Guys with Guns

Much has been written to debunk the thesis, popular among gun-rights advocates, that “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” The refutations tend to rely on statistics showing that increased gun ownership leads to increases in rates of violence, or that the instances in which civilians are able to use guns to stop crimes are vanishingly rare. But there’s one simple, common-sense argument that I’ve never seen put forward: Practically speaking, there is no difference between a “good guy” and a “bad guy.”

Given a collection of random people, would you be able to sort them into two groups, one good and one bad? Of course not — there is no real-world marker of goodness or badness. Clearly, then, we can’t expect a bullet to know whether it’s been fired by a good guy’s gun or a bad guy’s gun. It’s just going to go wherever the gun is pointed.

Therefore, it’s meaningless to say that “a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” All we can say is that one person with a gun can stop another person with a gun. It may be that one is a more skilled marksman than the other, or that one is luckier than the other, but which individual is “good” and which is “bad” doesn’t enter into it.

How, then, can we make it more likely that in any violent confrontation, the right person will prevail? Well, one possibility is that we, through our democratically elected government, could agree on who we want to represent our collective definition of goodness, and allow those people — and only those people — to have guns. We could train them to use their guns conscientiously and safely. We could make them responsible for protecting the rest of us (who are unarmed) against anyone who attempts to do us harm. We could make them easily identifiable as “good guys” by giving them uniforms… maybe even badges. (OK, you see where I’m going with this.)

Unfortunately, this proposal can only work if it’s built on a foundation of trust, and trust is in short supply. There are plenty of people who say, “I’m not going to put my safety in the hands of a government whose interests might be contrary to mine. The only person I can trust is myself. I refuse to relinquish the weapons that would allow me to defend myself against those who wish to hurt me — possibly including the government itself.”

Now, here’s where it gets interesting, because this is the point where I’d feel the urge to take sides: I’d want to say, “Yes, but in taking that position, you’re putting all of us in danger. If everyone has equal access to guns, there’s no guarantee that the ‘good’ person will defeat the ‘bad’ person in any given conflict — the outcome is just as likely to be the opposite.”

A thoughtful gun-rights advocate might then respond, “I acknowledge that if everyone has the right to use a gun, some people are going to die unnecessarily. But if that’s what’s necessary to preserve our absolute right to self-defense, I’m willing to make that tradeoff.”

And there lies the problem: Every policy decision involves a tradeoff. The difference between the two sides in an argument usually comes down to what each side is willing to trade away in exchange for something they consider more valuable.

This may seem like a weird change of topic, but consider the debate over encryption. Several digital communication companies protect their users’ privacy by providing end-to-end encryption — meaning that if I send you a message, it will be transmitted in a highly secure format that can be read only on your device. End-to-end encryption enrages law enforcement authorities, who have long been able to listen in on phone conversations and depend on being able to do the same with digital communications. In order to stop terrorist acts before they happen, they say, they must have a way to find out what potential terrorists are saying to each other. But companies such as Apple tell them, “We’re sorry, but messages sent via iMessage are so secure that even we can’t read them.”

The U.S. government has demanded that Apple build a back door into its communications software that would allow law enforcement to read encrypted messages in cases of potential threats to national security. Apple has refused, and privacy-rights advocates — myself among them — support Apple’s stance. The government, they say, could abuse its access by illegally tapping into conversations that have nothing to do with national security, and then using the gathered information for its own ends. To protect themselves from government agents who can’t be trusted, people should have the right to communicate privately.

Someone could easily say to a privacy-rights advocate, “But in taking that position, you’re putting us all in danger. You’re making it more difficult for law enforcement to predict and prevent terrorist acts.”

And I, as a privacy-rights advocate, would have to respond, “if that’s what’s necessary to preserve our absolute right to privacy, I’m willing to make that tradeoff.”

In other words, there’s no such thing as a “good guy with an argument” and a “bad guy with an argument.” Both sides are using the same argument, but we’re just filling in the blanks differently. In the absence of a perfect solution to a problem — which almost never exists — each of us has no choice but to weigh one potential outcome against another, using our own values as a guide.

Posted February 1, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Society
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They Don’t Make Centuries Like They Used To

I don’t remember how old I was — clearly not old enough to do the math myself — but I vividly recall having my mind blown when my mother told me that there were people still alive who had been born in the nineteenth century. This must have been in the early 1960s — a time when “a century ago” meant the Civil War and the Wild West. That such an ancient era could be so close to our own seemed unimaginable.

