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Stick To Your Guns
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Stick To Your Guns

What comes first the chicken or the AR-15?

A lot has changed for me over the past six months. I got married, moved cities, got a promotion, and I also bought my first gun.

I was never raised around firearms and never (until recently) had a large want to possess or shoot one. As a newcomer to guns I would be considered part of Gun Culture 2.0, the growing body of urban and more demographically diverse new gun owners and enthusiasts in America. This group saw historic numbers of new gun purchases following the onset of the pandemic and sets itself apart from prior generations of gun owners in two principal ways: it is much more diverse ethnically, culturally (in terms of urban/rural), politically, and by gender, and it tends to rank self-defense as the primary reason for gun ownership rather than hunting or sport.

I don’t remember the exact moment I decided to buy a gun. It was a slow evolution of thought beginning in 2020 and maturing in 2021. Personal safety, which is top of mind for many new gun owners was certainly a factor – the city I live in has seen a massive spike in violence, including over 500 homicides last year. But I can’t even call that the primary reason why I bought a firearm, but at some point after witnessing empty shelves, extrajudicial killings, riots in the streets, the appearance of secret police, targeted information censorship, and gloating around influencing elections, I decided to buy a gun. To me gun ownership especially the question of who owns them and who doesn’t – is about more than just personal safety. It’s about power and autonomy.

Gun Laws are the Real Silencers

Carroll Quigley in his history of the world, Tragedy and Hope, views weapons, specifically guns, as uniquely formative to civilizations. In cultures where access to arms is relegated to an elite or specialist class (think knights or Pretorian guards), the state tends to take on a heavily centralized and authoritarian flavor. On the other hand, in societies where weapons are accessible, cheap, and easy to use, forms of government and social institutions tend to be much more representative and egalitarian.[1]

Quigley directly links democratic and representative government to the ease with which the masses can arm themselves. [2] A person with a gun holds a lot more sway in how things go than a person without one. Further, individual gun ownership when proliferated at scale can be transformative to a society. Guns, when in the hands of everyday people and not a select elite, decentralize power and influence and upset more traditional forms of social control. It doesn’t take an academic historian at Georgetown to understand this, access to arms as a means of social control has been prevalent throughout history:

  • One of the first laws distinguishing the rights of black slaves and free people in North America was Virginia’s 1639 statute banning firearm provisions to Negros.

  • The spark that ignited the war for American independence was the Royal Crown’s attempt to disarm colonists at Lexington and Concord.

  • During the civil war, Confederate states chose to accept defeat rather than arming their large able-bodied pool of potential infantry, their slaves.

  • As relayed by Wooden Leg of the Cheyenne, one of the first demands of General Custer and the US Army was for Plains Indians to relinquish their guns before forcing them onto reservations.

  • The reconstructionist Black Codes and later Jim Crow laws in the South, explicitly looked to prevent colored people from being armed.[3]

  • After the Bolsheviks took control of Russia in 1918, they passed Article 218 of their criminal code mandating confiscation of all civilian firearms and outlawing gun possession.[4]

  • The Nazi Party made sure to disarm Jews and other “enemies of the state” prior to revoking their other civil liberties and interning them.[5]

  • The UK subjugated their colonies from Kenya to India to oppressive firearms prohibitions as a means of cementing control. Unfortunately, the worst vestiges of imperialism always comes home, and the UK now sports some of “the toughest gun control laws in the world.” Is it any wonder that the nation has also become one of the most complete surveillance states in existence?

  • New York City has some of the most draconian gun laws in the US and its recent history includes stop-and-frisk, “see something, say something” snitch programs, the suspension of habeas corpus, and its current occupation by the world’s 7th largest military, the $10bn a year NYPD.

Have I made my point yet?

Taken with the added weight and perspective of history, owning a gun is about much more than just protecting lives or valuables, it is a civic duty. The proliferation of arms in the populace provides necessary checks and balances in society not so much laterally amongst intra-governmental branches but vertically between the people and the state (and other institutions that seek to impose authority under threat of force).

Political leadership of both the right and left may undermine firearms, access to them, and their value in society. But as we saw in Afghanistan last year and in Ukraine just recently, individuals with arms can still make a serious difference in shaping the events of the world.

