Defining The Scope of the Problem

The Big Questions Around Assault Rifles

Reading Time: 10 min 

With any given instance of bullshit, which exact type it is says much about the bullshitter involved, but the actual facts, like honey badger, don’t care. If you read the intro you know I think you should care, and a lot, because the core of the bullshit is most definitely no accident, but the point from here out is to stick to the facts and debunk bullshit. Mostly.

Gun owners (myself included) should also care about this, because we also fall prey to the bullshit  — in fact we are the most deeply buried in it — and are often unknowingly participating in the gaslighting of the general public. By repeating gun lobby deepities like “a gun is a gun is a gun”, or “there is no such thing as an ‘assault rifle’, we are adding to what is effectively a campaign of psychological abuse. A deepity, if that is a new term for you, is something that can be read more than one way. One of which sounds deep but is false, and one that is true - but only trivially or marginally. The famous example is “love is just a word”.  Humans are particularly sensitive to this type of bullshit.

Most gun people certainly don’t think of themselves as liars, but it doesn’t stop a lot of them from bullshitting us about guns and things like legal loopholes. That is just how it’s done now.

But this is not just "gun people" versus everyone else. This is a focused lobby, and a subset of gun owners, that are actually working against everyone’s safety and best interests. A lot of gun people are also victims of the bullshit, and a mass shooter will kill them and their children as quickly as anyone else, and they deserve to be protected from that just as much as anybody else.

We should all care because assault rifles really are exceptionally dangerous guns, and they are not well-controlled yet. The very pro-active gun lobby has been quite effective at pulling the teeth of gun legislation for decades now, and they are working right now to repeal and dismantle what thin protections we do have from these guns.

The bullshit campaign takes many forms, which is partly why there are so many sections and angles covered in these articles, but we can simplify to get some perspective too: a great deal of the misinformation and fabricated confusion is focused on providing false answers or just making it really hard to answer, just three questions:

And if you can do that:

The third is slightly different but also very key:

“Too dangerous” requires balancing out the hazards with probabilities of violence using these guns, asking questions like "how likely is a gun crime using one?” How much different would it be with or without these particular guns?”. All of those things must be weighed against perceived possible benefits, and then all of that has to be balanced against other social values and priorities.

There is considerable bullshitting done on all of the above are subjects too, but most are not covered here. This is about the guns, and what they can and have done. The bigger questions are tied up in a complex equation, but it ends with a value judgment, a question of what we should do with the facts. That rests on, but is not the same as, what the facts are - and that part is my focus; that critical foundation that is being denied by gun lobby bullshit.

So these two questions come first: are assault rifles more dangerous? Can we distinguish them well enough to know which are which?  These are empirical questions -  not value judgments. The third question is also empirical question, but it can be mistaken for a subjective call if we are not careful. This question about how well our gun laws work is closely linked to the the two above, if only because it is heaped with much of the exact same bullshit, and it is important, because the whole current debate and ongoing concern is moot if that answer is “yes”.

It is not - but this can easily be misconstrued as an opinion thing. There is a more factual level to it: Do the laws actually address and limit the functionality of the weapons they are purportedly there for? This is not qualitative, it is a direct connection between the claim and the fact.

A good example is the 5 round magazine limit. Does that actually work? Are people actually following it? Does that limit the actual dangerous aspect of the magazines? These are all questions that you can ask that are not about opinion and can tell you straight-up if the law is working to meet its own stated purposes. The answers all happen to be no, but the point is that they are empirical, not subjective.

You can read more about the failure of our laws in more detail in the Why The Bullshit Matters section, but everything that follows in these articles form the fuller explanation and evidence to show why the answer to all three of these larger factual questions are: yes, yes, and a hard no.

It seems that most of Canada agrees with that and wants these guns prohibited. A very vocal but small minority in the gun lobby disagrees. Vehemently.

Why The Bullshit is Focused More on Hazard and Not on Risk.

Thankfully, mass shootings have been rare in Canada. But rare is not none. The risk is real, the weapons are accessible, and mass shootings are on a pretty dramatic upswing in places like the US, where effective controls are also (and even more) lacking. The bottom line is that the risk of one happening is definitely non-zero, and the risk of an assault  or assault-type rifle showing up in one is definitely non-zero as well. It’s only a question of how likely. And probably only a matter of time, sadly.

And that is really the answer.

The motivation for all the bullshit about how dangerous assault rifles themselves are is simple: some gun people really want to sell and to buy them, but there is also a simple reason it is so focused in the exact manner it often is: people nearly universally agree that banning some dangerous stuff is perfectly sensible. And for really dangerous things, but especially with low or no common benefit, the risk almost doesn’t even matter.

This is not controversial stuff. Few people, even among the most hard-core gun nuts, do much arguing for civilian ownership of explosive devices, full-on machine-guns, or shoulder-fired missiles. Few seem to feel their rights are being overly-trampled because they can’t buy home chemistry kits that include anthrax and smallpox. That is because gun owners aren’t crazy (usually anyway) - not even the minority that care a lot about assault rifles (again, mostly).

Dangerous stuff exists on a spectrum of potential hazard. Regardless of how useful any of that stuff may be, there is a generally accepted logic and pattern that says the more dangerous and/or risky something is, the more sense it probably makes to ban or heavily restrict access to it. We do this all the time and with all kinds of stuff, and without controversy, but this is really where the gun folks start to get freaked out, and where the problem with guns and assault rifles really come to into play.

