Lex Anteinternet: Auribus teneo lupum

Lex Anteinternet: Auribus teneo lupum:        

Auribus teneo lupum

 

 I'm posting this here not for the store, but for the mural.

I was going to post a reply to an entry on one of the blogs that is listed on the right side of this blog, but it started read like a book and I thought better of it.  That's a species of blog hijacking, and that's not the right way to go about things.  So instead I'm just going to make an epic length post here, which is probably also not the best way to go about things. In doing that, I'm going to incorporate a lot of text that I've put up here before.

What these have to do with is a certain type of violence.

Before we start off on that I'll note that I posted obliquely on this yesterday. Very obliquely, in my post

Tolerance and Helplessness.

It was in the early 1990s, when my mother started to be harassed by a mentally unstable individual.

He was, ostensibly, a student at the local community college.  My mother's house wasn't far from the college, which is one of the reasons she liked the house.  She had an active mind for most of her 90 plus years and that allowed her to be close to the college to take courses if she wished to.  It was also close to the YMCA.  She could walk to either, which she did frequently, as she didn't drive.

It might not have been obvious that was what I was posting about, but I was. I posted much more directly on this some time ago in a thread called: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalists. 

I think I was right when I put up that post, and I still think that.

At one time, I used to bump up posts when there was a reason, but I quit doing that some time ago.  Therefore, I'm going to do something really unusual, and make this a truly book length post, and repeat the entire thing as a quote here.  And then, after I do that, I'm going to go on and quote some more.  Before I do that, I'll note that there's a lot to consider here, and I'm going to be noting that again.

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what caused it, and how to prevent similar tragedies from reoccurring.  A lot, indeed frankly most, of this commentary, and most of the effort in Congress to address this, is and will be ignorant.  I don't mean stupid, but ignorant.

Analysis doesn't seem to be the American long suit these days, and perhaps it never was. But here's a topic that cries out for really deep analysis.  Indeed, it cries out for deep analysis in advance of any action, as otherwise the action will simply be ignorant and ineffective, and then will be off on the course that so many other nations have taken on serious topics, which is simply to end in dead end, wringing our hands, trying what's failed.

I'm no more qualified than most to look at this, but I'm probably at least as qualified, by training I suppose, to try some analysis.  Something I haven't seen happen much yet. So let's take a look at this grim topic and see what, if anything, that tells us.

Is there really a new problem?

One thing that hardly anyone asks at all is whether we're seeing a new problem.  Nobody wants to ask this, as it is just too horrible to ask. But it needs to be.  If this problem isn't new, the solution on it will be different, presumably, as opposed to it being a new problem.  And maybe that helps us learn what the actual problem is, as opposed to merely supposing we know what it to be.

According to an article recently run in the Casper Star Tribune, mass murders, into which this fits, have actually been occurring since time immemorial. And, violence in America society, all types of violence, is on the decline. Its way down.   Oddly enough, this includes mass murders.  Mass killings in the US are way down.  They're actually way down in the entire civilized world.  To my huge surprise, the peak year for mass killings in the US was. . . 1929.

1929.  That's right.

That date isn't insignificant. That was the year the Great Depression started globally, and it started by surprise most places.  It was a year of peak economic despair.  We'll come back to that.

Does that mean we've been experiencing this horror for centuries, that it peaked in 29, and that it's been on the decline ever since?  Yes, it does. But that might not be the full picture.  What probably is unique is the setting and the victims.  I have no data on this, but most mass killings of earlier eras, I'm guessing, occurred in different settings with adult victims.  That tells us something about this story as well.

Is it an American problem?

If you listen solely to the news media, you will get the impression that this is uniquely an American problem.  But it isn't.  While the US has had its share of these in recent years, recent years have also seen mass homicides in Norway, the UK and Canada, at least.

Indeed, according to a recent article by a psychologist in the New York Times, the psychological profile of mass killers does not vary at all from those who do it in the name of terrorism.  If that's correct, and his article seemed extremely solid, to say the least, it's then the case that the US doesn't come close to being the mass killer epicenter.  Indeed, as political and criminal activity masks what is essentially the same homicidal impulse, mass killing that really do not vary, it motive by the killer, are much more common in other lands.  All over the Middle East, for example, the same motive is causing nearly identical killings.  We've seen them in Russia as well, and it may be the case that they're actually quite common in Mexico right now.

All this is significant in that it gives us a pretty big database about the type of person who commits these acts.

But wait, isn't it really the implements?

In spite of the fact, as we've seen, and will continue to see below, that this topic requires analysis, and obviously has some aspects to it that have been missed in the past, for much of the press and the public the discussion immediately devolved into one on "gun control."  

In recent decades in the United States there's been a decline in support for gun control and, as noted, there's been a decline in violence too.  Also, interestingly there's been a real increase in states that allow citizens to carry concealed arms. Finally, there's been some action by the Federal government that has allowed the carrying of guns in places that previously it did not.  So, as a statistical matter, not really open to debate, as guns have become more accepted in everyday life, gun deaths, of all types, have declined.

Immediately this will raise the hackles of some, but it's a simple fact.  It can be argued that there's no cause and effect. That is, it can be argued that he increase in guns has not caused the decrease in violence.  And there would be a basis to argue that as violent death has declined everywhere in the Western world, but that in and of itself would suggest that merely looking at the implements does not provide a solution to this problem.

Additionally, and very much missed by the press, none of the implements used in these crimes are new.  The semi automatic pistol first became common, and commercially available, in the 1890s, when they first became reliable.  One of the first, Mauser's 1896 pattern pistol, remained in production up into the 1940s, showing how reliable they'd become.  Various armies started adopting them in the first decade of the 20th Century, as did the first few policemen.  Concealed carry semi automatics entered the picture at that point too.  The semi automatic pistol was perfected by 1911.  While pistol shooters could debate the point, the arm has not really changed since that point in time.  Functionally, while there are some mechanical innovations, the semi automatic pistol has not changed for practical purposes since 1911.  If a person wanted to argue about "high capacity" magazines, they were introduced first time in 1935, when Fabrique National of Belgium used one for its High Power pistol. So, if a person wanted to argue about it, you could say that the high capacity magazine equipped modern pistol appeared in 1935, although it would seem that the 1911 date for the perfection of the modern pistol is a better argument.  Anyhow, semi automatic pistols have been around for decades. This would pretty conclusively demonstrate that their mere existence is not relevant to the problem we're discussing.

