What to choose, what to choose. So many offerings on this menu of social concerns. Fortunately, the chef always features a daily special, and on this June day in 2022 gun legislation is the topic du jour.
I wish more gun legislation could eradicate gun violence, but with regard to stopping those heinous acts, I see most gun laws as ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst— the latter because they take away modes of self-protection and sport. That once peaceful places have become death zones has multiple causes. The mere presence of guns isn’t a direct cause of the demise of social order. Here’s my reasoning, and I’ll start with a question for you:
Would you have gone to a bar for a drink in Pittsburgh in 1932? Oh! Forgot. Sorry. Prohibition. But would you have gone, maybe with some friends anyway? You would have? Naughty. (Talk of an era of passwords! Every speakeasy had one) But then, what’s getting a little drink going to do in the big scheme of things? Maybe in the secrecy of your home then, eh? “Come on, who’s going to find out, who really cares beyond Eliot Ness, and what can a drink hurt? Who are you, Carrie Nation? If you are she, put down that hatchet. Someone could lose an eye with that thing. I mean, what’s more dangerous, a Scotch on the rocks or a big woman brandishing a hatchet?”
If you did go for a drink in Pittsburgh during Prohibition, you would have gotten the booze illegally thanks to people like John Volpe, a bootlegger locally known for driving a green Cadillac and helping others down on their luck. Like so many others who live ambivalent lives, Volpe did more than traffic in booze; he helped a lady pay off a $2,000 mortgage the day three mob hitmen shot him and his two brothers at the Rome Coffee Shop near the formidable courthouse. That the center of law lay in the vicinity had no effect on the behavior of the gunmen. Volpe died on the sidewalk where determined killers shot him in the back as he tried to flee to his green Caddy.
So well known was John Volpe that word spread fast through the neighborhood, and a crowd—and the police on horseback—arrived moments after the attack. Soon after, the police mounted more horses and a massive manhunt. But the mob, as you know, has its own justice system, and a guy named Bazzano who was responsible for the attack was killed (not by a gun but by multiple icepick stab wounds) after he arrived in New York for a meeting. Anyway, the 1932 Midday Massacre of the Volpes was a sign of the times—but then you’ve seen the multiple fictional versions of this actual history.
I live near Pittsburgh, a city that between 1910 and 1970 sported a population of more than 500,000 and that before its decline in the 1970s, had more than 600,000 residents. Even during the Great Depression and the time of Volpe’s murder, it sported a large population, but about a third of the employable had no employment. Then in the 1940s the city underwent an abrupt social and economic change as Prohibition ended and the Second World War led to a demand for steel. Drinks all around and the wages to pay for them! No more reasons for mob assassinations of bootleggers at midday on the city’s streets.
By the time I entered the picture during the war, gun violence was relatively rare. But don’t think I am naive; I know there were still bad guys and evil acts. Those lawbreakers of the 1930s did not suddenly vanish. Nevertheless, most people felt relatively safe most of the time; most families had multiple steelworkers, coke oven operators, miners, and bartenders who were gainfully employed. The high schools brimmed with the influx of war babies, destined, their parents hoped, for a better life than they had during the Depression. In my hometown not far from Pittsburgh, many front doors remained unlocked, and some adults and even teens with pickup trucks had a rifle on a gun rack across the back window, even pickup trucks parked near the high school. In those early fifties my pre-teen cousins and I went on long hikes to catch salamanders in a stream that ran through land owned by Seton Hill College (now University). Making those hikes required us to cross the tracks. My mother’s only warning was “to stay away from the hobos.” I know what you are thinking. “No right-thinking parent today would allow nine- and ten-year-olds to wander unsupervised for a few miles into woods and past the homeless and the open box cars that transported those hobos around the country. Such, however, were the times. Sure there were evil people and evil acts, but…
Back to that du jour topic: Guns, gun violence, and gun laws. Growing up, I heard of crimes, but not of daily gun murders. (Of course, access to what was going on wasn’t a 24/7 phenomenon in my youth; TV stations ran news at noon, six, and eleven) Since the demise of its steel industry and a halving of its population, Pittsburgh and its suburbs have seen an increase in shootings punctuated by some mass murders, such as the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. Shootings that injure and kill multiple people bubble to the surface of consciousness and roil the emotions of most citizens—but, of course, not those whose hearts are indurated by persistent exposure to violence, especially those growing up in gang-penetrated slum neighborhoods.
