Escalation

[garran]

"An armed society is a polite society."

I'm not sure what one does about this. Although I tend to like gun control laws, in concept, of course passing a law against something isn't really a very effective way to keep it from happening. What's needed is a general culture of not-guns - and although I'd have some idea how to go about it in a community of about the size and good will of Windsor House, on this sort of scale I really don't know how to get that back, once it starts to go.

This isn't what I expect from Vancouver.

Comments

[garran.livejournal.com]

I have known that guns exist, and the basic manner of their use, for as long as I can remember, so 'ignorance' is not something that I've ever had and isn't what I'm advocating. Rather, I'd like a change in culture, which is something different. It's not that the knowledge of an option is kept from the populace, or even that it's legally forbidden, though it might be* - it's that it's generally considered Not Something That's Done.

Crucially and conversely, something's being legally forbidden doesn't mean that it will necessarily be culturally frowned upon, cf. pot smoking in Vancouver. Which is what I was talking about in my original post here; passing a law isn't actually the useful way to combat a cultural shift, or at least it can't be the only part of your strategy. You actually need to find a way to change minds, to successfully exhort the populace in general to agree that something should or shouldn't be done, which is considerably more delicate, difficult and interesting. Laws will follow.

(Windsor House consciously shifted its culture on several occasions when I was there; it's pretty easy to do in a community of, as I say, that small size and that great good will. If something was bothering us enough we could shut down the school and hold a big meeting that everyone went to and talk about it until we had consensus on the direction to take. We did that once about people who had marijuana on school grounds, which was becoming almost endemic, and before we went into the meetings there was a cultural feeling among significant portions of the school populace that this was an okay thing to do so long as you weren't caught, and when we left the meetings that culture was gone - it had voluntarily dissolved.)

On the subject of nuclear weapons, though - if there was some safe and foolproof way to dispose of all the world's supply of these at once, wouldn't you want that to happen? It seems to me as though the major lesson of 'The Bomb' is that there are some things that we as a species are capable of that we should never, ever do; this is responsibility, too.


-Garran