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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

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Craig Mason: Revisiting licensing citizens as “gun-worthy”

By Craig Mason

By Craig Mason

On December 24, 2018, the Spokesman kindly ran my guest opinion, “License People, Not Guns,” in which I argued that a middle road between government-led gun control and ardent gun-rights supporters was to privatize (with financial responsibility) certifying people as “gun-worthy.”

I also pointed out that most passionate gun rights advocates were not defending target shooting or hunting, but a right to insurrection. Well! January 6, 2021, showed us the idiot version of that idea, and further discredited those whom I tried to sympathetically present as heirs to the minuteman mythology of the American Revolution in their attachment to the Second Amendment.

Our Founding Fathers feared “the mob,” and supported passionless reason – the Founders were the opposite of the illiterate dopes who overran Congress in support of the “Big Lie” of election theft.

It is clear that gun rights are going to be constrained as we sort out yet another mass shooting in Colorado, and they will likely be constrained in largely useless ways, because the problem is really our shift in child-rearing away from accountability and away from self-discipline.

“Left” and “right” have become incoherent categories of thought as “both sides” flee the hard work of raising a citizenry that is competent to exercise gun rights, exercise speech rights, and to choose their government. Reveling in thrilling outrage at the equally impotent other “side” is just another symptom of the self-indulgence of our age. It cripples thought and action to have “beliefs” divorced from reality.

Most of America’s problems can be addressed by properly regulating capitalism (and capitalists) at the top and regulating behavior at the bottom. Gun violence is just another symptom of a failure of social order.

Mayor Woodward ran against the homeless, and has done nothing, because the only way to really solve the problem is to institutionalize and medicate the crazy (they are not just “differently-saned”), to assist those willing to help themselves as indicated by behavior, not by platitudinous sloth, and to put the deliberately useless in an attentive work camp, to be dried out, and re-disciplined to labor. (Yes, the Victorian workhouse was one-third right.)

For 10,000 years, civilized societies held “young adults” responsible for their actions once they understood cause and effect around age 6 to 7. The recent segregation of teens among themselves (instead of being surrounded by adults with adult expectations at work and school) has led to an insupportable extension of childhood to the age of 30, holding no one truly responsible until their “brains develop” to the highest stage of Kohlbergian moral awareness. There is no evidence of the necessity of this tolerance of bad behavior in the young in the historical or anthropological record.

Understanding consequences is sufficient beyond the age of 7, but it becomes unintelligible in a society without steady, reasoned and reliable consequences. And those steady and reliable consequences produce disciplined people who, once disciplined, could then be handed the reins to themselves to enter autonomous adulthood as self-disciplined adults.

I know some readers will be thinking that I am advocating some kind of cruelty to children. Not at all. I never used corporal punishment at all with my children, and I do not believe it is appropriate for young children. They just need steady monitoring, affection and regular boundaries. I do believe it is appropriate for teens who cannot respond to reasons, and is best administered by a neutral third party upon a reflected account of the wrong and the consequence. This mode of discipline of teens is something District 81 gave up between my sophomore and junior year at North Central in the 1970s. The inmates took over the asylum, and society has been making excuses for the inmate misbehavior since.

How does this tie back to gun rights? We simply cannot give guns to people who lack self-discipline – which is to say more and more of the population are simply not competent to own guns. I support gun rights in the abstract, but I cannot ignore the increasing inability among the general population to regulate their own behavior, making them unsafe to themselves and others.

Too many people want their own (false) “facts,” feeling a right to indulge in denial of reality. Too many people are unwilling to hear opinions contrary to theirs and won’t carefully consider the merits of the opposing view before reacting. Our media seeks reaction, not reflection, as an emotional pornography run amok to procure market share. All reaction, without reflection before action.

Guns cannot be in the hands of those without self-discipline who cannot reflect before acting. Self-indulgent reactions with a gun are destroying any societal support for gun rights.

I now believe we must pull certifying a citizen as “gun worthy” closer to state action, as opposed to my prior privatized suggestion. Starting in junior high, teachers should give students a “self-regulation” grade. No one should be able to own a gun until their teachers, and then later in life, their employers, certify them as sufficiently self-disciplined to own a gun.

Gun rights advocates are going to have to face this reality, and propose a solution, or lose gun rights altogether. (Hint: If you already got the fidgets and could not even consider these truths, then you are the problem.)

Craig Mason is a local attorney and Spokane native who has also taught at Columbia Basin Community College, WSU-Tri-Cities, EWU and Gonzaga.