Well then, what about "assault rifles?"  They're new, correct?

The problem here is that it actually gets a bit difficult to define what's being discussed, as the term that's used in the news media isn't actually correctly used.  But we can work around that here.

Some people seem to think that the problem is the semi automatic rifle. But like the semi automatic pistol, they aren't new at all.  Semi automatic rifles made their first real appearance in the first decade of the 20th Century as a sporting arm.  The few early ones were actually surprisingly similar in some ways to the current "assault rifles" in that they were all relatively light in caliber.  Both Remington and Winchester offered them commercially before 1910, and in the Winchester offering featured a detachable box magazine, making it essentially identical to many common definitions of "assault rifles".  

These rifles were available for sale, but figure in crimes at  rate that isn't spectacular, although there are a few instances.  A Remington 08  was used in the notorious Spring Creek Raid in Wyoming, but then so were a lot of lever action Winchesters, so that doesn't tell us much, even if it did lead to the rapid discovery of the perpetrators.  Winchester semi automatics were used by at least one of the criminal gangs of the 1930s, but the same gang also used fully automatic weapons (machine-guns), so that probably doesn't tell us anything at all.

Indeed, if we look at it that way, it's really hard to see a connection between the existence of semi automatic rifles and these crimes in a causal fashion, and maybe there simply isn't one. But that would not fully look at the "assault rifle" aspect of it.

The rifles we're discussing probably wouldn't be recognized as an assault rifle by anyone, although a regulatory scrivener might include them accidentally.  When most people discuss "assault rifles", what they really mean are the M4 Carbine or, at least at one time, the AK47.

The latter two weapons are actually military weapons, under that designation, and in their military use they are "assault rifles". Assault rifles are a class of weapon that the Germans basically get credit for, although there were precursors going back as far as 1905, with the Russians getting the credit for being the very first army to have such a weapon. The true definition of an assault rifle is a selective fire rifle, filling the role of rifle and submachine gun in the infantry squad, which fires an "intermediate" cartridge.  As this isn't a tutorial in military firearms, I'll basically leave that definition there, but both the M4 and the AK47 fit that definition.

The first really mass produced assault rifle was the German MP44, which to a lot of people looks a lot like the AK 47 and which some claim, incorrectly, was the design basis for the AK 47.  The Germans also made a "battle rifle", which is a "full sized" selective fire rifle, during the war, and issued it only to paratroopers, sort of oddly, as it was extremely heavy.  "Battle rifles" became extremely common in Western nations after World War Two, and that's significant in that a lot of regulators confuse battle rifles with assault rifles, even though battle rifles are so enormously heavy and large that they are associated with almost no criminal activity whatsoever.  Indeed, most, in civilians hands (and they're becoming quite rare in military hands) go no further afield than the range, being as big as they are.

Assault rifles, by the military definition, are not offered for sale to civilians, as they are selective fire. That is, they can fire fully automatically, like a machinegun. But they have been offered for sale in semi automatic configurations.

This is significant for us here as what can be noted is that, starting at some point in the late 1960s, civilian variants of this class of military weapon were offered to civilians for sale. Can they really be distinguished from the earlier semi automatic rifles?  Well, sort of.  The principal means of doing so, however, would mostly be visual, as unsatisfactory at that would be. The first one to be offered in the US was the AR15 in semi-automatic, a rifle that had just been adopted as the M16 by the US military.  It is a distinct looking weapon.

To be fair, battle rifles were probably in civilian hands earlier, in their semi automatic variants, and some armies actually adopted them in semi automatic rather than selective fire.  I think perhaps Belgium offered the FAL for sale at some point in the late 50s or 60s, but they didn't really take off as a civilian arm at that time.  The Army itself released a very few M14s, the U.S. Army's battle rifle, into civilian hands for target shooting in the 1960s.  That rifle became commercially available in the early 1970s, where it was sold mostly to high end target shooters, who remain its principal market.

Later in the 1980s AK47s became available as various nations that had made them started offering them for commercial sale and they became more common in the 1990s, as various Soviet client states came out of Communism.  You don't hear much about them in the press anymore, and it seems to be the case that they aren't imported like they once were.  Anyhow, they're distinct looking also.

Since 2001 the U.S. Army has gone from the M16A3 to the M4 carbine, basically the same weapon, but with a much shorter barrel. Somewhere in that time frame Cerberus, the investment company, bought up a bunch of firearms manufacturers and united them, and that resulted in a tremendous spread of the AR15 type design as companies that had not offered one started to in their market niche.  Anyhow, after the war in Iraq and Afghanistan started, the M4 carbine type rifle, as a semi automatic, became extremely popular as a civilian arm.  Most of these are used for range plinking, for the most part.  But their visual impact apparently appeals to those who are inclined to commit the type of crime we're discussing, as does the appearance of similar looking arms, as military looking "assault" arms, even if not really military arms, have featured in some of these recent tragedies.

That's pretty long winded, but what we can, maybe, take from that is that the design of firearms hasn't changed enough over 120 years to have been the cause of what has been occurring. But what we can also take away from that is that, oddly enough, the appearance of these arms is unique, and they seem to show up in these horrors as a rule.  What that tells us is that it isn't the mechanics of what is used at all, but that the attractant here is a psychological one. And that tells us something about the shooters.

Who does these things?

It's pretty apparent that you could go to the average gun owner, and actually equip him with a machinegun, and he'd never do anything with it.  It's also apparent, from a recent mass killing in Casper Wyoming, that if you arm some people with medieval implements, they'll use them for murder.  That's correct; recently in Casper Wyoming, there was an event that fit this pattern that was committed with a bow and arrow and a large knife. Grisly, to be sure, but telling.  It isn't something new in the arms that's causing this, it's something new in the mind. But what?

I'm not qualified to be a psychologist at all, but I am trained to observe human behavior and to analyze it, and there are certain things that seem quite connected here, but which are ignored.  These are the things that need to be looked at prior to our doing anything, as the solutions are to be found here.