In 2022, reports of shootings seem to be an almost daily occurrence. By June 17, Pittsburgh had seen 47 murders by gun. Denizens of both city and suburb wonder whether they will be safe in once relatively peaceful places like the Theater District, the Strip District, or South Side. The Hill District that supposedly inspired Hill Street Blues is no longer the center of crime news. The center seems to be as ubiquitous as the Cosmic Background Radiation. So, yes, I can understand why people are concerned about gun violence. But as many gun rights proponents point out, guns don’t pull their own triggers. People with evil intentions do. And just as neither Prohibition nor the War on Drugs failed to quash what they were intended to quash, so gun laws have demonstrably not quashed gun murders. Otherwise, Chicago and other cities with strict gun laws would be havens of safety. And murders in and around schools would cease in those gun-free zones.
People aim guns and pull triggers. And bad people with guns can’t be stopped by laws because the law means nothing to the lawless, the impetuous, and the pathological killers. But for the sake of argument, let’s say gun laws work as intended. A great place to run an experiment on gun prohibition as a prophylaxis is an island, and one that comes to mind is Bermuda, where guns are, in fact, prohibited.
The tiny island sports a population of a little over 60,000, just a tenth of what Pittsburgh had in its heyday. So, let’s paint a picture of a serene tourist destination of pastel-colored houses with white roofs, where men wear dress shoes, knee socks, shorts, dress shirts, ties and sport coats to work, and where for decades the population has had a very high literacy rate. I have seen neatly dressed workers reading thick novels as they rode the bus to their jobs. I have witnessed an obsession with community cleanliness, also. After the garbage men collect, another person in a little three-wheeled vehicle follows to stab any loose bits of paper that might have fallen off the truck. Within that setting, one can imagine little crime and even less violent crime. Yet…This is a BIG YET…the murder rate in Bermuda is 123.91 per million people. That rate stands in contrast to the 42.01 for the USA. Say WHAT? Sure, one could say that in absolute numbers the thousands killed in the United States with its large population is staggering in contrast with Bermuda, but that rate per million on that small island and in the small population is at the very least noteworthy (and the rape rate is about six times higher on the island than on the nearby continent). And it’s not as though guns arrive with an invasion of gun smugglers walking across a border: Look at a map. Bermuda is surrounded by deep ocean. How, one might ask, does a gun appear on a gun-free island? And to what end does it make its appearance? There is no hunting on Bermuda save possibly for invasive vermin and tree frogs.
What’s going to happen if we do ban and confiscate guns in the US? Will knives be next on the list? Then hammers, icepicks like the one used to stab Bazzano, ropes, and fists? Will you be required to register your palms in case you, like a famous actor at the Academy Awards, decide to slap a jester in public, maybe even becoming a serial slapper or mass slapper? Will slappers be strapped with large foam gloves like those sold in sports arenas?
Yes, there is a problem. There’s a problem with the human spirit and imposed controls. It’s the problem of self-control that’s been with us since Cain and Abel. It’s a problem that even our close relatives have as Jane Goodall discovered when she witnessed a band of chimpanzees she once thought peaceful attack an individual from another tribe of chimps. It’s a problem that was manifested in the Hutus’ massacre of more than 600,000 Tutsis, many of those deaths coming from machete-wielding murderers. Tell me, should machetes, the weapon of choice among roving Hutus, have been outlawed? What about sticks and rocks? And stairs? And pushes down steps and off subway platforms? Do subway platforms kill? (Should Newton be blamed for the definition of a force as a push or pull—or for gravity?)
Repeatedly, the foes of legal gun ownership fail to comprehend that they can no more make the world safer by gun legislation than they made the world safer by banning the illegal fentanyl that killed about 100,000 Americans in 2021. What is there about the mindset of those anti-gun lobbyists and politicians who fail to address the pervasive sickness of spirit? (Those same people are often protected by people with guns as everyone knows) There is no guaranteed control over humans save self-control, and that guarantee is a limited warranty.
I remember some decades ago being in Bermuda and noting to my wife the disregard American tourists had for the formality to which Bermudians had become accustomed. And I remember that the hotel TVs had at the time Chicago news. And I remember seeing a couple of young people carrying boomboxes on their shoulders or wearing headphones and not reading thick novels. And I remember saying to my wife, “This pleasant little island is going to change for the worse because its young are becoming steeped in American culture and the violence of Chicago.”