Sixty-or-so years have passed since then, and “a century ago” now means 1922. Could I be the only one for whom 1922 doesn’t feel nearly as remote as the Civil War? Maybe it’s because we — or at least I — routinely watch films that were made in the 1920s, but life at that time doesn’t seem much different than life now. People drove cars, talked on telephones, and had gas stoves and electric lights. They went to the office, shopped in department stores, listened to recordings, and went to the movies. Granted, making a phone call required talking to an operator, and drivers of automobiles had to share the road with the occasional horse-drawn vehicle, but all in all, if someone were to put me in a time machine and drop me off in the 1920s, I think I’d make out just fine.

Jump ahead a decade to the 1930s, and life feels even more familiar. Cars look like cars instead of horseless carriages, phones can connect to each other autonomously, kitchens are bright with white-enameled appliances, and mass media — in the form of the ubiquitous radio — has entered everyone’s home. Most important, people can suddenly talk.

To clarify, people had been blabbing for thousands of years, but in movies (which is the most direct way we have of getting to know them), characters didn’t really start talking until the end of the 1920s. I’m guessing that the fact that we can not only see people going about their lives, but hear them as well, is what makes them feel so like us.

It’s disconcerting to spend time with characters in a 1930s movie — experiencing them not as relics of another time, but as living, breathing people — and suddenly remember that the actors we’re looking at are long gone. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, William Powell and Myrna Loy quipping, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert bantering — it all feels so immediate. I simply can’t adjust to the fact that the events I’m watching happened ninety years ago. Ninety years is practically a century.

I find myself wondering about the people who were my current age — in their mid-sixties, or older — in the 1960s. They would have been born around or before the turn of the twentieth century. Did the Civil War and Reconstruction feel as recent to them as the 1920s do to me? Would they have felt that if a time machine dropped them somewhere in the 1860s or ’70s, they would be in relatively familiar surroundings? Or does the absence of movies and sound recordings from that time mean that the Civil War era always felt remote to people who didn’t live through it?

I’m fairly certain that for young people today, the 1920s and ’30s do feel like the distant past — probably as distant as the era of Manifest Destiny felt to me when I was young. But I’ll bet that’s largely because they haven’t seen the films that I’ve seen. (In my experience, people under 30 refuse to watch any movie that’s in black-and-white, no matter how excellent it is.)

I developed my interest in silent films when I was still in elementary school, so I realize that I’m an anomaly even in my own generation. But I’d love to find a present-day me-equivalent — someone young who has watched a lot of classic films — and find out what their relationship is to the America of a hundred years ago. Does a century feel as short to them as it does to me?

Posted January 25, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Perception
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Narrow Escape

At a recent party (during that brief interlude when parties were a thing again), I had a conversation with someone who had attended a wine tasting. He was something of a wine connoisseur, and he spoke derisively of the tasters who had liked the cheaper wines more than the good, complex, expensive stuff. His attitude — although he didn’t express it in quite these words — was “Why should these ignorant people be allowed to drink wine?”

As much as I dislike snobbery, I have to confess that I sometimes share in it. When a new acquaintance told me that he liked blended scotch better than single malt, I couldn’t help but think less of him. It’s one thing to buy blended scotch because you don’t know enough about single malts to be able to pick one out, but to actually like it better…? It was hard to imagine that we could become friends.

I suppose we all have our snobberies — if not about alcohol, then about music, or literature, or fashion. But it only recently struck me that being a snob requires us to go against our usual way of assessing people.

A common, negative thing that one person might say about another is that they’re “narrow-minded.” To be narrow-minded is to be stuck in one set of beliefs, and to dismiss any beliefs that lie outside that set as simply wrong. The opposite of being narrow-minded is to be open-minded, which is to say willing to entertain a wide range of beliefs. If I’m open-minded, it doesn’t mean that I have to accept your view that UFOs are spaceships piloted by aliens from other planets, but I at least have to be open to being convinced. And I have to respect your right to hold that belief, even if it’s one I disagree with.

Of course, there are certain things about which we’re supposed to be narrow-minded. If you express a belief that one race of people is superior to another, I’m expected not only to reject that belief, but to consider you a lesser person. Failing to be narrow-minded in that case would make me a lesser person. But moral issues like that one are in a separate category, because — for mysterious reasons that I’ve speculated about before — we take the moral rightness or wrongness of something to be a fact, not something that we can simply hold beliefs about.

Outside of moral contexts, however, we’re generally willing to concede that our judgment of a particular set of ideas is just that — a judgment. I might consider “Vertigo” to be a better movie than “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” but I’d never claim the superiority of “Vertigo” to be an objective fact. The strongest claim I could make is that my assessment of movies aligns more closely with critical consensus than yours does.