What we're seeing in many of these murders is that the killers are mentally unstable in a truly insane sense. The attempted assassin of a politician in the US seems to fit this category.  Others, and here's where the New York Times article is helpful, are not so much insane, but they fit into a category of people who, by some means, are subject to a personality disorder that renders them socially marooned, and it would seem, it renders them also incapable of empathy, but fully capable of despair.

Some of these individuals are quite smart. The recent killer in Newton Connecticut, apparently afflicted with Aspergers Disease, seems to fit this category.  The killer in the Denver theater shootings also very clearly had some sort of personality disorder and was very well educated and intelligent.  Others are not so smart, but a consistent strain of some sort of very pronounced personality disorder runs through these stories.  The killer in the Casper Wyoming murders was self-diagnosed with Aspergers, and based on his personal history, I suspect his self diagnosis was correct.

Does this mean that everyone who has these conditions is a time bomb waiting to go off?  Absolutely and clearly not.  And, if we assume (perhaps quite incorrectly, however) that incidents of these conditions are not increasing in frequency (which they very well may be), what that tells us is something else.  If we've always had people who have been so afflicted, but haven't had this particular set of problems, something else has changed. What could it be?

First, before moving on in this, however, what is it about these conditions that make them unique. That's important. What we know is that the conditions make these people socially awkward. In some cases, they divorce them of empathy.  That seems to be all the more to the conditions that we can discern, that's relevant here.  But, as the vast, vast, majority of people who have these conditions also have moral standards, and usually go on to live fully productive lives, it tells us something is also wrong at the societal level, and not as much the individual one.

Maybe the violence has been masked.

Once again, before going on to really analyze what's different, maybe we ought to attempt to determine if anything at all is different.  Is it?

Maybe not. As noted above, all types of violence are going down in the Western world.  But that means that there was once a lot more violence. And a lot of that violence was committed by "average people."  But that may mean that there was a lot of violence committed by our target population here that just went unnoticed as unique.

I suspect that there's more than a little truth to that.  Going all the way back in history we can find examples of violent people who probably fit into the group we're looking at.  Viking Berserkers, for example, just strike me as homicidal youths with severe personality disorders, recruited for cannon fodder by Scandinavian raiding parties.  Indeed, I suspect the whole "glorious" example of Berserkers celebrated in Nordic sagas is a whopping fraud, probably done for recruiting purposes, and that the true story probably involved the gang encouraging poor Sven to go mad and charge into the English, so he'd get killed but take out a few Englishmen with him.  Coming more recently into time, Billy the Kid probably fits this group.  Same type of deal, I'd note.  He was a killer, but a killer whose talents were useful in the Lincoln County War, until they no longer were, at which point his status as a homicidal maniac were finally noted.  John Wesley Hardin might.  The whole James Gang might for that matter.  Celebrated to this day, the entire group may have been a group of misfits who proclivities came to light in the Civil War, and just continued on until finally a cousin took out Jesse James.  Entire groups of people at war might.  For example, while many of the Nazi mass murderers were average men caught up by evil, I'd guess that a few were people who fit into our target group here.  And we can find plenty of examples of German battlefield executions that have to raise this question in our minds.  It's not a comfortable one, quite frankly.  But maybe part of the answer to the question, regarding mass killings of the past, when stated "How could average people do this?", is "they weren't average people."

I'll leave this part of the analysis here, as I'm not sure what we do with it.  But it might very well be the case.  Maybe we've always had these killers, but couldn't recognize them as unique until this era of relative non violence.  Maybe Viking Berserkers, Moslem Assassins, William Bonnie, the Dillinger Gang, SS Guards, would be school killers today.  

Certainly the New York Times analysis would support this.  I suspect, to more than a little degree, these people have always been with us.  Maybe what has changed, has been what has changed from time to time.  For most of human history, and in most societies, people are taught a set of standards that discourages this behavior.  From time to time, however, certain societies encourage and glamorize it.  The Crusader era Moslem Assassins encouraged suicidal behavior.  Al Queda encourages it today.  The Viking raiders encouraged young men to go shrieking into the enemy.  Quantrell encouraged killing, looting and burning.  The Nazis glorified violent death, and the infliction of violent death.  When those things are taught as virtues, some people who are otherwise troubled will pick up on it.

Maybe we're tolerating the behavior

Anyone who is old enough to remember back into the 1970s would be aware, if they're observant, that a great deal more is now tolerated in terms of bad behavior of all types than once was. This may very well be a factor in this.

Prior to the 1980s bad behavior by children in school simply wasn't tolerated.  It wasn't tolerated by the schools, and it wasn't tolerated by other children either.  The concept of "take it outside", which would now be regarded as actionable in a school, was the rule. As late as the 1970s I can specifically recall being the witness to a teacher's order that a brewing altercation, by a bully against another student, be "taken out into the hall" for a fight.  I remember it, as I was the student.  The teacher didn't attempt to order the bully to stop, and there was no effort to counsel anyone. Rather, the teacher simply ordered the brewing fight out of the classroom.

The degree of social control of this type was quite high, and while it sounds shocking, it was amazingly effective. There were always kids who were problematic in school, but there was also always no doubt that there would be action.  In some classes, such as Physical Education, the action would actually be teacher imposed. That's correct, I can also recall a PE teacher taking a swing at a student, which impressed the students, but which didn't seem inappropriate to any of us.

When a student simply couldn't be tolerated, they were not. This meant some were farmed out of school directly to trade schools and others to institutions. This is now all a thing of the past.  In the 1980s it was determined that all of this was cruel, but perhaps there's a lesson here in this.  Up until that time, there was a concept that if a person couldn't accommodate themselves to a set of standards, they'd be hit by the system and society.  Now, this is simply not the case.

Indeed, it is now the case that even the dangerously insane are generally not addressed at all, unless they harm somebody.  For at least a period of a decade here, an insane man wondered the streets threatening people with a cane.  He never hit them, but he came close to looking like he would.  I haven't seen him around for some time, so perhaps he did. But up until that point was crossed, nothing was going to occur.

This last item is particularly misguided.  There's a concept that leaving people alone in their insanity is kind. But to be insane is a particularly hard cross of misery to bear, and that misery is always there.  Allowing the misery to be violently inflicted on others isn't doing anyone a favor or kindness.

