Guns: And Other Dangerous Technology in the Hands of American Citizens
Copyright © John Janovy, Jr., 2013
During the summer of either 1948 or 1949, when I
was ten or eleven years old, our family drove from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles
to visit my mother’s sister. Among the highlights of that trip were the
Southwestern deserts, with their “World’s Largest Rattlesnake” signs, a visit
to the Los Angeles natural history museum and La Brea tar pits, a “war show” at
the Memorial Coliseum, and a tour of Carlsbad Caverns on the way home. Among
the vocabulary I’d acquired during the previous few years, prior to Hiroshima,
was the phrase “.50 caliber machine gun;” the war show, a WWII battle
re-enactment, brought that phrase to life, sort of, without human bodies actually
being blown apart but with a healthy dose of noise, flashing lights, and
weapons. That pre-teen memory surfaced a dozen years later as I lay on the
ground and pressed the trigger of a real .50 caliber machine gun, felt the
concussions, and watched the tracers, straight as a burning chalk line, for a
mile down range.
During the summer of 1958 and fall of 1959, I was
in military training as an advanced ROTC student and field artillery second
lieutenant, respectively. In 1958, I did infantry basic training at Ft. Hood,
near Waco, Texas, and in 1959, went through the officers’ basic course at Ft.
Sill, Oklahoma. During one of those periods, we were taken to the firing range
and introduced to a variety of weapons: .30 caliber carbines, .30 caliber
machine guns, .50 caliber machine guns, 57mm recoilless rifles, and hand
grenades. We were all quite familiar with the M1 Garand. At Ft. Sill, we also spent
many hours learning to direct artillery fire, both in the classroom and on the
firing range (“Your target is an abandoned tank, 100 mls west of Signal
Mountain.”). Eventually we ended up behind 105mm howitzers, pushing shells into
the chamber with a balled fist (avoids fingers being caught in the breech block),
and yanking the lanyard. Later, firing both 155mm and 8 inch howitzers, my
thoughts often turned to exactly how much havoc a single individual, or a small
group of people, could wreak given the right technology.
Those thoughts again surfaced in my mind one clear
early fall afternoon as I entered the Strategic Air Command Museum, situated
along the Platte River south and west of Omaha, Nebraska, and stared up at truly
remarkable pieces of technology, all designed for one purpose and one purpose
only: to deliver death and destruction, hopefully on an unimaginable scale, to
some far-away place and to some far-away people. B-58A Hustler nuclear
supersonic bomber, maximum speed 1,358 MPH at 44,000 feet, payload of 109,500
pounds (55 tons of mayhem, potentially nuclear); B-52B heavy bomber, capable of
carrying 123 tons of whatever happened to be needed or wanted at the time; both
helped along in their missions by SR-71A Blackbird, a reconnaissance aircraft with
a range of 3000 miles at 80,000 feet and Mach 2 speed, scanning and reporting
on a hundred thousand square miles of enemy territory in an hour aloft—in
essence, a traveling bomb sight. And that’s just the old, decommissioned,
museum stuff; whatever is currently deployed must be an order of magnitude more
lethal.
None of these flying instruments required a whole
platoon to deliver, although if ground support and maintenance are considered, the
number of people involved must be substantial. The intellectual and physical resources
required to design, build, and test these technological wonders are also quite
substantial. A liberal mindset might wonder indeed whether such a massive
commitment to the production of military hardware, currently more in terms of
currency than spent on such purposes by all the world’s remaining nations,
including China, is consistent with the American Dream, American ideals, or the
concept of American Exceptionalism. But we’ve kept a hell of a lot of people
employed, many of them at tasks requiring high-level skills. As a result, with
our taxes we’ve supported—most certainly although indirectly—colleges and universities,
local housing markets and automobile dealerships near military bases, and the
medical profession, along with every other business and charity that receives
money from families associated in any way with this military-industrial
complex.
What we have not done, as a nation, is assess the
long-term consequences of our obsession with weapons. And it is an obsession;
the evidence to support such a claim is nearly boundless, from the video game
and entertainment industries, to glamorization of military service, jet fighter
fly-overs at college football games, the above-mentioned expenditure of
national resources on large, highly destructive, state-of-the-art technology,
and political rhetoric that inevitably accompanies the latest multiple
shootings in schools, shopping malls, movie theaters, and places where
disgruntled pistol-packing guys were formerly employed (or their ex-wives
and/or ex-girlfriends are now employed). As a nation, we solve problems, or at
least try to solve them, with guns: big ones, small ones, mounted on everything
from jeeps to tanks to jet aircraft, and evolving as rapidly as technology
itself in an age characterized by competitive technological evolution.
