The sheer availability of weaponry in the United States increases the risk of terrorism. Terrorist groups in other democracies have usually scrambled to find weapons; the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for instance, had to resort to getting arms from Libya.
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And David Frum:
Hundreds of millions of firearms are housed in American garages, basements, and attics. Delusions and disinformation still flow through social media. For a long time, however, mainstream politics has been barricaded from violence not only by the moral resistance of decent people—but also by the pragmatic calculations of even cynical politicians that violence does not pay.
That pragmatic calculation has been weakening. In 2018, the present governor of Montana won a House race after he violently attacked a journalist for asking him an unwanted question. More and more politicians campaign with firearms at their side. The taboo on political violence, already weaker in the United States than in many peer democracies, is weakening further. Among other things, Trump’s impeachment trial offers an opportunity to reassert that taboo, to denormalize mayhem and murder as the route to power.
So it’s not only Trump who is on trial. It’s his methods—and all who aspire to adopt his methods as their own in the political contests ahead.
February 12th, 2021 at 11:25AM
To quote a quarterback who might be considering a political career, R-E-L-A-X.
There are something like six hundred thousand deer hunters in Wisconsin, and who knows how many more might be target or trap shooters.
More than a few of them are likely members of the National Rifle Association. In addition, there’s a substantial share of those members who aren’t into the politics of the national office, but all in on range safety or the latest trapshoot-cum-fundraiser for Tocquevillian local causes.
Perhaps Mr Frum ought find one of those fundraisers, stop there, look, and listen, before he again holds forth about populist terrorists.
February 12th, 2021 at 12:05PM
Stephen: I think it’s a more general fear. Not just that there are basically white nationalist terror cells in various places in this country with massively stockpiled weapons; but that once shooting starts and everyone is scared, all those upstanding Wisconsin hunters will in response reach for THEIR guns, etc. etc. It seems to me a no-brainer as a general proposition that the more weaponry in a population (and some of it serious military grade), the more likely various forms of civil unrest will explode into something far worse. And that an outgunned police/military presence will be useless.
February 13th, 2021 at 1:04PM
Seriously, UD? The political class is hiding behind razor wire and the bayonets of Illinois Guardsmen for fear that red-pilled normies with deer rifles, aided by renegade elements of the police and the military, are one provocation away from going all Sarajevo on the Establishment?
Let’s grant the premise of your fear: other people are fearful. If so, mightn’t it be in the interest of the political class, acting as agents for the public, to stop suggesting that Trump voters as a class are Q-anon believers (one of your other interlocutors had a useful disaggregation of that population); to stop suggesting that hunters and competitors at target shooting as a class are one Charlton Heston quote away from taking direct action; to encourage the adherents of critical race theory to stop privilege-shaming anyone born white?
Note further, I haven’t even raised the arbitrary, deadly, ineffective, and generally classist corona lockdowns, nor have I gotten into the weeds about what makes a firearm “serious military grade.”
As grotesque, to borrow a word, as the former president has often been, he’s a symptom, and David Frum isn’t going to wish future manifestations of his form away.
February 13th, 2021 at 3:12PM
Stephen: I didn’t malign most gun owners as dangerous; that was your interpretation of what I said. My implication was that if the newly emboldened insurrectionists among us decide to branch out from state capitols and the Capitol to the streets of our cities and towns (nothing in their behavior/rhetoric makes this a paranoid ‘if’), we can expect a super-dangerous 3-way war: police/military vs. insurrectionists vs. ordinary decent people protecting their families with their guns.
As of 2017, there were approximately 120.5 civilian firearms per one hundred persons in this country. The actual number is probably far higher. It just doesn’t seem rocket science to me that a population armed to the teeth is likely to be a bit more flammable than a reasonably armed population, or a lightly armed population.
Guns make all sorts of things much more dangerous, right? Take the common human experience of depression. If you live in a state with huge numbers of guns, you run a far higher risk of suicide than people who live in states with fewer guns. The suicide statistics in this country elegantly track gun ownership. Check out Alaska, Wyoming, Montana.
You seem to be arguing that affection for Trump and the piling on of guns is a “symptom” of anger at elites who call all Republicans QAnon nuts and malign all gun-owners and make all white people feel ashamed of being white.
I know better than most – having spent my entire career in the field of the humanities at an east coast university – how obnoxious mindless radicalism can be, and how disdainful of ordinary Americans mindlessly radical elites can be. But I don’t see it as a massively meaningful cultural movement, I’m afraid. The other side has to deal with critical race theory; I have to deal with people from the other side calling me and people like me godless baby killers. So? I’m perfectly happy to fight cultural wars without trying to win them by killing people inside the United States Capitol.
February 14th, 2021 at 5:31PM
UD, mightn’t that super-dangerous war have more than three dimensions: patriot militias here, woke militias there, scared citizens, police and military, and then complicate things in the cities with ethnically-based drug lords squaring off and the police viewed more as armies of occupation than as protection for the scared citizens? That gets us way beyond cultural wars.
I suspect a spurious correlation in those states with suicides and gun ownership. That’s an occupational hazard in the social sciences, but easy enough to see why: sparsely settled states, principal industries are extractive or agricultural, law enforcement is a long way away, thus home defense is a thing, and the comfy or high status jobs are elsewhere. It’s gloomy six months or so out of each year. Thus the remaining population is selected for depression and drug use and despair. One could probably perform a similar analysis on parts of upstate New York, or of Wisconsin north of 29: the dachas for rich city folks in a few places, and a lot of towns where the ambitious kids have long ago fled.
I have less confidence in Trumpism as a symptom of more widespread abuse by people who think themselves better, but am not prepared to abandon it as a working hypothesis. That it’s easy enough to mock residents of the states you invoke is part of my case. Alaska? See Tina Fey and the Sarah Palin mocking. Montana and Wyoming? See the national 55 mph speed limit and references to “flyover country.”
We’re in agreement that occupying the national capitol isn’t the approach to take. Unfortunately, that’s not the way to get eyeballs, retweets, and likes these days.