Anyhow, there's at least an argument that, up until the 1980s, there was a set of standards that existed which people, particularly the young, were expected to adhere to, with consequences if they did not. There was no effort to insert those who could not, through no fault of their own, into the main body of students, and there was a point at which those who would not comport were disciplined or removed.  

None of this is to suggest we need to return to the "take it out in the hall" type of mentality, which wouldn't be a good idea at all.  But, perhaps that teaches us another lesson here.  We may have, through our attempts at being enlightened and tolerant, failed to teach a certain population that there's a standard to which they must comport.  Probably all the "take it out" type of behavior did was to reenforce that, in a fairly crude manner, the basic lesson being that there is a standard at work.

But what is that standard?
Maybe the standard was destroyed

There's been a lot of commentary the last few years about the lack of prayer in school, and as recently noted on the Ramblings of a Teacher blog, there's been an email and Facebook item circulating that promotes the return of daily prayer to public schools.  Like the author of that blog, I think that idea misses the mark.

What I do think, however, is that we've seen an evolution from a loosely recognized general standard, which was frankly religion based, into the concept of "tolerance" for other ideas, which has now slipped into complete moral relativism that lacks any standards at all.

This is, I think, fairly demonstrable by history and the result isn't good.  A brief look at that history is instructive.

This is not to suggest that the country had a uniform Christian history and that this suddenly fell apart recently, that wouldn't be true.  And it wouldn't even be true to maintain that the country has been uniformly religiously observant throughout its history.  What would be true, however, is that a loose set of Christian standards was generally recognized, even by those who were not religious, or even a-religious, and even though the degree to which people closely identified with religion has changed varied enormously over the country's history.

Early in the nation's history the country was almost uniformly Protestant, although there was more than one Protestant church that was present in the country, and the doctrinal differences between them were in some instances quite pronounced.  It would be false to claim that they all had the same theological concepts, and indeed some of them had radically different theologies.  Indeed, even those several Protestant faiths that were present in North America had acted to strongly repress each other here, on occasion, and had been involved in some instances in open warfare in the British Isles..  Catholics, and Jews, were largely absent from the early history of the country, except with Catholics nervously present in some very concentrated regions.  The Catholic presence in the country really became pronounced first in the 1840s, as a result of the revolutions in Europe and the Irish Famine.  This actually created huge concern amongst the Protestant sections of the county, who were often very anti Catholic.  This started to wane during the Civil War, however.  Jewish immigrants came in throughout the 19th Century, some from Europe in chief, but many from Imperial Russia, where they sought to escape Russian programs.

The purpose of this is not to do a treatise on religion in the United States, which would be a massive work and which, at this point, would pretty much cease to be illustrative of anything relevant to this discussion, but rather to note something else.  Even though the degree to which the American population was adherent and observant of their Faiths, and even though the country has had, at various points, very strong doctrinal differences in the population, to the extent that it impacted public policy, the country had a culture that loosely recognized a very loose set of Christian principals as social principals.

This was so much the case that everyone, even members of non-Christian faiths, and even those who were members of no faiths at all, recognized what the standards were.  Interestingly, up until quite recently, people who chose to ignore those standards, and in any one era there are plenty of people who do, often recognized that they were breaching the standard and sometimes even that doing so was wrong.  To use a non-violent example, people generally recognized that cheating on a spouse was wrong, even if they did it.  Most people were a little queasy about divorce even if they divorced and remarried.  Nearly everyone regarded cohabitation out of wedlock as morally wrong, even if they did not attend a church.  Sex outside of marriage was generally regarded as wrong, and indeed even the entertainment industry used that fact as part of the risque allure when they depicted that scenario.

The point of this isn't to suggest that various topics regarding marriage and non marriage are somehow related to this topic. Rather, the point is to show that there was more of a concept of such things at work in society, and that's just an easy one to pick up on, as the changes in regards to it have been quite pronounced.  But, if the argument isn't to be extremely strained and fall flat, other examples would have to be given.  So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

The point of this is that, even though there were multiple Faiths, and people of no faith, there was a general concept of a set of standards that were almost universally accepted and they had roots that went way back into the country's early history..  Included in that set of beliefs was that you didn't harm others.  It isn't that people didn't do it, it's that they knew it was wrong to do it.

Starting in the 1960s, however, American society really began to break a global set of standards down.  The concept of "tolerance" came in. Tolerance means to tolerate, not to accept, but over time the two became confused, and it became the American ideal to accept everything.  Even people with strong moral beliefs were told that they must accept behavior that was previously regarded as morally wrong, or even illegal in some places. There are many present examples of this that a person could point to.  The point here is not that toleration is bad, but rather that confusing tolerance with acceptance, and following that a feeling that acceptance must be mute, probably isn't good.  Toleration sort of presupposes the existence of a general standard, or at least that people can debate it.  If they can't openly debate it, that' probably is not a good thing.  If self declared standards must be accepted, rather than subject to debate, all standards become fairly meaningless as a result.

The overall negative effect this has on a society would also be a major treatise in its own right and I'm not qualified to write it..  Most cultures do not experience this, as most are not as diverse as ours. Whether any society can in fact endure an existence without standards is open to question,  and the very few previous examples that creep up on that topic are not happy ones.  It is clear that most people do in fact continue to retain  bits and pieces of the old standard, and perhaps most people are very highly analogous to our predecessors who lived in eras when standards were very generally held, and there were decades of American history that were just like that.  But for some people, who are otherwise self-focused, and with problems relating to other people, the weak nature of the standard is now potentially a problem.  Unable to relate, and in a society that teaches that there are no standards, they only standards they have are self learned, in a self isolation.

But what are they learning then, and how?

No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics.

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education.

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Niebelungenleid is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

The Conclusion and what to do about it.

That's where this seems to lead.  It's a long road, but it seems solid to me.  

The implements are not new.  But what is new is that we have a population that has nowhere to go, having a hard time fitting in, has a hard time finding meaningful work and which is spending its surplus time saturated in the glamorization of violence.

Well, what can a person do with that?

