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THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS by Barry Edelson 
StalemateGuns, Drugs and Political Failure
The views expressed in this dialogue belong exclusively to the two characters, Querious and Antagonē (an-tá-go-nee), who, in their zeal to extract the truth over their friendly weekly lunch at a local diner, are often carried away on flights of rhetorical fancy. They are both entirely fictitious figments of the author's imagination and are not intended to resemble any actual persons or their thoughts.
You don't own a gun, do you? ANTAGONĒ No, but not for any ideological reason. QUERIOUS I didn't know guns had an ideology. ANTAGONĒ Maybe I should have said, not for any political reason. QUERIOUS So you don't align yourself either with the gun-control people or the gun-rights people? ANTAGONĒ Not really, no. QUERIOUS You're not a violent person. It surprises me that you don't lean towards more the gun-control side of the argument. ANTAGONĒ I imagine that most people — including gun-rights people, as you call them — are non-violent. What kind of a person isn't against violence? But being against violence is like being against guns: neither is going to go away just because you don't like them. QUERIOUS That's not exactly true. Many other developed countries manage to restrict people's access to guns, and they all have much lower crime rates than we do. ANTAGONĒ They don't have the same history or culture that we do. For the most part, most never had widespread gun ownership in the first place, nor a frontier history in which both guns and violence featured prominently. QUERIOUS What about Australia? They are certainly a country that once had an untamed frontier, like ours. After a mass shooting a few years back, they successfully banned assault rifles. If memory serves, it was a conservative government that led that effort. Hard to imagine that happening here. ANTAGONĒ We tend to suppose that Australia, as an English-speaking former British colony, is a lot like America. And we do share some common characteristics — including a strange, inextinguishable fetish for the royal family — but the likeness only goes so far. I am certainly no expert in all things Australian, but their history and culture are different from ours, and they consequently confront modern issues from a different perspective. The very fact that Australians gave up their banned weapons without much of a fight tells you how different they are from us. QUERIOUS Then why do you suppose that we have this particular culture and they don't? For that matter, why doesn't any other country deal with the gun problem, or fail to deal with it, the way we do? ANTAGONĒ That is an extremely complicated question. Who can analyze all of the millions of factors that produce a particular culture with its peculiar set of values? QUERIOUS Or clash of values. ANTAGONĒ Being so divided is even more evidence for how impossible this is to answer. Every society is the product of countless interactions among countless individuals. It reminds me of Tolstoy's famous description of the battlefield in War and Peace: there is so much chaos, so much blood and movement and noise and smoke, that it's impossible for anyone to know exactly what's happening at any point in time. The foot soldiers in the midst of the fighting cannot know, and the generals looking on from a distance cannot know. Tolstoy takes this further by supposing that society at large is much like the battlefield, only less violent (usually): it's too complex for anyone to see everything that's happening, let alone understand it or make predictions about it. Anyone who convinces himself that he has some kind of superior instinct or intelligence, and claims to grasp what's going on and to know what will happen next, is just a fool. QUERIOUS It seems the world is filled with these fools. And that some of them are running the world. ANTAGONĒ Yes, and that is one of the many reasons why people have guns. They don't trust the fools in charge, they don't trust their neighbors — well, not all of them — and they cannot rely on the kindness of strangers. You will never convince certain people that they don't need a gun to protect themselves. QUERIOUS But that's not the only reason people have guns. It seems to go deeper than that for many gun owners. No one needs to tote an AR-15 around a shopping mall or bring it to a political rally for their protection. For people like that, the gun is not just a practical tool for hunting or self-defense, it becomes an object of veneration. Or worse, a means of intimidation. ANTAGONĒ Certainly there are those who see a gun as kind of personal statement, which is wrapped up in their sense of identity. People have all kinds of reasons for doing the things they do. But that doesn't make all of them trigger-happy idiots, or anti-government zealots, or even run-of-the-mill criminals. QUERIOUS The crime statistics would suggest otherwise. We are back to the question of why, if we are fundamentally no different from the other humans on the planet, do we have so much violence? Clearly, most gun owners don't kill anybody, but it only takes a small number of maniacs to cause mayhem. How many mass shootings have there been in schools in the last 25 or 30 years? The fact that we have lost count speaks for itself. Honoring the freedom of gun owners has left an awful lot of innocent people dead. ANTAGONĒ You seem to be on the verge of saying that guns should be outlawed altogether. QUERIOUS I can accept gun ownership as a necessary evil in a violent world, just as I accept the need for the country to have armed forces. But if I could choose between a world in which guns were freely available to any lunatic who wants one and a world in which there were no guns whatsoever, I would without hesitation choose the latter. ANTAGONĒ But if you acknowledge that a world without guns is a fantasy, then you also have to acknowledge that buying a gun can be a perfectly reasonable decision. QUERIOUS That's a bit like saying that because the world is filled with monsters, it would good to have your own monster in the house. I am more interested in the question of why we have so many monsters in the first place. ANTAGONĒ That would be a better place to center this