Owning a tool that is literally a matter of life and death has shifted many of my perceptions around responsibility. It forced me to seek out personal proficiency, self-reliance, and independence. If a ruling class wanted a population of generally weak and dependent people, it makes sense why they would want to keep firearms out of their hands.

Beak Bans

My pro-gun stance is buffeted by a belief in self-reliance, a right to physical protection, and personal autonomy. But many who are anti-gun are not against any of these aspects, they simply believe guns are dangerous and that that danger far exceeds any benefit that they could confer.

H. L. Mencken remarked that protecting liberty entails defending scoundrels. Similarly, safeguarding freedoms means not glibly ignoring their downsides. Guns are dangerous, that’s their whole point, a weapon is supposed to be harmful otherwise it wouldn’t be an effective means of self-defense. But the fact that guns cause harm shifts many people to view them as evil or what OSD calls the halal vs haram lens.[6] Through this lens, any type or means to acquire firearms should be banned or heavily controlled.

This negative view of guns has been spurred on by a barrage of reporting on violent crime and mass shootings. Through this and anti-gun propaganda, many have come to believe there is a simple solution to these issues: more gun control & bans.

I personally have my reservations about the efficacy of regulation and acts of prohibition (look how it has worked historically for alcohol, drugs, gambling, let alone gun control). Further, I also do not believe that all of the narratives we hear about mass-shootings are the full story. But besides these caveats I tend to look at mass-shootings and violence not as gun issues but rather as symptoms of a much larger societal problems. Put simply: Why do we live in a society where people feel impelled to commit such atrocities?

Joel Salatin notes in Folks, This Ain’t Normal that when chickens are raised in tightly packed industrial coops with forced lighting and feeding rather than open range pastures, they exhibit extreme signs of stress and anxiety and routinely attack and kill one another. To counteract this, the standard practice in the poultry industry is to cut off the beaks and toes of chicks, effectively making their would-be murderous pecks and scratches harmless.

I have written about mental illness at length before, and I’m stuck by the similarity between clipping a chicken’s beak so that it doesn’t harm its neighbor under the duress of an insane and unnatural environment and the discussion of gun control as a means to dampen psychotic behavior in humans.

People do not shoot up parks and elementary schools simply as a function of the ease-of-access to guns. If we want to have a real discussion about why these vicious outbreaks of carnage take place, we will need to soberly face some hard and unsettling questions about how we have built and how we maintain our society and ourselves. Unfortunately, this is a very broad and difficult discussion, meanwhile villainizing guns provides an easy out. While organizations can effortlessly acquire votes, funding, and engagement from hawking a simple panacea, the cures they tout are only attempting to mask symptoms rather than treat an underlying disease.

Tragically, the debeaking of chickens is not harmless in itself but leads to much pain and suffering for the young chicks. Similarly, the prohibition or restrictions on guns is not without the negative effects of creating dependent people reliant on systems and institutions for their physical safety who are dauntingly vulnerable to loss of personal autonomy. We should address shootings and gun violence, but not by more restrictions on arms.

Don’t let them clip your beaks, stick to your guns.


[1] Quigley, in his long-winded manner, writes about this on page 34-35 of Tragedy and Hope. He also apparently died while in the process of putting together an entire book dedicated to the topic: Weapons Systems and Political Stability.  I haven’t checked it out yet but hope to do so in the near future.

[2] It is worth noting that Quigley was one of Bill Clinton’s most influential and loved teachers. So much so that Clinton personally thanked him in his inaugural address. This gives extra gravity to the fact that Clinton was the one who passed the Federal Assault Weapons ban and Brady Bill.

[3] One of the first activities of many KKK bands was to disarm local blacks.

[4] It is perhaps worth reading the linked article despite its rather blatant bias, and even more worth reading its cited source which looks to refute its claims. Between the two it still is evident firearm access is a form of social control.

[5] Politifact counters the idea that gun control laws lead to the atrocities under the Nazis, as many laws were already on the books under the Weimar republic & Treaty of Versailles’ general disarmament – but it is clear to see that enforcement was ramped up and politically targeted once the Nazis got in control.

[6] Open Source Defense (OSD for short) is an awesome blog about guns and gun rights absent of politics and the culture wars in general. I came to them by chance, but they provide excellent discussions and reframing around many discussions with guns. I have also had the chance to speak with a few of the folks behind the blog and they are a pretty cool group of people in general.

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