That's another question entirely, but the ultimate one.  What seems clear is that people who have pinned their hopes on a targeted solution will be tragically disappointed.  Banning one singular thing, even assuming that a statute was drafted by somebody competent to address the material items (which has so far proven to be completely the opposite of the case) would be at best a band aid approach and at worse actually do nothing at all. Indeed, if that approach failed, and it would be likely to, it would be very bad, as once any society tends to adopt a certain approach, they tend to follow that path in spite of failure.  The decades long "war on drugs" is arguably such an example.

What does seem to be the case is that we have a population we've really failed, but the failure is now so systemic that addressing the problem is massive in scope. But if we don't confront that now, the problem will grow worse and worse.  The difference between tolerance and acceptance needs to be reestablished, and the concept that a society must have standards does as well.  And that can't be foisted off on the school system.  And, while we now seem to accept that we've lost forever certain types of work, we must recognize that work, for some people, is much more than a career, but literally a life raft for them and us, giving their lives meaning.  Finally, while we're talking of banning things, we need to really look at violent entertainment.  Just as the argument will be advanced by those in favor of banning certain firearms that it doesn't matter that most of the owners of those arms will not misuse them, but that those who do, do so catastrophically, it is even more the case that some will be impacted by the glorious cartoon depiction of violence negatively.  And entertainment, at the end of the day, is just that.  There's little justification for highly glamorized sexualized violence aimed at teenage and twenty something males.
Epilogue:
Since I first wrote this, a couple of news stories, based on statistics have run which are interesting in the context of this story, and perception.
The first one was the release, by a proud New York City, of the hugely dramatic decline in homicide in New York. That data revealed that not only had homicide declined massively, but that almost all homicides in New York involve parties who have been convicted of prior felonies.  That is, almost all homicide victims are the associates of felons.    In other words, people who get murdered tend to be involved in criminal activity themselves.  Almost all of the remaining homicides, a very small number, are domestic incidents.  So, the threat to the general public is almost non-existent, and the recently enacted firearms provisions in New York will have next to no, and may no, effect on anything.
The second news story was just released, and it reveals that death by gun homicides has declined about 40% in the US since 1990, and is now at something .like 3.4 deaths per 100,000 people.  Of note, if you remove certain cities, indeed cities with gun control provisions, the homicide rate in the US is very small.  That would actually suggest new laws may actually be counterproductive.
Epilogue posted on May 8, 2013
Epilogue II:
This topic has been back in the news again, so I'm bumping it up.
One of the things that strikes me here is the degree to which there's no original thinking on this topic, and that the same old supposed solutions, which are nearly wholly devoid of any analytical thought, are dragged out every time something occurs.  There seems to be no appreciation that at a time in which overall violence is decreasing, these stand out because they are anomalies, and anomalies with distinct patters, the most significant of which is mental illness.
When we consider that, and that we consider that recent statistical data demonstrates an increasing dissociation and dislike by Americans for their employments and careers, we have a dual disturbing trend of being unwilling to address a disturbed person until that person acts out, and having an economy which increasingly suits the personalities of fewer and fewer people.
Epilogue III
And I'm bumping this up again.
One thing I'm increasingly inclined to emphasize on this story is the media's role in feeding the mentally in regarding this.  That may seem extreme, but truth be known, violence of all types, including of the type that hits the news, is on the decline. Yet the news makes the opposite seem so.
When news was more local, the violent acts of mentally ill people stayed local for the most part.  While there's no ready way to sensor the news in this day and age, some responsibility in reporting is in order.
Additionally, there's something about social cohesion that's lacking, it seems to me, that is feeding into this. Whether it be the actor in Oregon or ISIL proponents in France or the East Coast, its increasingly obvious how these acts are perpetrated by people who have dropped out of society and have nothing to rely on.  Arms in the hands of such individuals are no more advanced than they were a century ago, so its an evolution in something else, and this seems to be part of this, that helps perpetuate violence.

Now that I've done that, and I hope that if you are following this you've read this far, I'll summarize something that I'm sure I have summarized in more recent posts.

The United States, and the world, is getting a lot less violent.

But these acts keep happening. And they're happening because starting some point after World War Two we started producing a selfish society that valued only money.  Following that, we told people that there were no external values at all, only the values that they themselves defined.

Both of those things were pathetic lies.

And then following that, through our technology, we marginalized those in society who were marginalized to start with, and then we salved ourselves by pretending we were not doing it and that everything can be okay for everyone.  People who once had some value in society no longer did.  And those people often live in isolated desperation.  Worse yet, they live in isolated desperation surrounded by fantasies of violence this culture has, in recent decades, wallowed in.

This brings me to the blog item I was going to post on.  I'll quote in here in its entirety.

Thoughts after yet another school shooting 

By leann28 on February 16, 2018

As a public school teacher for 15 years, and now a parent, it occurs to me that what we think is normal and what our children are growing up with as normal is not, in fact, normal. It is not normal for students to have to think about how to evade a shooter. It is not normal for them to be concerned about what to do if something is happening in their school and where they would go. It is not normal to have to think about throwing something at a window (provided you have them in your classroom) to break it to get out. It is not normal. IT. IS. NOT. NORMAL!!!!!!

I remember as a kid in a public school that we would practice fire drills, but that was really it in terms of emergency preparedness. And it was generally if the fire was in the school building somewhere, how would we get out? What was the exit we were supposed to use? Where did we line up outside? And we do practice fire drills. But we also practice things like lockdown, modified lockdown, shelter-in-place, etc. We regularly practice these kinds of drills and work to improve all the time, even having police and other emergency personnel helping us know what we should do to get better to prevent something from happening and protecting our students.

And I hear stories of the teachers and other school staff that shielded their students from bullets, sacrificing themselves. And I think to myself that I would totally do the same thing. If it came down to it, I would absolutely shield my students, stepping in between them and whatever the weapon is. My own son is growing up in a world where this seems to be normal and that when he gets older will think about his mom as a teacher and what that means in these kinds of school situations.

I know exactly what to do for a lockdown, modified lockdown, evacuation drill, etc. I have a folder in my room to remind me in the moment in case I forget. This folder has the directions for each of the different kinds of drills, with class lists, etc. I know I have to close the blinds for my exterior windows, close the blinds on my door to the hall, lock the door, get extra kids/adults out of the halls, etc. and into the closest room, put a poster on the bottom window to block visibility into the classroom, turn off lights, have my students move and be absolutely silent, and act as if every drill is real because in the moment, we won’t know if it is just a drill or if it is a real situation. Being prepared is good.

