Drinking, England, and guns.
[I'd like to follow up on what Dulak (who I somewhat disagree with), and Nonstop and Cheesey (who I somewhat agree with), but I think we're going off topic pretty substantially. So, Kevin or whoever else can do this, feel free to move what I'm about to say to another thread. Because I'm going to go on at length, and I don't expect to say anything about the original story other than to remark that California will never have a shortage of fruits and nuts.]
To start with, an admission of two biases: I hate gun control and I love Great Britain.
Bias #1: I hate gun control because I believe that it isn't guns that cause problems, its the people who decide to pull triggers when they pull them. And I hate it even more because I trust the state not at all, and widespread gun ownership provides a necessary check upon the use of state power by tyrants individual and majoritarian.
Bias #2: I love so many things British it will drive zombieslayer and dfosterf nuts. Steak and kidney pie. Bangers and mash. Fish and chips. Whisky without an e, and real ale pumped the old fashioned way. Imperial pints and chicken tikka. Hampstead Heath and Kew Gardens. The tube and the railways. The Scottish Highlands, the University of Durham, and the Pavilion at Brighton. Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle. Stonehenge, the Tate, and the BM. The Yeoman Warders. Doner kebabs and Charing Cross booksellers. A good bookshop in every town. Castles. The best whisky shop in the world....in a town of a few thousand. Something like 400 distilleries in an area the size of Vermont. London. Monty Python. Benny Hill. Inspector Morse and Inspector Frost. Doctor Who and Blake's Seven.
The Oxbridge tutorial system. Newman and the Arnolds. The Industrial Revolution. Guy Fawkes. Thomas Becket and Thomas More, Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin. The Great Reform Bills. Pitt AND Fox. Thomas Paine AND Edmund Burke. Gladstone AND Disraeli.
The Inklings.
And the everyday people. Friends from Southwick to Bute, Chester to Bradford to Durham. Plummy accents and Cockney ones. Nobs and snobs. Conversations in a hundred pubs, and a dozen churches.
I could go on, but I think the biases are clear enough. :)
Because IMO much as I love Britain, I would not recommend social/political organization on the British model to anyone.
Everything in Britain is corrupted by seemingly unremovable class divisions. Class and ethnic divisions exist in this country, yes, but they are *nothing* like the divisions that exist in Britain. Deep divisions.
Though much of that depth is hidden, like the entwined rhizomes of your lawn's grass or a bamboo patch. Partly because of an emphasis on reservedness and privacy that crosses all classes (I've found even most of those labelled "yobs" are amazingly polite toward strangers), its sometimes hard to see all the places where class divides the people of Britain. And the same for ethnic divisions between Scots and English, between Welsh and English, between all the different post-colonial immigrants and the old Anglo-Saxon and Norman English.
But those divisions are real, deep, and in many cases utterly determinative of choices and opportunities. (IMO, only division-of-opportunity in the USA that is anywhere near that deep is that between urban blacks and the rest of us. And even that division is far more brittle than the British class system.)
The "generations on the dole" phenomenon has been widespread in the UK for several generations now. But it's something we're really only just now starting to see in any numbers here, and primary in particular sections of the inner cities.
This is not to make light of its happening now in the United States; only to point out that Britain has been dealing with -- or failing to deal with -- the problem for several generations now.
If I were living in a country where the dole had been a way of life for significant numbers of people since WWII (and for some, a generation or so more even than that), a country where restrictions on mobility were no less than they had been for the lifetime of everyone living, I'd not want an armed populace either.
And add to the lack of social mobility all the other impedimentia of the country that for all purposes was the pioneer of useless welfare state institutions of "cradle-to-grave" safety ... no, I wouldn't model my social institutions on theirs.
Even one institution which I consider among Britain's two greatest social innovations -- the Oxbridge tutorial system of higher education -- I would hesitate to import. That system only works to the extent that you only need 3-5 percent of the population with that kind of education; in a world like today's, where you need to find ways to get that kind of education in the hands of 50-50 percent of the population, the Oxbridge approach just reinforces differences you want to break down.
There are two separate kinds of violence you have to worry about with young people today. Call one "Inner City" and call the other "Columbine."
The inner city one -- that's the one that should worry everyone. Because that one is the problem of revolution. That's the one of 40 percent (or more) male unemployment. The one of generations on welfare. The one that has been promised better for generations -- and still seen worse every year. To my mind, the historical question is not why the Watts riots of 1964 and 1992 happened....but why they haven't happened more often.
If I were a statist sort who had to come up with an argument for gun control, I would point to the inner city problem and use it as my primary justification. Of course I'd also have to be willing to deprive people of basic freedom on racial lines: because, to my mind, you can't make this argument unless you are willing to say that it's too dangerous to let disenchanted young black men keep and bear arms the way everyone else can.
(Frankly this sort of thinking appalls me so much, I hope no statist types are monitoring this board. The last thing I want to encourage is this sort of thinking. But the only argument for gun control, it seems to me, the only one that holds any water at all, is one that admits that the danger of an armed population is the danger of insurrection.)
Columbine on the other hand? Tragedy, yes. But evidence of a need for gun control? Absolutely not.
Suburban high schools are not places of potential revolution. They are places of conformity and privilege. People who go on rampages from places like Columbine are individuals. Individuals who don't fit. Who don't identify with the people they are shooting and blowing up.
Columbines happen when individuals snap. When individuals are insane. When individuals are evil. When individuals feel themselves so badly fucked over.
The key word is "individuals".
Revolutions go nowhere if they are just individuals.
The reason "inner city" is a bigger danger than "Columbine" is that the inner city -- like the streets of the East End in London -- offers far more fertile ground for combining groups of people in revolution.
Imagining a revolution happening in the suburbs is as laughable an idea as imagining one happening in rural Iowa. Suburbans are whiners and complainers about self-esteem. They join movements like they join churches and softball leagues. They revolt by dressing in black and wearing designer body piercings. Changing the world means getting a job for a socially respectable employer.
Guns are a systematic danger only if there is a danger of revolution. Frankly, I don't think Britain has a whole lot to worry about revolution either; but they have far more to worry about it than we do. Because the proportion of "inner city/yobs/lower classes" is far bigger, and far more immobile, and has been for far longer, than ours.
Our biggest danger is not our guns. Its the fact that we're letting the whiners have too much say. (Dakota, if he's read this far, will doubtless be shocked to hear a whiner like me admit this, but he's right.) Because the more we let the whiners control the political and social agenda -- the more we worry about political correctness and being sustainable and being nicey nicey, the more we emulate the worst part of the Brit system. The more immobile we make the divisions between the haves and the true have-nots, the more we make "opportunity" a generations-long unkept promise, the more those have-nots are likely to realize that revolution is their only option.
And, because, unlike today's British yobs, and, especially, unlike the revolutionists of 1776, those potential revolutionaries from our "inner city" are not going to revolt in the way Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the others did. They're going to revolt like the French did.
And for those of you who don't know your history, and think French idiocy is defined by the silliness of the last couple decades, check out what they did to themselves between 1789 and 1848.
England has a lot to love about it. I really think it does.
But I also think has done even more to fuck itself than we have.
Magna Cart and the common law. Yes.
Real ale and single malt whiskey. Yes.
Commercial society and Adam Smith. Yes.
20th century political and social theory. Absolutely not.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)