So why is it that we generally admire open-mindedness and scorn narrow-mindedness, but in cases of taste, we experience the opposite? Why am I more likely to respect someone who says “I enjoy rosé wine, but I refuse to drink white Zinfandel” than someone who says “All wine is good”?

After all, a drinker who believes that all wine is good will likely have a happier life, since they’ll take pleasure in whatever is served to them at a party. They’ll be more open to trying varieties of wine that they’ve never heard of before. They’ll have equal regard for each new person they meet, regardless of that person’s taste in wine. What reason could I have to look down on someone like that?

My guess is that snobbery is not really about the wine — or whiskey, or art, or whatever — but about social identity. If I believe in the superiority of a particular style of music, I get to be a member of a tribe, and to bond with people who feel the same way about music. I get treated as an insider, and I get to treat others as outsiders. Deep down, I know that my ranking of one sort of music above another is simply a matter of taste, and not a provable fact; but I get social rewards for treating it as if it were a fact.

I’m coming to feel that it’s incumbent on me to start ignoring those social rewards as a way toward being a better person. When I meet someone who prefers blended scotch, shouldn’t I make a conscious choice not to look down on them, but to chastise myself for my own narrow-mindedness? Shouldn’t I say to myself, “Well, sure, blended scotch is up to 80% neutral grain whiskey, with various proportions of barrel-aged malts added to give it flavor, and it’s mass-produced this way not for reasons of quality, but simply to keep the price down — but if my new acquaintance thinks it’s superior, maybe they’re seeing something that I’m missing”?

OK, well, I didn’t say it was easy.

Posted January 18, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure
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Song in My Heart

Tara DeMoulin

A few nights ago, I cautiously donned my KN95 mask and went to a (well ventilated, vaccinated-only) San Francisco bar to see my friend Tara DeMoulin sing a set of jazz standards. I hadn’t had any in-person contact with her since before the pandemic, so having an opportunity to hear her voice was worth the slight chance of catching a potentially fatal case of Omicron.

Apart from being a singer, Tara is an actor, writer, aspiring filmmaker, and autodidact who can express herself eloquently and brilliantly on any topic, including arts, history, and politics. (If she had a blog, I would urge you to abandon mine and go read hers instead; but since she doesn’t, all I can suggest is that you follow her on Facebook.) The first time I met Tara was during a break at a film festival, when we struck up a conversation over refreshments. When she mentioned that she was a vocalist, I naturally asked when I could hear her sing. She responded by cupping her hand and singing a song directly into my ear, which is an experience I would recommend to anybody.

Like any good performer, Tara puts her entire self into everything she sings. It’s a skill that I envy, because for me, singing a song is simply the act of singing a song. I love the physical sensation of singing, and I strive to do it as well as I can, but I’ve never been able to find an emotional connection to the words in the way Tara so clearly does.

That’s probably related to the fact that when I listen to a song, I rarely notice the lyrics; all I really hear is the music. My popular-music-loving wife Debra is the opposite: When she listens to a song, she hears only the words. We’ll occasionally have a conversation in which she’ll refer to a well-known song by its content, such as when she described Rupert Holmes’s “Escape” — the one with the catchy chorus that starts with “If you like piña coladas…” — as a song about a couple who turn to the personal ads as a way to escape their boring relationship, only to discover that the attractive strangers they find there are each other. My reaction in those cases is always one of surprise: “You mean that song is about something?”

A few years ago, Tara told me about a recording that so moved her, she found herself compulsively listening to it over and over. It was “La Corrida,” a song by the French singer Francis Cabrel, expressing the horror of a bullfight from the point of view of the doomed bull. She recited the lyrics for me in perfect French, her voice filled with urgency and pain:

Depuis le temps que je patiente dans cette chambre noire
J’entends qu’on s’amuse et qu’on chante
Au bout du couloir…[1]

I confessed to her that I’d never had the experience of being moved by a song in the way she was. Nearly everyone I know has a song or an album that — particularly during their adolescence — they deeply identified with, that might even have represented a turning point in their life. I’ve always been able to enjoy a song; I can understand its message; I can appreciate its beauty and craftsmanship; but I never had the often-described feeling of a song speaking directly to me, as if the songwriter had been able to see into my soul.

Tara refused to accept this. She pressed me: There must have been some time, she said, when I felt an especially deep connection to something I listened to. I thought for a bit, and then said, “Yes, there was.” It was in college, when I was taking an introductory music course, and I heard a recording of the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. I have a perfect memory of the room I was sitting in — or at least the room my body was sitting in — while the music wrapped itself around me and carried me, awestruck, to a place from which I felt I could embrace the universe. That was the first time I’d ever experienced a symphonic composition as something other than background noise, and it was the source of an attraction to classical music, and particularly to Mozart, that I still hold.

