Daoist Gun Control Redux

I posted this in January, but the inhuamnity of American gun culture requires us to return, again and again, to the sad topic of firearm violence:

 

 The Daodejing takes a dim view of weapons.  Passage 31 begins (Legge translation):

Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Dao do not like to employ them.

夫佳兵者，不祥之器，物或惡之，故有道者不處。

This is not simply an anti-war message, though the Daodejing can be seen as generally anti-war.  The aversion to arms runs deeper. Weapons distort our humanity.  They take us away from allowing Dao to unfold as it will; they are instruments of coercive intervention that often do more harm than good.  In a well-ordered society, as in passage 80, they are unnecessary (Eno translation):

Though there be armor and weaponry, they shall not be deployed.

雖有甲兵，無所陳之.

Weapons bring out the worst in people.  They make us think that we can easily dominate others, take what we want without fear of reprisal.  They instill a false sense of power: yes, a gun would allow me to kill a person right here and now, and the fear of that sort of violent death may well cause that person to do what I want right here and now.  But this is a false power because, over time, that coercive force will reach its limit, or it may even inspire counteractions that are more powerful.  A gun may facilitate a victory today, but it cannot bring victories forever.

The wretched "debate" on gun control in the US misses most of this.  Gun zealots hold an impoverished view of society, one that presumes the complete absence of civility.  All they can think of is violent attack against their persons that they believe they can somehow prevent with a firearm.  They resist data that suggest gun ownvership brings an increased likelihood of accidental harm and suicide.  Due to the power of the gun lobby, advocates of stricter regulation are reduced to the narrowest proposals for limiting the availability of fire arms.  Thus, American society is flooded with guns, and grows coarser because of it.

Guns also undermine democracy.  Think about it: democracy requires freedom of expression.  Open, rational debate, with the possibility of peacefully persuading others of your position is the ideal.  Firearms distort that process.  The coercive potential they represent can silence people, weakening the give and take that democracy require.  Interestingly, although not a treatise on democracy, the Daodejing seems to understand this in passage 36 (Hinton):

Fish should be kept in their watery depths: a nation's honed instruments of power should be kept well-hidden from the people.

魚不可脫於淵，國之利器不可以示人。

This statement will not doubt enrage gun owners who resist reasonable regulation.  They will see in it a conspiracy on the part of state power-holders to dominate the population. But that ignores the prior point that state power-holders themselves should not rely upon weapons.  The point of passage 36 is that "soft and weak overcome hard and strong" (柔弱勝剛強).  Fishes find natural comfort in the depths; and people will find their best natural expressions when weapons are not ostentatiously displayed.

Americans can learn something from the Daodejing here: weapons weaken our humanity.

chart source

Comments

[Ngok Ming Cheung]

Your points are all true and valid. Yet as the Washington D.C. shootings yesterday demonstrated that guns are the easy choice of the weak and unbalanced to show their mettle if only momentarily. The problem for U.S. is not on the chart you shown for most killed per 100,000, but the associated gunboat diplomacy of U.S. foreign policy. For the millions of casualties in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, not to mention of U.S. soldiers. One can't find domestic tranquility while pursuing foreign aggressive empire building.

[Chris Waugh]

Not buying it, Ngok Ming Cheung. Israel and Norway have compulsory military training (and one memorable not-night in Norway I watched a drunk guy field strip and reassemble his Army-issue assault rifle) and Israel's policies toward it's neighbours do tend towards the aggressive, with much weaponry openly displayed. Australia has a rather aggressive policy towards boatloads of refugees arriving illegally and unannounced from its neighbour to the northwest, which again involves much weaponry on open display, and on one infamous occasion the deployment of the SAS, and joined in the misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The UK until very recently has been awful keen to involve itself in the USA's imperial misadventures - and I seem to recall reading that with the exception of one year in the 1960s has had troops in combat every year since the end of World War 2. Japan is involved in territorial disputes over uninhabited islands with two of its neighbours which involve much rattling of neighbours. Worst I can think of to say about Canada is that their climate is somewhat less than ideal. And yet all of those countries have far lower rates of firearm homicides than the USA. Which leads me to conclude that somewhere in Sam's article is a point and you have missed it.

[Ngok Ming Cheung]

Mr. Waugh,
I think you have miss the point of my previous comment. I do not disagree with Sam on the question weapon and war is bad. One doesn't have to go to Daodejing, one can find anti-war arguments in Sun Tze's "Art of War" which are much more persuasive. Sam was using Chinese philosophy and reason to persuade Americans in favor of gun control which I consider futile without dealing with the history and foundation of U.S.. I am talking of manifest destiny and U.S. exceptionalism which is so in vogue while burying the dark past of slavery and genocide. We maybe celebrating Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, but we don't really want to know and learn from the past. I remember the negative reactions to the movie "Soldier Blue" which depicts the massacre of Native Americans from the viewpoint of a captured white woman in late 60s, a time of idealism, forget about now. It means we don't really want to know history or philosophy.

[Chris Waugh]

All of which strikes me as being utterly irrelevant to the subject at hand. But never mind.