The steps we take to mitigate risk are different. They are also driven by the facts - otherwise they aren’t likely to work - but whether or not we should take steps, and in which order, and to whatever degree, all of that is also a value judgment. It comes down to priorities, and conflicting priorities make it a political thing.

One way we have of minimizing conflicts over things is consistency. It keeps things fair if we apply the same standards in every case. It also saves a lot of wasted time and money if we don’t have the same arguments over and over again when the relevant factors are the same (which is why we don’t have to debate whether or not to ban new biological weapons as they come up). It doesn’t always work, but that’s a pretty good place to start anyway, and a lot of our laws and legal cases are built around keeping with precedent - keeping it predictable, and fair.

We make a hazard and risk assessment on stuff and sometimes we say “nope, too dangerous: banned”. This is not often, or best, done by considering best-case scenarios, but rather worst-case scenarios. For example, 99% of people might buy hand-grenades and only use them to play catch with their kids, but that 1% is going to ruin it for everyone - so we just cut right to it with those, and pretty much everyone is fine with that.

We do that a bunch of times with different stuff and establish precedents, because similar risk/benefit profiles usually apply to hazardous stuff - you know, like bombs, rockets, and biological weapons. All of which is also stuff where we don’t have to wait for a worst-case scenario to actually happen on our doorstep before we know what to do  about them. Those precedents become standards, and standards tend to lead to automatic judgments.

If you are using consistent logic, then when you drop something on the spectrum of danger/hazard and it falls into a position of “acceptably dangerous” or “too dangerous” then it usually makes sense to treat the new thing about the same as other things we consider  safe enough, or “too dangerous”. This becomes almost automatic really, not much room for debate, and not much interest in debate, particularly when the hazard is mass murder of innocent men, women, and children.

All of that is fine, but it is less great if you happen to think the risky stuff is worth it for your own personal best interests, or profits. Like the gun lobby and their assault rifles.

A realistic assessment of the hazard and risk facts tends to land assault rifles right in smack in the middle of the really dangerous stuff, and that just won’t work for the gun people that want to sell them and own them. Regardless of the true hazards, and risk factors, they want these rifles lumped in with hunting rifles, not hand-grenades.

When another mass shooting happens and talk of bans comes up again, they often attack people’s reactions as being “knee jerk”, and the above is why they can be partly right. However this disregards the validity of a sensible and well-established way of handing danger, as well as overlooking the fact that the gun lobby gaslight and campaigning is the only reason the issue is even still coming up. Generally, the whole “knee-jerk” thing is not well understood by the people shouting it and it’s really just a way to diminish and demean an opposing view. Tactics, basically.

Still, the whole semi-autonomous aspect of the assessment process should be monitored to make sure the reflex is in fact triggering a precedent based on fact, and is not ‘misfiring’.

Add to that the gun lobby stirring up fears of “slippery slopes” and it can make even moderate gun owners nervous about what gets lumped in where. Slippery-slope arguments are almost always based on bad logic and mostly serve to sow fear and uncertainty to advance an agenda. In this case they are used to make moderate gun owners fearful that their non-assault rifle firearms are going to be “next”, or their “property” in general will be (another gun-lobby boogieman). However, banning all guns or demonstrably safer hunting weapons is virtually never even on the table, never mind topping an agenda - but it is good to ensure the process is not just automatic. Checking the facts and measuring risk and hazard is a good place to start - and then we are back to the beginning with the gun lobby bullshitting everyone so the end picture comes out more in their favour.

Rather than face the facts and build a case for an exception to be made (because that would be supremely difficult) the gun lobby instead puts a lot of effort into distorting public perception of the hazard and risks, and everything about them. This plays out well for assault rifles, but it a powerful tool they use in their fight against all types of gun control.

All the bullshit is geared towards creating an artificial place for assault rifles in the “acceptable” hazard range. This is so clearly against the realities of risk and hazard that they pull out all the stops in the gaslighting campaign about what they are and how dangerous they are. To support that they also create a false impression of how effective the current gun laws are, making it seem that whatever minimal hazard or risk they’ll even acknowledge is already well in-hand. Through all of this they serve a narrow self-interest at the direct expense of public safety. And it works quite well - they have snowed a lot of people, including many gun owners that are legitimate victims of this bullshit.

In any case, that’s the problem we face: a poorly understood public hazard and risk that is being actively covered over by special interests. The gun lobby is pretty good at this game, which isn’t surprising since it has been developed and honed with a lot of financial backing of a multi-billion dollar industry.They were also able to draw a lot of useful tips from the cigarette industry, among others.

All of this means it can be hard for non-gun people to get to the facts about the weapons, which they need in order to decide how to think, feel, and how to vote on the subject. This long-assed series of articles is aimed at clearing that up.

Hard-core gun people are not likely to enjoy most of it. Many will feel unjustly lumped in with the active bullshitters and public gaslighting campaign. Sorry about that - hard to tell from the outside, unfortunately - but that is a good reason why it is better to choose to not be part of the problem.

But I don’t hate guns or gun owners. That would be silly of me since I am a gun owner myself - although I do not and will not own assault weapons or semi-automatic box-fed weapons at all.

Let me be extra clear though: in my mind the majority of Canadian gun owners, including those that do support assault rifle ownership, have also been misled, and the majority are good people who would much rather take a bullet for an innocent person before shooting at one.

But that is not where the problem lies.

Thoughts about the article? Feel free to drop me a line.