Is this gun-toting nation—sucking up a
disproportionate share of global fossil fuels, rapidly evolving into a
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, mélange unimagined, and
unimaginable, to our Founding Fathers, and enjoying a level of person freedom
that is terrifying to many of our self-declared mortal enemies who range from
fanatical God-worshiping monotheists to oppressive, nuclear-wannabe tyrants—a
problem to be solved? No. It is simply not possible for any political party or
NGO to convert the United States of America into post-Nagasaki Japan. Whatever
our current condition, it cannot be radically altered; we are simply too
heavily armed, both as individuals and as a nation. Among our public health
hazards, perceived and real, firearms rank somewhere between female clothing
(perceived high, especially by the religious and the Republican, but actually very
low) and tobacco (perceived relatively low by users, but actually very high).
Our reactions to those hazards, both as
individuals and as a society, vary greatly, depending on our exposure to them,
our backgrounds, and the circumstances under which their hazardous properties
are manifested. This essay deals, therefore, with the relationship between
perception, actual hazard potential, and our actions resulting from perception.
We humans act, or try to act, on our beliefs, which in turn are heavily influenced
by our perceptions. For example, we ask: are so-called assault weapons with
high capacity magazines a public health hazard? Our perceptions answer that
question with a resounding “yes!” but the statistics tell us otherwise,
regardless of the emotional impact of senseless multiple murder by disturbed
individuals who, in a careful society, would never have had access to such
means of destruction. Is female upper-body clothing a public health hazard? Our
perceptions answer that question with a resounding “yes!” but the statistics
tell us otherwise, regardless of the emotional impact of Janet Jackson’s left
nipple at a Super Bowl halftime show and consequent legal response ranging from
quick Congressional action to a class action lawsuit. So when we ask whether a
particular technology is dangerous, the proper answer is another question: compared to what?
I contend that the relationship between what we
see, what we believe, what we desire, and what we do is, or at least should be,
a subject of intense and rational study. Thus when we step back and take a
serious, dispassionate, look at our perceptions of danger and our actions
driven by those perceptions, we can only conclude that Homo sapiens is a very interesting and mysterious species. Evolutionary
biologists would not be surprised by such a conclusion. Christopher Beard’s The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey hints at
the origin of our fears and Mark Klinger’s drawings give those fears a sort of
life. Beard’s fossil evidence is, like most such evidence, open to discussion,
but his basic premise is valid regardless of arguments over hand and foot structure:
we come from frightened little primates with great big eyes and complicated
brains. I suspect that if you sat down with Beard over a glass of wine, he’d
tell you that we’re still frightened little primates with great big eyes and
complicated brains and we’re using the latter overtime to concoct a whole lot
of jungle beasts that may not really exist, using only our words and ideas.
It’s pretty easy to envision our foot-tall ancestors
constantly on the watch for predators: cats, birds of prey, snakes. When an
eagle swept down out of the sky, we quickly jumped, sometimes successfully. But
when a distant volcano sent dust clouds that covered the sun and influenced the
fruit supply a year hence, we shrugged our little shoulders, regardless of the
ultimate impact on our local community. And that’s where we are today. When the
dysfunctional kid kills his dysfunctional and heavily-armed mother then shows
up at school with a highly functional weapon, he might as well be the Miocene
leopard leaping onto that low branch where we’re trying to teach our baby how
to peel an orange. But when nerds tell us that the average global temperature
will increase a couple or three centigrade degrees by the time our newly-born
granddaughter is our age, then we call it just a theory and dispute it
vigorously, especially if we’re employed by certain companies, especially those
invested in the production of carbon-based fuels.