Of course, one could say that I’m a simpleton because I’m arguing from anecdote and not from logic and absolute numbers. That “rate per million” I mentioned above doesn’t amount to many murders on an island with 63,000 citizens, just 8 in 2021. But why has Bermuda’s trend toward violence increased in a population whose numbers have remained rather steady for decades? The gun laws haven’t changed; guns are still forbidden. The country remains ostensibly gun free. Yet, there are guns on the island and people who use them with malicious intent—and on an island that has no slums.
On this website I refer often to the role of place in human life. Place is more than a physical environment; it can be a mindset. Bermudian children listening to music with the lyrics of violence derived from American cities grow up with a mindset of a place that is steeped in violence. Inner big city has become the mindset of people on an island 700 miles off the coast of North Carolina. But it would be foolish of me to imply that Bermudians were unfamiliar with crime before Chicago TV and anti-police hiphop lyrics encompassed the island like the Gulf Stream.
A cursory look at Bermuda’s history reveals the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1775, when a Bermudian trader arranged to steal for the Continental Congress 100 barrels of gunpowder that the British kept in Bermuda. In return for the gunpowder, the Continental Congress lifted an embargo it imposed on other English colonies until Bermuda reverted to its support for England. Then with the reimposition of the embargo, Bermudians robbed of their trade turned to privateering, preying mostly on American shipping. The island population’s penchant for crime is, therefore, not a new phenomenon and not without its tie to gun violence. Those privateers didn’t seize vessels by peaceful request.
And, of course, Bermudians are humans, you know, members of that species that kills its own by tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions in wars during which the wishes of a few determine the destructive actions of many. One need only look at Ukraine in 2022 to witness how easily we can shoot tens of thousands of both invaded and invader. Humans. Can’t live with them, so we shoot them.
Thus, American legislators have a dilemma. How without 24/7 surveillance and immediate response times can any controls imposed on a large population stop individuals from doing what the controls supposedly control? And how does surveillance prevent either planned or impetuous acts? (It hasn’t in London, one of the most surveilled cities) Just as a Constitutional Amendment failed regardless of efforts by Eliot Ness and Carrie Nation, so gun-free zones have failed in cities and schoolyards. Look at Bermuda. Look at hypothetical you at a speakeasy or buying some booze from John Volpe in the 1930s.
The only truly effective gun control is self-control.
I wish more gun legislation could eradicate gun violence, but with regard to stopping those heinous acts, I see most gun laws as ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst— the latter because they take away modes of self-protection and sport. That once peaceful places have become death zones has multiple causes. The mere presence of guns isn’t a direct cause of the demise of social order. Here’s my reasoning, and I’ll start with a question for you:
Would you have gone to a bar for a drink in Pittsburgh in 1932? Oh! Forgot. Sorry. Prohibition. But would you have gone, maybe with some friends anyway? You would have? Naughty. (Talk of an era of passwords! Every speakeasy had one) But then, what’s getting a little drink going to do in the big scheme of things? Maybe in the secrecy of your home then, eh? “Come on, who’s going to find out, who really cares beyond Eliot Ness, and what can a drink hurt? Who are you, Carrie Nation? If you are she, put down that hatchet. Someone could lose an eye with that thing. I mean, what’s more dangerous, a Scotch on the rocks or a big woman brandishing a hatchet?”
If you did go for a drink in Pittsburgh during Prohibition, you would have gotten the booze illegally thanks to people like John Volpe, a bootlegger locally known for driving a green Cadillac and helping others down on their luck. Like so many others who live ambivalent lives, Volpe did more than traffic in booze; he helped a lady pay off a $2,000 mortgage the day three mob hitmen shot him and his two brothers at the Rome Coffee Shop near the formidable courthouse. That the center of law lay in the vicinity had no effect on the behavior of the gunmen. Volpe died on the sidewalk where determined killers shot him in the back as he tried to flee to his green Caddy.
So well known was John Volpe that word spread fast through the neighborhood, and a crowd—and the police on horseback—arrived moments after the attack. Soon after, the police mounted more horses and a massive manhunt. But the mob, as you know, has its own justice system, and a guy named Bazzano who was responsible for the attack was killed (not by a gun but by multiple icepick stab wounds) after he arrived in New York for a meeting. Anyway, the 1932 Midday Massacre of the Volpes was a sign of the times—but then you’ve seen the multiple fictional versions of this actual history.