debate. QUERIOUS Okay, but every time someone proposes shifting the debate to discussions of mental illness, or domestic violence, or the rights of ex-cons, or even suicide — which has long accounted for the largest number of gun deaths — someone on the right screams that any talk about the causes of violence is just a conspiracy by the left to take everyone's guns away. ANTAGONĒ Not everyone feels that way. QUERIOUS Enough people do to scare politicians away from the issue. I'll give you a concrete example: do you remember that scene in Michael Moore's movie — I think it was Bowling for Columbine — when he interviewed Charlton Heston? ANTAGONĒ Yes, and I remember that many in the gun-rights camp thought it was kind of a set-up. QUERIOUS I would venture to guess that most of the people who reacted that way didn't actually see the movie. Which is not surprising, since this is one of those issues that encourages people to retreat into their information silos and ignore everyone who might present any conflicting evidence. But what I remember is that Moore was surprisingly cordial and respectful, given where he is coming from politically. He asked Heston a question that is very pertinent to our discussion: why does Canada have a high rate of gun ownership but only a tiny fraction of the gun violence that we have? It was very surprising for him to ask that because he was basically ceding the point to Heston, and the gun lobby he represented, that guns are not the problem. ANTAGONĒ And what was Heston's response? QUERIOUS Disappointingly, he didn't really have a good answer. He mumbled something about race conflict and our violent history, but that doesn't even begin to cover the range of problems we are dealing with. One would have expected someone who devoted so many years of his life to protecting the rights of gun owners to have given more thought to a central tenet of his own argument. So what if it's true that "Guns don't kill, people do"? Don't you even want to understand why so many Americans kill each other when no other civilized nation has this problem? ANTAGONĒ I would suggest to you that the lack of understanding is as much on the left as on the right. QUERIOUS How so? ANTAGONĒ Moore was on to something when he took the focus off of the guns themselves, at least momentarily. But let's face it, he is not the most intellectually honest or consistent advocate out there. The major point of his movie, if memory serves, was that people having lots of guns is an inherently bad thing that leads to lots of bad outcomes. He didn't pursue his own question to Heston any further, which is equally disappointing to me. How about putting aside the political polemics on both sides, which are doomed to languish forever in black and white, and instead explore the cultural issues at length, in shades of gray? Moore wouldn't have been interested in making that movie. But somebody should. QUERIOUS I think Moore was, in that instance, trying to be even-handed. He started out the interview by showing Heston his own NRA membership card, to demonstrate that he is not hostile to gun ownership per se. But when he asked Heston why he kept loaded guns in his house in Beverly Hills, when he admitted that he doesn't feel unsafe and has never been the victim of a crime, all he could say was, "Because I can." In other words, because the Second Amendment says he can. Well, I'm sorry, but I would have thought that otherwise sensible adults can understand the difference between having the right to do something and doing the right thing. That answer signals to every reasonable person who genuinely wants to solve this problem that, to a certain group of Americans, and a set of influential people who represent their interests, their freedom to do whatever the hell they want is more important than anyone else's personal safety, including that of children. ANTAGONĒ You have fallen back on the argument that only the guns matter, and that they are more important to this question than the people who abuse them. QUERIOUS The fact of the matter is, lots of people do believe that guns are inherently bad. Used as intended, they kill people. ANTAGONĒ Well, used as intended, drugs also kill people. But I don't hear people on the left arguing that drugs should be banned. Quite the contrary: we are on a slow but steady path towards towards greater freedom of drug use and less extreme penalties for those who sell and use them. QUERIOUS I don't hear anyone on the left saying that meth, heroin and fentanyl should be legal. The movement to legalize marijuana has nothing to do with addictive narcotics. And, in stark contrast to the gun issue, no one on the left is arguing that even legal drugs should be unregulated. Gun rights advocates oppose any scrutiny of weapons makers whatsoever. ANTAGONĒ But it strikes me that there is a more fundamental point to be made here. Why do liberals invoke the "nanny state" to regulate all manner of things and behaviors that they find objectionable, from sugary sodas to air pollution, but expect the government to look the other way if the bad stuff happens to be agreeable to them? QUERIOUS One might very well turn that question around the other way: why have conservatives waged a half-century war on drugs but think it's okay to let people carry guns around as if we were living the Wild West? No one on the right ever declared, "Drugs don't kill, people do." Not coincidentally, those two trends have largely overlapped. We have been fighting the drug war since the 1970s, which is the same time period when gun violence, and crime in general, started to get out of control. The two sides have been running in opposite directions on both issues all this time. And with nothing to show for it except a growing number of dead bodies. ANTAGONĒ Well, we agree on that at least: the drug war has been as big a failure as the effort to ban guns. So what do you chalk up this strange inversion of opinions to? Mere hypocrisy? QUERIOUS There's some of that, of course. Partisanship makes it worse, by freezing politicians, and their followers, into all-or-nothing positions on issues that demand some nuance. ANTAGONĒ I'm not entirely convinced of the premise of your argument, though. When it comes to drugs, liberals say that using drugs is a personal decision, however tragic the