murdered for no discernible reason beyond provoking general warfare—and again I reject the genocidal military solution that is so emotionally tempting. That said, it’s time to face some hard truths.

There are philosophical and cultural ideologies that are never going to exist in peace with one another. I live, breathe, and procreate multiculturalism, but I have to admit that its limitations fall far short of my own broad philosophical horizons. For all the many failings and shortcomings of my people, we still occupy the moral high ground of human history under principles of individual rights, equality before the law, political self-determination, and scientific reason. Despite our modernly fashionable self-doubt, it is our culture that brought light and prosperity to the world.

The enemy of my culture is anti-humanism, whether it stems from dogmatic religion, totalitarian rulership, or mere bad public policy. I’ll be honest; these enemies are presently growing in strength at home and abroad. There will inevitably be conflict, some violent. I want my culture to continue to survive and prosper, and that means some of its enemies will have to be destroyed—but this must be an option exercised only in self-defense, only to the extent absolutely necessary, and only in keeping with our higher principles.

If we cannot survive and prosper under these moral principles … then we shouldn’t survive or prosper …

Ending Gun Violence in the United States

Cynical reasons aside, I still don’t understand why “gun violence” is worse than any other kind of violence. Nevertheless, let’s talk about reducing or even ending “gun violence” in the United States, but let’s also be honest about the means that would be used and the ends that would be achieved.

“Gun violence” has already been declining for about 20 years now, while the supply of firearms has steadily increased, but with each new highly publicized shooting, there is always an outcry for more “reasonable” or “common sense” gun controls. In fact, though, we are beyond this point. All reasonable controls have been in place for many years. Americans have already accepted violations of their Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendment rights in this pursuit.

Frankly, the only real options that remain are prohibition and confiscation. Obviously, if all firearms were removed from the country, there could be no more “gun violence” in the U.S., right? In the long run, this would mean disarming the police and military and closing the borders, but we can ignore those fantasies for this discussion.

So let’s get started!

First, we would have to repeal the Second Amendment. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, we can no longer pretend that “the people” therein were the regular military or even the militia. However, this is a big hurdle to leap.

The Democratic Party has reliably supported stringent gun controls for decades now. Democrats will probably also gain solid control of the federal government in the near future, so passing a proposed Constitutional amendment may not be that hard. Getting it ratified by 38 states would be a much more difficult proposition. Though several of the most populous states are stalwart gun-control bastions, over 40 states have enacted legislation and policies that strongly support the right to arms.

Therefore, repealing or modifying the Second Amendment would likely fail.

Second, even if repeal were successful, additional legislation would be required to actually start prohibiting guns and removing them from society. While less difficult than a Constitutional amendment, federal legislation would face many of the same problems. Pro-gun states would no doubt refuse to go along with prohibition schemes.

This secondary crisis could logically lead to the dissolution of the United States. Assuming the right political processes were followed, such an event needn’t result in civil war or even lesser violence, but a great deal of social and economic disruption would be unavoidable. Populations would be displaced, and North America would likely find itself with several new republics.

Third, assuming that the United States remained intact following federal prohibition, approximately 400 million firearms would still have to be confiscated. (There are about 300 million in circulation right now, but the number would drastically increase during the repeal and prohibition processes.) General confiscation could be eschewed, allowing for a slow attrition process to remove firearms from American society. However, firearms are durable goods, so “gun violence” would persist for centuries without active confiscation efforts.

Of course, confiscation would raise additional Constitutional problems. The Fourth Amendment would have to be repealed or ignored in order to effectively search for and seize firearms from recalcitrant owners. The Fifth Amendment would demand that those who did comply should be justly compensated for their surrendered property—and if everyone complied, this would cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. If both were ignored …

Fourth, compliance with any confiscation regime would certainly be incomplete. Historical examples have proven this even in countries without such strong right-to-arms traditions. Nevertheless, even if only a third of American gun owners were actively non-compliant, that would represent over 100 million firearms remaining at large … in the hands of people highly motivated to resist and confound enforcement efforts.

The results would be bloody. With the Second Amendment gone, the Fourth Amendment suspended, and the Fifth Amendment ignored, the previously law-abiding resisters would face death or imprisonment for their non-compliance. With this final violation of their Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment, why wouldn’t they turn to violence? Why shouldn’t they?

The resistance and bloodshed might last generations—decades more of intensified “gun violence,” moved from its former home in the criminal underground into the front yards of polite society. Police would be killed on confiscation missions. Prohibitionist politicians and other political enemies of the resistance would be assassinated. The resistance fighters—now branded domestic terrorists—would themselves be killed or captured. They might be defeated in the long run … or they might not be. Constant, low-grade domestic warfare could be maintained indefinitely. Again, firearms are durable goods capable of lasting for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, and the technology behind them is actually quite simple. How many more technological restrictions could our civilization accept or endure in the crusade to rid it of “gun violence”?