I live near Pittsburgh, a city that between 1910 and 1970 sported a population of more than 500,000 and that before its decline in the 1970s, had more than 600,000 residents. Even during the Great Depression and the time of Volpe’s murder, it sported a large population, but about a third of the employable had no employment. Then in the 1940s the city underwent an abrupt social and economic change as Prohibition ended and the Second World War led to a demand for steel. Drinks all around and the wages to pay for them! No more reasons for mob assassinations of bootleggers at midday on the city’s streets.
By the time I entered the picture during the war, gun violence was relatively rare. But don’t think I am naive; I know there were still bad guys and evil acts. Those lawbreakers of the 1930s did not suddenly vanish. Nevertheless, most people felt relatively safe most of the time; most families had multiple steelworkers, coke oven operators, miners, and bartenders who were gainfully employed. The high schools brimmed with the influx of war babies, destined, their parents hoped, for a better life than they had during the Depression. In my hometown not far from Pittsburgh, many front doors remained unlocked, and some adults and even teens with pickup trucks had a rifle on a gun rack across the back window, even pickup trucks parked near the high school. In those early fifties my pre-teen cousins and I went on long hikes to catch salamanders in a stream that ran through land owned by Seton Hill College (now University). Making those hikes required us to cross the tracks. My mother’s only warning was “to stay away from the hobos.” I know what you are thinking. “No right-thinking parent today would allow nine- and ten-year-olds to wander unsupervised for a few miles into woods and past the homeless and the open box cars that transported those hobos around the country. Such, however, were the times. Sure there were evil people and evil acts, but…
Back to that du jour topic: Guns, gun violence, and gun laws. Growing up, I heard of crimes, but not of daily gun murders. (Of course, access to what was going on wasn’t a 24/7 phenomenon in my youth; TV stations ran news at noon, six, and eleven) Since the demise of its steel industry and a halving of its population, Pittsburgh and its suburbs have seen an increase in shootings punctuated by some mass murders, such as the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. Shootings that injure and kill multiple people bubble to the surface of consciousness and roil the emotions of most citizens—but, of course, not those whose hearts are indurated by persistent exposure to violence, especially those growing up in gang-penetrated slum neighborhoods.
In 2022, reports of shootings seem to be an almost daily occurrence. By June 17, Pittsburgh had seen 47 murders by gun. Denizens of both city and suburb wonder whether they will be safe in once relatively peaceful places like the Theater District, the Strip District, or South Side. The Hill District that supposedly inspired Hill Street Blues is no longer the center of crime news. The center seems to be as ubiquitous as the Cosmic Background Radiation. So, yes, I can understand why people are concerned about gun violence. But as many gun rights proponents point out, guns don’t pull their own triggers. People with evil intentions do. And just as neither Prohibition nor the War on Drugs failed to quash what they were intended to quash, so gun laws have demonstrably not quashed gun murders. Otherwise, Chicago and other cities with strict gun laws would be havens of safety. And murders in and around schools would cease in those gun-free zones.
People aim guns and pull triggers. And bad people with guns can’t be stopped by laws because the law means nothing to the lawless, the impetuous, and the pathological killers. But for the sake of argument, let’s say gun laws work as intended. A great place to run an experiment on gun prohibition as a prophylaxis is an island, and one that comes to mind is Bermuda, where guns are, in fact, prohibited.
The tiny island sports a population of a little over 60,000, just a tenth of what Pittsburgh had in its heyday. So, let’s paint a picture of a serene tourist destination of pastel-colored houses with white roofs, where men wear dress shoes, knee socks, shorts, dress shirts, ties and sport coats to work, and where for decades the population has had a very high literacy rate. I have seen neatly dressed workers reading thick novels as they rode the bus to their jobs. I have witnessed an obsession with community cleanliness, also. After the garbage men collect, another person in a little three-wheeled vehicle follows to stab any loose bits of paper that might have fallen off the truck. Within that setting, one can imagine little crime and even less violent crime. Yet…This is a BIG YET…the murder rate in Bermuda is 123.91 per million people. That rate stands in contrast to the 42.01 for the USA. Say WHAT? Sure, one could say that in absolute numbers the thousands killed in the United States with its large population is staggering in contrast with Bermuda, but that rate per million on that small island and in the small population is at the very least noteworthy (and the rape rate is about six times higher on the island than on the nearby continent). And it’s not as though guns arrive with an invasion of gun smugglers walking across a border: Look at a map. Bermuda is surrounded by deep ocean. How, one might ask, does a gun appear on a gun-free island? And to what end does it make its appearance? There is no hunting on Bermuda save possibly for invasive vermin and tree frogs.