But let’s be honest, when it comes down to it, there is a significant problem that these kinds of situations have become normal. We have to do better for ourselves, but most especially for our children and students. We can’t continue to let this happen, send thoughts and prayers, and forget in the next few days about this until the next one happens. We must call on our legislators at both state and national levels to do something about this. I am not saying take all guns away. I am not even saying take most guns away. I am saying that there is nothing that a regular, everyday citizen needs an automatic assault rifle for. ABSOLUTELY ZERO reason. Those weapons are not used for self protection but for mass casualties.

I agree that this is not normal.   Not normal at all.  Now, let's consider the last paragraph, which I will repeat.

But let’s be honest, when it comes down to it, there is a significant problem that these kinds of situations have become normal. We have to do better for ourselves, but most especially for our children and students. We can’t continue to let this happen, send thoughts and prayers, and forget in the next few days about this until the next one happens. We must call on our legislators at both state and national levels to do something about this. I am not saying take all guns away. I am not even saying take most guns away. I am saying that there is nothing that a regular, everyday citizen needs an automatic assault rifle for. ABSOLUTELY ZERO reason. Those weapons are not used for self protection but for mass casualties.

I think her view is common, and it has to be answered.  Indeed, I've heard that very view amongst people that I know well and admire and more.

Now, let me start off and note, as I have elsewhere and did above, that actually semi automatic rifles have changed very little over a century. So something else has.  What that something else is, I set out mostly above, but I've also commented on it here before myself, and I'll therefore set out my prior comments again.

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

I've been writing a lot, in contravention to our recent focus on 1915-17 in a distinct, sometimes daily, way, about the Vietnam War.  Indeed, it's always been an interest of mine and I have have several other threads in the hopper.

This one is one that I've hesitated to write about as I'm well aware that its really controversial.  So much so that it sparks rage in some people on both sides of a debate that rapidly become so vitriolic that they aren't part of a debate at all.

I speak of the AR15 rifle.
Long winded vitriolic introduction

 Paratrooper in Vietnam armed with M16A1 rifles.  This trooper seems to have a cleaning brush sticking through the front swivel.  That's something I've never seen a photo of before, but in some photos you can see the assembled cleaning rods, designed to be carried disassembled in the stock, sticking through the ventilation holes of the front grip to be used an emergency ramrod in case the weapon jammed.

Now, let me note right away, this isn't a debate about gun control or "gun violence" (that odd newspeak category of violence).  If you want to read my views on that you can read my several other threads that touch on it.*  No, this is about the law of unintended consequences.

Eh?
Yes, exactly.

And for that, we need a little background about the AR15 and the M16, one of Robert S. McNamara's gifts to the military that just keeps on giving.

And if a person wonders what I mean by that, I don't like the M16.  And yes, I have personal experience with the M16, or rather I should say a variety of those jamming plastic and steel direct impingement second rate assault rifles, if that's what it is, the M16A1.**

 Me, with one of the several M16A1s I carried at one time or another doing stuff similar to this. This photograph was taken in South Korea.  This M16A1 was not made by Colt.  It was made by General Motors Hydramatic Division.  It was one of the better ones I used over the years and I can't recall this one jamming.

Now,  just saying that in that fashion will send some people into cardiac arrest.  The "American Rifle", or whatever its being called today, has come to absolute dominate a large section of the rifle market.  And I think it's junk.  Well, if not junk, it has problems.

And I don't mean in a "they should be banned" sense.  I mean that in a "they don't like to work" sense.

Vietnam War Era manual for the soldier on the M16A1.  This manual was still in use in the early 80s when I was in the National Guard, but it was being phased out at that time by a less teenagerish version.  This document is interesting in that the Army thought it had to publish a cartoon book in order to get soldier to read the manual.  It's also interesting in that it was drawn by famous cartoonish Will Eisner, who had military experience, but who used the stock grizzled sergeant as a stock character. By this time during the Vietnam War a lot of Sergeant E-5s weren't much older than the privates.  The actual book itself featured a cartoon buxom female character was was drawn as if she was right out of Terry and the Pirates, which probably wasn't too relevant to a generation that thought Jane Fonda and various Playboy victims were the model of feminine beauty.

This was well known in Vietnam and it's the fault of the design, contrary to what latter day legions of apologist say about the rifle.  One of the best minor monuments of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the war, in my view, came when Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave called it a piece of junk.  It was still well known in the 1980s when we lubricated the weapon with gallons of banana scented Break Free to make sure it'd work.  And it's been a consistent complaint about it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's the reason that piston variants like the HK416 show up in special use and the gas system weaknesses are why nobody else in the world attempts to field an assault rifle that features that gas system.

 Philippine Army soldiers armed with a HK416, a piston using variant of the AR that cures its feeding problems. This version was designed by the German firm of Hecklar & Koch and has been widely used around the world, including by the United States in the hands of special troops.

We ought to replace it.

But we don't.

And yes, none of that is what I'm writing about here, although its related.

Part of the reason, I suspect, that we don't replace the M16/M4 weapons is that the service buys them.

Well of course, you say, how else would they get them?

Well, prior to the M16A1 the service's standard rifles weren't purchased, as a rule, usually. They were made by the Government. And that's what the point of this post is.

And its an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences.  Maybe.

Bear with me, I'm getting there.

A civilian item has to be marketed.

The M16A4/A5 and M4 carbines the Armed Forces use today came about as developments of the earlier rifles, the most significant of which is the M16A1. The M16A1 was a Vietnam era corrective improvement of the design of the M16 most significantly featuring a big plunger that allowed a soldier to jam the bolt home when it jammed as one more shot is better than none at all.

The M16 was a military selective fire variant of the AR15, sometimes inaccurately called the "Colt AR15".  The AR15 itself was a 5.56 (or .223 if you prefer) development of the AR10, the original design.

 The original variant of the AR10 with wrapped fiberglass stock and realty weird flash hinder.  The AR10 has seen a revival after having truly been dead in that it has come back into the service as a designated marksman rifle.  While I do not like the ARs, this makes a lot of sense as its very similar to the rifle otherwise in service and it is quite accurate.  "Joe Loong - originally posted to Flickr as DSCF1108 CC BY-SA 2.0 File:AR-10 in the National Firearms Museum.jpg."