Finally, after many, many years and considerable costs in blood and treasure, we might succeed in removing all firearms from the United States. There would be no more “gun violence.” We would have addressed one of the hows of violence … but still not have touched any of the whys. Therefore, people would still become the victims of murder, rape, robbery, and other crimes of violence—just as the unarmed or disarmed always have.

On the Tactics of Mass Murder

In a world populated by more than seven billion persons, the tiny minorities formed by the willfully evil and dangerously insane will number in the millions. Therefore, as I’ve noted before, it is not surprising in a concurrent era of global information networks that we will hear of their horrific deeds all too frequently. How we respond to such events is a measure of our own rationality—but that’s not directly what I want to discuss now.

To tell the truth, I’ve avoided this discussion for a while. However, not naming a potential danger does nothing to mitigate it. Furthermore, the evil and insane can benefit from the information revolution just as easily as the rest of us, so they will find no shortage of terminal inspiration or instruction when the time comes. In the end, our best policy prescription may simply be to not make risks of mass murder worse than they already are.

Misery loves company. This aphorism may explain as much as anything else why certain individuals choose to end their own lives while inflicting as much collateral damage as possible. Garnering the wide recognition they feel they deserve but have never received may be another motivation—which is why I refuse to name perpetrators of these atrocious crimes. In the end, though, I can’t answer the why. A very few broken human creatures stare into the abyss of grief or envy or rage and see mass murder as the best course of action toward even the pettiest of goals. Others in the vast majority of semi-rational human beings who may look into that same abyss will reject violence as unjustified no matter how noble the ends might seem—even when they lack the self-awareness to articulate doing so.

The how is what I want to discuss here. The means and methods of mass killers are so often what drives the public-policy debate … at least after the fact. That’s where the prevention efforts are usually focused. Those efforts are misguided at best.

The entertainment media have made a fetish of the personal weapon, be it a gun or a knife or some other type of sidearm. It has been transformed into a talisman of power in the popular imagination, though its actual lethal capabilities are much more modest. In fact, personal weapons are not the most effective choice for mass slaughter, but deranged individuals embrace the mythology and select them anyway, no doubt indulging in cinematic fantasies of the carnage they will cause. There are deadlier and more destructive methods to exact social vengeance, but if these means are presently used with greater frequency, then we certainly don’t hear about that fact from the politically motivated news media.

The typical American arguments for and against the right to bear arms don’t really matter in this case. Even if guns and knives were completely prohibited, the ban would always be incomplete. If all responsible adults were legally authorized to carry defensive weapons at all times and in all locations, the armed citizen would still be the exception rather than the rule. Actually, we could indulge in the fantastical extremes of these positions … and we would still fail.

All weapons more dangerous than a plastic sippy cup could magically vanish from existence, but mass killers would still arise and still carry their crimes to completion. Conversely, all responsible adults could be armed and ready to defend against any and all direct attacks, but this wouldn’t stop mass murder either. Would-be killers would simply change their tactics, and the results would probably be worse.

Personal weapons are essentially precision tools, best suited for defensive purposes against no more than a few discreet targets. A single bullet isn’t terribly lethal. A blade can be much deadlier but has a more limited threat radius. By choosing a personal weapon for his crimes, a would-be mass murderer has already limited the amount of damage he can do.

Impersonal weapons are by far the more dangerous selection. Explosives, fire, poison, these are just a few things that can be used to kill both indiscriminately and on a large scale. Deployed with insidious planning, the results of such attacks can be truly devastating—and they give the killer not bent on suicide or imprisonment much greater opportunities to escape and repeat his crimes again and again.

The will to commit atrocious acts is and has always been the greatest threat. We’ve learned that lesson over and over again throughout history, but as rational, compassionate people, we want to forget that horrific evil can and does exist in the darkest corners of the human heart. When it escapes into the world through willful intent or insane delusion, the innocent will always be its victims. With billions of human souls sharing life today, these incidents will occur with chilling regularity and frequency—and yet they are still vanishingly rare in absolute terms.

We might mitigate the risks posed by certain strains of this social violence, perhaps at great cost to liberty and prosperity, but in so doing we might only clear the way for more virulent strains to manifest themselves. The how that we can see and discuss won’t give us the solution to this problem. That answer—if there is an answer—still lies within the why. If we can find a solution, I do know that it won’t be political or tactical. It will have to be emotional or spiritual … or, dare I say it, moral.

Meanwhile, to make public policy in anguish is … and always will be … folly.