What’s going to happen if we do ban and confiscate guns in the US? Will knives be next on the list? Then hammers, icepicks like the one used to stab Bazzano, ropes, and fists? Will you be required to register your palms in case you, like a famous actor at the Academy Awards, decide to slap a jester in public, maybe even becoming a serial slapper or mass slapper? Will slappers be strapped with large foam gloves like those sold in sports arenas?
Yes, there is a problem. There’s a problem with the human spirit and imposed controls. It’s the problem of self-control that’s been with us since Cain and Abel. It’s a problem that even our close relatives have as Jane Goodall discovered when she witnessed a band of chimpanzees she once thought peaceful attack an individual from another tribe of chimps. It’s a problem that was manifested in the Hutus’ massacre of more than 600,000 Tutsis, many of those deaths coming from machete-wielding murderers. Tell me, should machetes, the weapon of choice among roving Hutus, have been outlawed? What about sticks and rocks? And stairs? And pushes down steps and off subway platforms? Do subway platforms kill? (Should Newton be blamed for the definition of a force as a push or pull—or for gravity?)
Repeatedly, the foes of legal gun ownership fail to comprehend that they can no more make the world safer by gun legislation than they made the world safer by banning the illegal fentanyl that killed about 100,000 Americans in 2021. What is there about the mindset of those anti-gun lobbyists and politicians who fail to address the pervasive sickness of spirit? (Those same people are often protected by people with guns as everyone knows) There is no guaranteed control over humans save self-control, and that guarantee is a limited warranty.
I remember some decades ago being in Bermuda and noting to my wife the disregard American tourists had for the formality to which Bermudians had become accustomed. And I remember that the hotel TVs had at the time Chicago news. And I remember seeing a couple of young people carrying boomboxes on their shoulders or wearing headphones and not reading thick novels. And I remember saying to my wife, “This pleasant little island is going to change for the worse because its young are becoming steeped in American culture and the violence of Chicago.”
Of course, one could say that I’m a simpleton because I’m arguing from anecdote and not from logic and absolute numbers. That “rate per million” I mentioned above doesn’t amount to many murders on an island with 63,000 citizens, just 8 in 2021. But why has Bermuda’s trend toward violence increased in a population whose numbers have remained rather steady for decades? The gun laws haven’t changed; guns are still forbidden. The country remains ostensibly gun free. Yet, there are guns on the island and people who use them with malicious intent—and on an island that has no slums.
On this website I refer often to the role of place in human life. Place is more than a physical environment; it can be a mindset. Bermudian children listening to music with the lyrics of violence derived from American cities grow up with a mindset of a place that is steeped in violence. Inner big city has become the mindset of people on an island 700 miles off the coast of North Carolina. But it would be foolish of me to imply that Bermudians were unfamiliar with crime before Chicago TV and anti-police hiphop lyrics encompassed the island like the Gulf Stream.
A cursory look at Bermuda’s history reveals the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1775, when a Bermudian trader arranged to steal for the Continental Congress 100 barrels of gunpowder that the British kept in Bermuda. In return for the gunpowder, the Continental Congress lifted an embargo it imposed on other English colonies until Bermuda reverted to its support for England. Then with the reimposition of the embargo, Bermudians robbed of their trade turned to privateering, preying mostly on American shipping. The island population’s penchant for crime is, therefore, not a new phenomenon and not without its tie to gun violence. Those privateers didn’t seize vessels by peaceful request.
And, of course, Bermudians are humans, you know, members of that species that kills its own by tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions in wars during which the wishes of a few determine the destructive actions of many. One need only look at Ukraine in 2022 to witness how easily we can shoot tens of thousands of both invaded and invader. Humans. Can’t live with them, so we shoot them.
Thus, American legislators have a dilemma. How without 24/7 surveillance and immediate response times can any controls imposed on a large population stop individuals from doing what the controls supposedly control? And how does surveillance prevent either planned or impetuous acts? (It hasn’t in London, one of the most surveilled cities) Just as a Constitutional Amendment failed regardless of efforts by Eliot Ness and Carrie Nation, so gun-free zones have failed in cities and schoolyards. Look at Bermuda. Look at hypothetical you at a speakeasy or buying some booze from John Volpe in the 1930s.
The only truly effective gun control is self-control.
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