How Guns Change People

The latest tragedy in Aurora brought with it a renewed discussion about guns and violence in America, along with some new heights in "stupid shit people say" in the wake of such an event. While there is plenty of meat on that bone to nourish the ranter in me, the truth is that I'm tired of that blue-in-the-face argument.

For me, the question is not about whether guns kill people or people kill people, or that making it harder for law abiding citizens to obtain guns will mean that only criminals will have guns. These are silly and foolish straw men statements and believe the serious question about how and why people are changed by their relationship to a gun. I believe that Evan Selinger is on the right track in this piece from the Atlantic in asking the right question about guns and violence in America.

The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun

By Evan Selinger 

Jul 23 2012, 4:40 PM ET 230 Does the old rallying cry "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" hold up to philosophical scrutiny?

The tragic Colorado Batman shooting has prompted a wave of soul-searching. How do things like this happen? Over at Wired,David Dobbs gave a provocative answer in "Batman Movies Don't Kill. But They're Friendly to the Concept ." I suspect Dobbs's nuanced analysis about causality and responsibility won't sit well with everyone.

Dobbs questions the role of gun culture in steering "certain unhinged or deeply a-moral people toward the sort of violence that has now become so routine that the entire thing seems scripted." But what about "normal" people? Yes, plenty of people carry guns without incident. Yes, proper gun training can go a long way. And, yes, there are significant cultural differences about how guns are used. But, perhaps overly simplistic assumptions about what technology is and who we are when we use it get in the way of us seeing how, to use Dobbs's theatrical metaphor, guns can give "stage directions."

Instrumentalist Conception of Technology
The commonsense view of technology is one that some philosophers call the instrumentalist conception. According to the instrumentalist conception, while the ends that technology can be applied to can be cognitively and morally significant, technology itself is value-neutral. Technology, in other words, is subservient to our beliefs and desires; it does not significantly constrain much less determine them. This view is famously touted in the National Rifle Association's maxim: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

The NRA maxim "Guns don't kill people. People kill people," captures the widely believed idea that the appropriate source to blame for a murder is the person who pulled the gun's trigger.

To be sure, this statement is more of a slogan than well-formulated argument. But even as a shorthand expression, it captures the widely believed idea that murder is wrong and the appropriate source to blame for committing murder is the person who pulled a gun's trigger. Indeed, the NRA's proposition is not unusual; it aptly expresses the folk psychology that underlies moral and legal norms.

The main idea, here, is that guns are neither animate nor supernatural beings; they cannot use coercion or possession to make a person shoot. By contrast, murderers should be held responsible for their actions because they can resolve conflict without resorting to violence, even during moments of intense passion. Furthermore, it would be absurd to incarcerate a firearm as punishment. Unlike people, guns cannot reflect on wrongdoing or be rehabilitated.

Beyond Instrumentalism: Gun Use
Taking on the instrumentalist conception of technology, Don Ihde , a leading philosopher of technology, claims that "the human-gun relation transforms the situation from any similar situation of a human without a gun." By focusing on what it is like for a flesh-and-blood human to actually be in possession of a gun, Ihde describes "lived experience" in a manner that reveals the NRA position to be but a partial grasp of a more complex situation. By equating firearm responsibility exclusively with human choice, the NRA claim abstracts away relevant considerations about how gun possession can affect one's sense of self and agency. In order to appreciate this point, it helps to consider the fundamental materiality of guns.

In principle, guns, like every technology, can be used in different ways to accomplish different goals. Guns can be tossed around like Frisbees. They can be used to dig through dirt like shovels, or mounted on top of a fireplace mantel, as aesthetic objects. They can even be integrated into cooking practices; gangster pancakes might make a tasty Sunday morning treat. But while all of these options remain physical possibilities, they are not likely to occur, at least not in a widespread manner with regularity. Such options are not practically viable because gun design itself embodies behavior-shaping values; its material composition indicates the preferred ends to which it "should" be used. Put in Ihde's parlance, while a gun's structure is "multistable " with respect to its possible uses across a myriad of contexts, a partially determined trajectory nevertheless constrains which possibilities are easy to pursue and which of the intermediate and difficult options are worth investing time and labor into.

A gun's excellence simply lies in its capacity to quickly fire bullets that can reliably pierce targets.

With respect to the trajectory at issue, guns were designed for the sole purpose of accomplishing radical and life-altering action at a distance with minimal physical exertion on the part of the shooter. Since a gun's mechanisms were built for the purpose of releasing deadly projectiles outwards, it is difficult to imagine how one could realistically find utility in using a gun to pursue ends that do not require shooting bullets. For the most part, a gun's excellence simply lies in its capacity to quickly fire bullets that can reliably pierce targets. Using the butt of a gun to hammer the nail into a "Wanted" post--a common act in the old cowboy movies--is an exceptional use.

What the NRA position fails to convey, therefore, are the perceptual affordances offered by gun possession and the transformative consequences of yielding to these affordances. To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. Like many other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which aspects of experience are both "amplified" and "reduced". In this case, there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence.