The AR10 was the brainchild of Fairchild engineer Eugene Stoner.  Stoner was out to design an assault rifle that could be manufactured cheaply using the newest in World War Two technology and Fairchild was looking for ways to exploit that technology.

Yes, its' that old.

 Stg44 (or in this case a MP 43/1) using optical sight, which most did not, and featuring stamped receiver and in some instances a plastic butt stock.  Almost everything about this World War Two era German assault rifle was every bit as modern as the features of the AR15/M16.  CC BY-SA 3.0 de File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-118-55, Infanterist mit Sturmgewehr 44.jpg Created: 31 December 1942

Anyhow, Stoner's idea was to make a cheap assault rifle out of stamped steel and plastic.  It these regards it wasn't really revolutionary as the world's first assault rifle, accepted as such, ultimately came to do that as well.  Stoner's design also omitted any sort of advance gas system, such a a piston or block, and simply blew tapped gas back on a cup machined on top of a bolt carrier and then vented into the action.  In this fashion it wasn't revolutionary either, as a semi automatic rifle used by the Swedes during World War Two (in which they were neutral) also used it.  Like the M16, it had performance problems.

If you think, gee, that's going to get things pretty dirty, you'd be right.

Anyhow, at some point this branch of Fairchild, Armalite, separated from Faichild and the company went about trying to market the AR10 with limited success after entering the competition for a new battle rifle for the United States and not prevailing in it.***  Some were in fact purchased and even used in combat in distant regions of the globe, with the example of Portuguese paratroopers in Angola perhaps being the most significant.  It might be noted that the Portuguese have always shown an affinity for eclectic weapons choices and, at the same time, their officers were carrying Luger's in combat, which would make most people knowledgeable about modern weapons gasp.

Anyhow, also in the 1950s the United States was also experimenter with .22 caliber rifles, which things chambered in .222 and .223 are.  Not .22 LR, of course, which is the most common little tiny cartridge on earth, but centerfire .22 caliber weapons.  

It was an experiment.

At the time the US had just adopted the M14 rifle, which it made.

And that gets to one of our first really big salient points.

The government had designed and made the M14.

 Paratrooper in Vietnam with M14 rifle.  While its seemingly been forgotten, the US Army was equipped with the M14 at the start of the Vietnam War, as were the Marines.  The Air Force was still equipped with the M1 Garand, as was the Navy.  The Guard and Reserve was completely equipped with M1 Garands.

We're in the late 1950s at this point.  But let's explore that, as that's a hugely significant point in our essay of today. The government had made and designed the M14.

Indeed, the U.S. Government had made every principal standard longarm it had equipped its military with since the foundation of the country.  That was the system.  Longarms, such as rifles and muskets, were made in government arsenals.  They were usually, indeed almost always, designed by government employees.  In the rare instances in which they were not designed by government employees, such as with the Krag series of rifles and carbines, the U.S. Government bought a license to produce them and then made them, itself, under license.

The only exceptions to this in any form came normally during big wars, or with small purchases.  So, for example, prior to the Civil War you will find that the Army bought small lots of Sharps carbines.  Small lots.  During the Civil War the Army bought everything going, but the Civil War was a really big war.  During the Indian Wars the Army bought small lots of experimental weapons, but didn't adopt them, and then the Navy and Marine Corps bought relatively small lots of Remington made Lees at various points up to and during the Spanish American War (the United States, not the United Kingdom, was the first nation on earth to equip itself in any fashion with a Lee rifle. . . take that SMLE fans).  During World War One the Government contracted for huge lots of M1917 Enfields and bought small lots of Mosin Nagants (that had been rejected by the Imperial Russian inspectors, who must have been delusional given the circumstances their nation was under).  

And so on.

But for long arms, the big story was Springfield Armory. To a lesser extent, and at different times, the story was also Rock Island Arsenal and Harpers Ferry Arsenal.

Now, if this is a bit shocking in our super glory of the free market era, we should note that this wasn't unusual at all and wasn't limited to longarms.  The government also manufactured artillery (it isn't like there's a big civilian market for it, after all).  It made saddles by the thousands as well, for which there was a big civilian market, and all sorts of tack.  Prisoners in Ft. Leavenworth made bad footwear for the Army for many years.  At one point between World War One and World War Two the government manufactured 6x6 trucks. . . nobody else was making them and the artillery branch needed them.

 Cavalrymen at Ft. Riley Kansas, 1940.  The pack and riding saddle that are in this photo were both types manufactured by the government itself.

It's also worth noting that there were certain things the government didn't make, and some of them were surprising.  The government quit making handguns sometime prior to the Civil War.  The introduction of Colt revolvers seems to have caused that to come about. Whatever it was, they had made them, and they just quit.  And the U.S. military actually uses a surprising number of handguns.  The U.S. military also never made very many machineguns, which is odd.  It did try to come up with one during World War Two but a production goof made that example lousy, and it had made a few prior to World War One.. The one and only machinegun it ever tried to field that was its own design was the M15/M14E1, a light machinegun variant of the the M14, and it wasn't very good.  The M14 was excellent, but the M14E1 wasn't.

During this entire time the US never made a really bad longarm.  It made some that didn't quite pan out, such as the Krag, and some that were so so, like the trapdoor Springfield's, but it never made a really awful longarm, which is remarkable.  And when things didn't quite pan out, because they made them, they usually reacted pretty quickly as a rule, although the long history of the trapdoor runs contrary to that. 

And then came the AR15 and Robert McNamara.

 Robert S. McNamara.

When the US entered the Vietnam War, it sent its troops in with M14s, which were just coming into service. They were so new, and there were so few, that the National Guard never received them.  And they worked fine.  

We were, as another thread explores here in depth, also supplying our ally, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, with weapons.  The ARVN didn't get M14s, they got, and had been getting for some time, M1 Garands (another great U.S. arsenal design) and M1/M2 Carbines (a World War Two design by Winchester that was in fact acquired by contract from civilian manufacturers and which was, in fact, not a very good military weapon).

And then came in the USAF.