Tara’s reaction was a relieved smile that said, “I told you so.” She was satisfied that I was, after all, a normal human being. In retrospect, though, I’m not as convinced as she was. My Mozart experience was not in response to a song — a verbal message expressed with music — but to pure music. And since that day, I’ve never had a similar response to a recording, even a recording of the Jupiter Symphony. The joy I take in music all comes from live performance, where I’m experiencing not just the music itself, but the immediate energy of the people making it.

Looking back at Tara’s performance a few nights ago, I’m not sure that I could separate my enjoyment of her singing from my affection for her as a person, and my appreciation of her charisma as a performer. (Such is Tara’s sway over a crowd that when she offhandedly recommended a cocktail called The Liberal, pretty much everyone at the bar turned around and ordered one.) I must admit that when she performed her beautiful rendition of “La Vie en Rose,” I wasn’t thinking about the bittersweetness of romance so much as how lovely it would be to have that melody sung directly into my ear.

[1] As I’ve been waiting in this pitch-dark room / I hear merrymaking and singing / At the end of the corridor…

Posted January 11, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Arts
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Vote of Confidence

On November 8, 2016, an hour into teaching my regular Tuesday night class, I announced that I was going to end the lesson early and turn on the news of the presidential election. The polls had finally closed across the country, meaning that news organizations could now release their projected results. “OK, turn it on, but you’re not going to like it,” said one student who was already staring at his phone.

Sure enough, when I switched the digital projector over to CNN, I was shocked to see a US map largely drenched in MAGA-red. “This wasn’t supposed to be possible!” I said to myself in horror. Then, a moment later, another thought occurred to me: Why had the student assumed that I wasn’t going to like it?

I had always been scrupulous about keeping politics out of the classroom. I wanted every student to feel included and accepted regardless of whether their political beliefs aligned with mine, and the easiest way to ensure that was never to discuss politics. On every Election Day, I would exhort students to go out and vote — even offering to excuse them from class if there was no other time they could make it to the polls — but never said a word about whom they ought to vote for. Eight years before, during a similar Tuesday night class, I had turned on the news just as Barack Obama was being declared the first Black person elected to the presidency, and felt constrained to show no reaction, even as I watched tears come to the eyes of several of my students of color. Now, watching Donald Trump emerge victorious, I had to avoid displaying my despair.

I don’t know where I got the idea that part of my role as a teacher was to remain politically dispassionate. Certainly, many of my colleagues strongly believed the opposite — that it was their duty to bring politics into the classroom, regardless of what subject they were teaching. The college administration had an explicit policy of advocating for social and environmental justice. Faculty members were expected to support and encourage activism among their students, many of whom came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or immigrant families.

Not surprisingly, I share those beliefs in progressive causes. Nevertheless, I chafed at being expected — to some degree, required— to hold a particular set of values, and I didn’t want to put my students in that same position. My job was to teach my students how to think, but not what to think. If I were to present my values as being true, I would be, in effect, telling some number of my students that theirs are false. I’m not prepared to do that.

I’ve long experienced queasiness at what was for a time called “virtue signaling” (and now appears to be called “performative behavior”). When people posted about their political beliefs on Facebook, I wouldn’t regard their posts as saying something about the world — at least not anything that hasn’t been said a million times before — but as saying something about themselves: “Look how noble I am to have these opinions.” In the words of P.T. Barnum, talk is cheap. If I’m not doing something to better the state of the world (and I honestly can’t claim to be doing much), then I haven’t earned any right to tell others what my feelings are about it, and they have no reason to care.

So when that student said, on election night, that I’m “not going to like it,” I immediately wondered what led him to assume that I favored the liberal candidate over the conservative one. Had I failed in keeping my opinions to myself, and if so, how? I knew that I hadn’t said anything in class, or even outside of class, and I hadn’t posted about politics on social media. I couldn’t have communicated my desired outcome unconsciously — say, through body language — since until that moment, I didn’t have any idea who was ahead in the election.

All I could come up with is that, having spent a few months in my classroom, the student had intuited that I just didn’t seem like a Trump supporter. I treated my students with respect and was genuinely interested in their ideas. I was flexible. I was compassionate. I often initiated discussions of ethical issues in class, but I hadn’t attempted to impose my values on my students or make judgments about theirs.

If that was indeed the reason, then I could be happy. It meant that I hadn’t failed; I had, in some sense, succeeded. It meant that I didn’t have to explicitly express my values and beliefs; I could simply live them, and know that some people might benefit. It meant that even if I wasn’t doing as much as I should to make the world better, I could take solace in the fact that in my own limited way, I was at least not making it worse.

Posted January 4, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Society
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