French philosopher Bruno Latour goes far as to depict the experience of possessing a gun as one that produces a different subject: "You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you." While the idea that a gun-human combination can produce a new subject may seem extreme, it is actually an experience that people (with appropriate background assumptions) typically attest to, when responding to strong architectural configurations. When walking around such prestigious colleges as Harvard and the University of Chicago, it is easy to feel that one has suddenly become smarter. Likewise, museums and sites of religious worship can induce more than a momentary inclination towards reflection; they can allow one to view artistic and spiritual matters as a contemplative being.

The Brave One
The points about guns made by Ihde and Latour are poignantly explored in the 2007 film The Brave One. Unfortunately, many critics examined the film through a humanist lens, and bounded by its conceptual limitations, offered damning reviews. Many depicted the movie as a hyperbolic revenge film. All they saw was a gun blazing Jodie Foster playing a character named Erica Bain who copes with a violent assault (that kills her fiancé and leaves her in a three week coma) by moving through one scene after another of gratuitous vigilante violence, using an illicitly acquired 9mm handgun to settle scores and punish criminals that the law cannot touch. A stir was even caused by the following so-called "liberal" remarks that Foster made during an interview :

I don't believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I'm crazy because I'm only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely.

The critics failed to grasp a point that Foster herself underscored in numerous interviews. Despite its market-driven name, the film is not primarily about human virtues or vices. It does not try to discern whether there is an essential experience of bravery or cowardice, and the extent to which characters in the film personify such ideals. Rather, it is an existential meditation that centers on what Foster calls a "deeper and scarier" theme. Looking beyond the explicit plot and its correlative bursts of visually disturbing depictions of violence, makes it becomes possible to recognize that the film explores the anti-essentialist thesis that people are not unified subjects, but instead are beings with fluid and re-negotiable identities. Especially in the face of trauma, people can abandon old lives and start new ones. In the case at issue, Erica goes from being a woman who lives a relatively disembodied existence -- a radio host who collects the sounds of NY city by blending into its background; a minor celebrity who refuses an offer to appear on television by suggesting that she is more of a voice than a seductive face; and a lover who, at the beginning of the film, is visually contrasted with an athletic looking, long-haired, male-nurse fiancé -- to a someone who can kill in cold blood without experiencing the quintessential physical sign of remorse, shaky hands.
By depicting Erica's metamorphosis as a shift away from disembodiment that is brought by means other than consciousness-raising or personal affirmation, The Brave One challenges the instrumental conception of technology. Erica's transformation is so explicitly and thoroughly dependent upon technological mediation that the audience is led to infer that without the gun, she would be radically debilitated by her beating; her fate would lie in becoming an apartment-bound recluse.
Reflecting on the centrality of technological mediation to the plot, Foster uses phenomenological language and tells the media that the gun "opens up a world" in which Erica is viscerally "materialized" and therein drawn to dangerous situations (e.g., late night trips to a convenience store and subway) where there is an increased likelihood of encountering violence. Since Erica enters these places because of a technologically induced desire, and not because she is deliberately seeking retribution, it may be fitting to consider the gun -as Latour might suggest, through his notion of "symmetry " -- one of the "actors" in the film.

To be sure, The Brave One is just a movie. It isn't a scientific study and it does feature a character who has come undone. But if philosophers like Ihde and Latour are right, we've got more in common with her than most are willing to admit. And this possibility ups Dobbs's already high metaphorical ante.

Citizens United - what was the deal again?

I have found myself decrying the Citizens United decision but feeling a little confused about what, exactly, were the previous SCOTUS decisions that were at stake. In truth, I felt like I didn't really understand the basis of the decision and found Stone's description helpful in understanding the history and philosophies involved.

Wherever you fall on the decision, hopefully this will help explain it in context.