outcome, but that guns must be heavily regulated because people can't be trusted with them. QUERIOUS And, just as you suggested, conservatives think the inverse: that people should be left alone to own and use guns as they see fit, but when it comes to drugs, we need to apply the full force of the state to keep drugs out of people's hands. ANTAGONĒ It stands to reason that if one is being consistent, one would either let people destroy themselves in any fashion they choose, whether with guns or drugs or any other dangerous implement, or we should intervene to save them no matter what they are doing or whether they even want to be saved. QUERIOUS There is the real weakness of your argument: because drugs may kill the user, but they don't kill the person standing nearby. They are not a weapon of mass harm. Letting people hurt themselves is a matter of right, but rights are no longer defensible when they infringe on the rights of others. ANTAGONĒ What about the families of the drugs users, which are also often destroyed by the death of the user? And what about the people murdered in the business of trafficking and selling drugs? Lots of bystanders get killed that way, and I suspect many more than in the mass killings that get all the attention. Not to mention all of the millions of people in prison, and their families, whose lives have also been ruined by drugs. QUERIOUS But that is all the result of making drugs illegal. If Prohibition should have taught us anything, it's that banning a desired substance will only create a black market for it, and that violent criminals will fight it out among themselves to control that market. All we did by banning alcohol a hundred years ago was create the ideal conditions for modern organized crime to flourish, and we've been stuck with it ever since. But we didn't learn that lesson at all. We have seen this play out now for a century, and nothing changes. Remember The Wire? The most organized and successful business in Baltimore was the illegal drug trade. ANTAGONĒ Successful and deadly, in multiple ways. QUERIOUS This is where we encounter a terrible convergence of these two issues. The availability of guns makes it possible for gangs to terrorize whole neighborhoods — in the case of Central America, whole countries — while the illegality of drugs creates incentives for more and more violent conflict. It seems obvious to me that this is a powerful argument for making drugs legal and guns illegal. ANTAGONĒ Now you are sidestepping the point I made earlier. Either the state should intervene in both cases or neither. QUERIOUS I never took you for a libertarian. Where do you come down on this question? Surely you think some regulation is in order, in order to maintain order. ANTAGONĒ Without a doubt. Even if, as a rule, I am not bothered if other people have guns, I am nonetheless uncomfortable with the proliferation of military-style weapons and the paranoia that seems to inspire many people to buy and, increasingly, use them. QUERIOUS So you acknowledge there is paranoia involved? ANTAGONĒ Well, to be perfectly honest, it pains me to watch thousands of people rush out to increase the size of their arsenals every time a Democrat gets elected president, because they believe that the government is planning to invade their homes and seize their weapons. This is not rational behavior because, of course, (a) it has never happened, and (b) it's hard to imagine how the government, as generally incompetent as it is, would go about the business of confiscating 300 million weapons. But that reality doesn't stop people from taking a few isolated instances in which the government did in fact behave horribly, like Waco or Ruby Ridge, and spinning them into conspiracy theories on a national scale. QUERIOUS And believing they are going to win an apocalyptic battle with the Feds. ANTAGONĒ That, too. QUERIOUS You do realize that now you sound like someone who is in favor of gun control. These are not attitudes or behaviors that make it easy to defend gun rights. ANTAGONĒ My point exactly. I don't like it when the views of a small number of extremists are lumped in with those of ordinary, everyday gun owners. QUERIOUS Just as I don't like it when the opinions of people who want to turn every police station in the country into a day-care center are lumped in with those of us who just don't want it to be so easy for Americans to kill each other. ANTAGONĒ Point taken. QUERIOUS But acknowledging all that, you wouldn't hesitate to buy a weapon? ANTAGONĒ Not if I felt I needed one, no. Why should else's crazy ideas about guns stop me from doing something that is, in itself, perfectly reasonable? That's like saying you shouldn't smoke pot because of the fentanyl crisis. QUERIOUS What would you do about confronting gun violence and the conspiracy theories? ANTAGONĒ I would not confront them. I would defend myself as best I can. QUERIOUS Not rely on the state to defend you? ANTAGONĒ Ha. You saw what happened in Uvalde, Texas, when the cops stood outside a school for ages while people were being massacred inside? QUERIOUS That's not a typical response. Cops these days, and in most places, are trained to respond to an active shooter situation by going in fast and asking questions later. ANTAGONĒ I still think my chances are better if I arm myself. QUERIOUS And I think that view is delusional. Even police officers will tell you that it is very hard to control your fear and think straight, let alone shoot straight, in dangerous situations. What chance do you have? None of us knows how we would act in an extremely tense, life-and-death moment until we face it. ANTAGONĒ If that's true, then no one knows how the cops will perform, either. Maybe that's why there are so many killings of innocent people: not because the cops are necessarily racist or trigger-happy, but because they need to respond to violent incidents with lightning-fast thinking and judgment, which is beyond the mental and emotional capacity of most humans, no matter how much training they've had. QUERIOUS But still you don't even have a gun. ANTAGONĒ Not yet, anyway. QUERIOUS Are you thinking about it? ANTAGONĒ I wasn't before we had this conversation. March 26, 2025
There are more dialogues here: Cruel Jokes, Volume I
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