In the following pages I’ve tried to put a recent
gun tragedy—the Newtown, Connecticut, Sandy Hook elementary school
shootings—into a modern evolutionary perspective. Nothing will change the
devastating shock and everlasting sorrow of parents who lost children in that
incident. My hope is that another one does not occur before I finish this small
book, or evermore. But even though I am far away from that Connecticut event,
like the vast majority of all Americans the discussion about preventing that
next one surrounds me, carried on in my daily newspaper, on national television,
in news magazines, and, of course, via the Internet, especially Facebook and
Twitter. The argument over “gun control” will not go away by the time I finish
this analysis, and my voice is not likely to settle it, especially because whatever
the term “gun control” means to folks from all sides of the political spectrum,
it’s not likely to stop the next person determined to shatter our sense of
safety and well-being.
I am a scientist, however, who for the past
half-century has had to answer to anonymous peer reviewers when attempting to publish,
for international consumption, the results of research done in my laboratory.
Such review forces upon a writer both a certain kind of rationality and a deep
respect for evidence—traits we acquire not because we’re particularly noble,
highly ethical, or more intelligent than our neighbors, but because they’ve
been forced upon us by our professional colleagues, not all of whom are our
fans. So I’m going to try to take a look at evidence, mainly statistics,
insofar as they are available and presumed accurate, as well as our reactions
to various events, both as individuals and as a society. As a result of that
look, I conclude that we Americans live with public health hazards, some of
them quite remarkable, but we react to them in ways that are not always
consistent with the level of danger, especially as a society.
Some of these hazards can be ameliorated, others
seem quite intractable. In some cases we have reduced danger to the public, in
other cases we have not, and will not. With some, we are and likely always will
be exceedingly vulnerable; with others, we will ignore at our long-term peril
simply out of disbelief. Yes, we are still those scared little primates always
on the lookout for leopards and eagles, but fail to see some of them,
especially when they come disguised in our false perceptions, and imagine
others just because they’re dressed up in metaphorical Halloween costumes. And
what are those costumes made of? My answer is: words and beliefs, although I
will admit that some of those beliefs may have roots that go back very deep,
into that wide-eyed, frightened, Miocene ancestry.
Homo sapiens, a primate whose scientific
name translates literally into “wise man,” is a consummate inventor. There is
plenty of evidence that this propensity for making things—tools, especially—is
deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. Chimpanzees do it; some birds do it;
and, if we consider bubble-cones that enclose anchovies into enormous
bite-sized groups as technology, whales do it, too. So we are not alone in our
inventive practices regardless of how sophisticated we may be compared to our
vertebrate relatives and how powerful this combination of human brain and hand
has proven to be, particularly in the construction of weapons. Every spear, bow
and arrow, knife, catapult, pistol, rifle, machine gun, cannon, and jet
fighter/bomber is a device intended to hurt something or someone: prey or
enemy. Yet we invent plenty of other things that can and do hurt, regardless of
our intent. Then we live with our inventions.
Technology never
goes away. Freeman Dyson, in his book Disturbing
the Universe, passes along a story about a child given the choice of a
horse or a bicycle. The boy chooses the horse; the take-home lesson is that the
horse is a natural phenomenon that will eventually die, but the bicycle is
technology. The boy knew instinctively that once he acquired a bicycle, he had
that technology, the idea if not the steel and rubber machine itself, forever. In
addition, the society surrounding that boy had acquired the knowledge of how to
build bicycles, and such knowledge would not go away so long as humans
populated the Earth. Dyson follows that story with a discussion of weapons,
especially nuclear weapons. We have them; we will have them, indeed lots of
them, for as long as we exist as a species; their parts may well outlive us by
millennia.
So what are my
purposes in writing this essay? There are three: First, like thousands, if not
millions, of my fellow Americans, I feel a need to speak out about problems
that seem to plague our society, and especially when those problems deliver
such an emotional impact and affront to our rationality. Second, because of my
scientific specialty—parasitology, i.e., the study of parasitic organisms—I’m
constantly exposed to technical literature that addresses problems of risk and
health, including the dangers of infectious disease at both the individual and
population level. Thus by training, I believe I’m as qualified to talk about
various aspects of dangerous technology, including weapons, as some Rambo
wannabe. Finally, for the past half-century, my professional life has been one
in which my students and I have constantly addressed complex problems, albeit
most of them involving the lives of microscopic animals, and published the results
of such study. Nevertheless, complex, multi-faceted problems share many traits,
not the least of which is the relationship between perception and reality. This
relationship is the one I am exploring in the following pages.