Explaining Citizens United

The Supreme Court's decision yesterday in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has rightly generated a lot of attention. It is, indeed, a profoundly important decision that will have a dramatic impact on American politics. In a five-to-four decision, with the justices voting along familiar lines (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito on one side; Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor on the other), the Court held unconstitutional a key provision of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act that had placed limits on the amount of money corporations and unions could spend to support or oppose political candidates in the closing days of a campaign. The goal of the Act was to limit the impact corporations and unions could have on American politics. What I want to do in this post is to explain the decision.
After Watergate, Congress enacted legislation that limited both the amount that individuals and organizations could contribute directly to political candidates and the amount they could independently spend in support of or in opposition to particular political candidates. The purpose of the legislation was to create a "fairer" political process, both by reducing the opportunities for corruption and improper influence and by "equalizing" to some degree the influence different individuals and organizations could have on the political process. Just as we have "one person, one vote," the idea was the move towards a system in which we have "one person, one dollar."
In Buckley v. Valeo, decided in 1976, the Supreme Court held that the contribution limits were constitutional, but that the expenditure limits violated the First Amendment. In reaching this result, the Court acknowledged that political contributions and expenditures are "speech" within the meaning of the First Amendment, that the most serious infringements of First Amendment rights are laws that discriminate against particular points of view (for example, "No person may criticize the war"), and that the contribution and expenditure limits did not discriminate against particular points of view, but applied across the boards, without regard to whether the "speaker" was supporting a Republican or a Democrat. It therefore analogized these limits to laws regulating the size of billboards or the hours in which one may use a loudspeaker in residential neighborhoods. That is, like those laws, the contribution and expenditure limits regulated speech without regard to the speaker's particular views. In such circumstances, the Court generally applies of form of "balancing" to determine whether the law is constitutional. It assesses the severity of the law's impact on free speech, and then asks whether the government's interest is sufficiently weighty to justify the particular restriction at issue.
In Buckley, the Court held that the contribution limits (which limited how much one could give directly to a candidate) were constitutional, because the government has a substantial interest in avoiding the appearance and reality of corruption and undue influence and because the impact on free speech was relatively modest. This was so because individuals who wanted to spend more than the law allowed them to contribute directly to a particular candidate could still spend that money to support the candidate in other ways (for example, by contributing to a PAC). On the other hand, the Court held that the expenditure limits were unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that to tell a person that she can spend $X and not a penny more to support her favored candidate was a severe restriction on her right to free speech. So serious a limitation on the individual's freedom, the Court held, could not be justified by the interest in "equalization" or in avoiding the appearance or reality of undue influence.
After Buckley, the Court began to focus on the issue of corporations and labor unions. The question, in short, was whether such organizations had the same First Amendment rights to spend money in the political process as individuals. In 1978, in a sharply-divided decision in the Bellotti case, the Court held that the speech of corporations is entitled to the same protection under the First Amendment as any other speech. In 1990, however, in the Austin case, the Court tacked in the opposite direction and upheld restrictions on corporate expenditures. It was difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile these two decisions. In recent years, the Court has decided several cases in which the justices have divided quite bitterly over this issue. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito have consistently found ways to interpret Austin very narrowly, whereas Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter/Sotomayor have consistently followed Austin.
In Citizens United, the dispute finally came to a head, and the five "conservative" justices overruled Austin and held that corporations and labor unions have the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Thus, any restriction of their freedom to spend unlimited amounts in support of their favored candidates violates the Constitution.
So, what are the arguments on each side? Apart from the issue of precedent, the dissenters in Citizens United see the problem this way: (1) Think of a town hall meeting or a presidential debate in which the moderator proposed to sell debate time to the highest bidder. Thus, in this town hall meeting or debate, which would last two hours, the moderator would sell each 15-minute segment to the person willing to bid the most money for it. We would likely see this as a crazy system. That's no way to run a democracy. We want our debates to be more structured and fairer than that. Each side should have more or less equal time to makes its case. Congress, which enacted the legislation at issue in Citizen United, wanted to make political campaigns a bit more like presidential debates and town hall meetings. It wanted to ensure that the side with the most money doesn't automatically dominate the debate for no reason other than the fact that it has deeper pockets. The dissenters in Citizens United accepted Congress' judgment this is a compelling justification for restricting political expenditures.
(2) Moreover, they argue, this argument is especially appropriate with respect to corporations and labor unions. They are, after all, artificial entities created by the government for the purpose of enabling them to amass huge amounts of money in order to operate efficiently in the economic marketplace. But they were not created for the purpose of enabling them to amass huge amounts of money so they can overrun the political process. It is perfectly reasonable, the dissenters argue, for the government to limit the amount such organizations can spend to influence our democracy. Indeed, in other ways we don't treat corporations or labor unions as "people" - they have no constitutional right to hold political office or to vote, for example, so why should they have the same First Amendment speech rights as "real" people?
The five justices in the majority in Citizens United see the problem quite differently: (1) In their view, any restriction on the amount that individuals or organizations can spend in the political process represents a severe limitation on First Amendment rights. Even if the law is neutral with respect to the particular points of view expressed, it is still a profound limitation on individual liberty. Moreover, corporations and unions are just associations of individuals, and there is no good reason why associations of individuals shouldn't have the same First Amendment rights as the individuals themselves. Indeed, the NAACP and the New York Times have First Amendment rights, so why not General Motors and Bank of America?
(2) Moreover, they argue, any legislation that so directly shapes the political process must be highly suspect. One thing we know for sure about politicians is that they will not make laws that disadvantage them. Thus, we should not take this sort of legislation at face value. If one party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, and it enacts campaign finance legislation, we can be sure that in subtle but important ways the legislation will be designed to promote the partisan political interests of that party. And even if one party doesn't control all these agencies of government, we can be sure that any legislation the government enacts will be designed to serve the interests of incumbents. Thus, not only is such legislation a serious limitation on First Amendment freedoms, but the courts should be highly suspicious of such laws, which are paradigmatic examples of the fox guarding the hen-house.
So, there you have it. My point in writing this is not to persuade, but to explain. My own view is that the dissenters have the better of the argument, particularly with respect to corporations and unions (though I would hold expenditure limitations on individuals unconstitutional). One of the interesting things about Citizens United is that the "conservative" justices, who claim to exercise judicial restraint, are reaching out in this case to assert a very aggressive interpretation of the First Amendment. In this sense, and in the context of many other highly controversial areas of constitutional law -- such as affirmative action and gun rights -- these justices do not live up to their billing that they merely call "balls and strikes." This is a very activist decision that will fundamentally transform American politics in the years to come.