From 1948 when it was created up until, well, forever, the USAF has had sort of weird price of place in military acquisitions.  The Air Force generally, but not always, gets what it wants.  And it decided that airmen would have been way too burdened to guard air bases in Vietnam equipped with M1 Garands (which is what they would have had, M14s wouldn't have caught up with the Air Force yet) and therefore it would buy the new, super sexy, AR15 in a selective fire form.

 

World War Two vintage poster depicting tough combat infantryman with an M1 Garand.  The Air Force didn't want the M1 to do its talking in Vietnam.

Which takes us back to the AR10 and the .223. 

The experiment I noted above resulted in various entities, and Springfield Armory, coming up with .223 designs to be tested. Winchester made a rifle that was based on the M1 Carbine, which is a fairly lousy military weapon but which does function fine.  Its product was a lot like the later Ruger Mini14.  Springfield Armory again adapted, albeit half halfheartedly, the Garand action that was used for the M1 Garand and the M14 to the .223 and also came up with a weapon that bears a strong resemblance to the later Ruger Mini14.  Armalite adapted the AR10. As Winchester later lamented, the AR15 looked "sexy".

The Army yawned and the halfhearted effort of Springfield Armory showed that it never thought the .223 was going to go anywhere anyway, but the Air Force said "Golly Gee Bob!.  Look at that nifty thing". and adopted it.  As Armalite's production capacity was nonexistent Colt, taking a gamble as it was really a pistol manufacture, bought the rights to Stoners design.  So Colt fell into a military contract in 1963 when the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Army, bought AR15s to equip its men in Vietnam with.****  Right around the same time the Secret Service also bought AR15s.  Indeed, if you look closely at the famous video footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination, you can see that a Secret Serviceman in the car behind Kennedy's is carrying an AR15.
Now, the real irony of this is that the Air Force is the service that's least qualified to decide anything about small arms and in truth perimeter security in Vietnam would have been just as readily served by men carrying M1 Garands.  Heck, it would have been better served. The Air Force didn't need M16s and it shouldn't have received them.  It was patently absurd.  Compounding the problem, however, the Army's Special Forces took some M16s and heaped lavish praise on them, the recipients of the praise forgetting that special troops are notoriously able to make use of weapons that regular soldiers cannot.
This combined result then operated to convince William C. Westmoreland, whom we've recently otherwise read about, to urge the ordering of what had then been adopted as a limited standard as the M16 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  There was some logic to his decision.  For one thing, the ARVN soldiers were tiny.  The M1 Garand which they were supplied with by the United States was huge and the alternative M1/M2 Carbine was ineffective.  The M16 seemed just the ticket.
The ARVN was not impressed.  While Americans have heaped condemnation on the ARVN for decades many ARVN troops saw years and years of combat and they weren't actually asking for new small arms.  When they received the M16 they were amongst the first to discovery that it jammed, and jammed badly. They were convinced that the Americans were giving them junk that the Americans themselves weren't using. That was soon to change.

 ARVN Rangers during the Tet Offensive.  Some ARVN units fought well throughout the Vietnam War including special units such as this.  By Tet, the ARVN on the whole was fighting well and most of its troops were equipped with M16A1s, although you still find examples of them carrying M1 Carbines right to the end of the war.

Coincident with the first ordering of the M16 there were teething problems with the production of M14s.  In retrospect they weren't all that bad and even recent US military history at the time should have revealed that.  There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well.  Production capacity limits meant that the M1903 never was fully replaced during World War Two in spite of a massive effort to manufacture M1 Garands.  During World War One production limits had lead to the as many M1917s being made as M1903s. So this wasn't really new.  More than enough M14s existed to equip the active duty Army and Marine Corps, even if the reserves did nto receive them. But they were practically new.  Nonetheless McNamara had the production of M14s stopped.
This was a monumentally boneheaded move and this alone deserves to rate Robert Strange McNamara as a Department of Defense disaster.  Springfield Armory dated back to the early history of the country, and now it was idled and no M14s were being made.  M16s, on the other hand, were coming in from Colt and would soon be licensed by Colt to other companies as production for the Vietnam War heated up.  It was soon decided to equip US soldiers in Vietnam with the rifle.

Problems rapidly developed, although they were problems the ARVN was already aware of.  The gun jammed and people were getting killed.  The immediate solution was to come out with the A1 variant of the rifle, the M16A1, which featured a large plunger that struck the bolt to close it in an emergency.  This didn't solve the problem but it did mean that there was at least the hope of not getting killed if the rifle jammed up in combat.^

 Paratrooper cleaning an M16 in 1966, at which time it was still an experimental arm.

The M16A1 was not well received.  Marine Corps units avoided using it as long as possible  by shifting M14s to units in the field and M16s back to the rear. This went on until the M14s had been withdrawn and they just couldn't get away with it any longer. The Army, being larger, never had that opportunity and so it went right into front line units  The initial results were disastrous as the new weapon locked up like a drum in combat.  People with long memories recalled after the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division ran into trouble with the weapon at Ia Drang in 1966 that the same regiment had experienced fatal weapons jams nearly a century earlier at Little Big Horn due to the copper cartridges used by the Army in the action sticky trapdoor Springfield at that time.
New orders requiring "Tiger" to prodigiously clean the weapon constantly, prodigious lubrication and a switch in powder for ammunition partially alleviated the problem but it's never gone away.  Oddly, the current M4 Carbine is reported to jam more than the M16A5, showing that they both jam, but the carbine inexplicably jams more.  But the M16 has kept on keeping on.
That was in part because in 1968 the Secretary of Defense had Springfield Armory closed for good.
Springfield Armory had been mounting a rear guard action against the M16 ever since it had been introduced.   The M16A1 was standardized in 1967 and the M16 had been ordered to replace the M14 by McNamara at least two years earlier.  So the United States lost a manufacturing capacity for small arms, by the military itself, that it had since 1777.
A private industrial concern
The closing of Springfield Armory, the replacement of the M14 by the M16, and the utilization of a private contractor for the first time in the nation's history to supply all of the nation's small arms need created a situation that was unprecedented.

Prior to the M16, the US had never had to rely solely upon private industry for the supply of muskets or rifles.  Privately produced longarms had existed before, of course, but never without the Government itself making the established standard longarm.  Privately produced longarms were the exception to the rule, sometimes a huge exception to the rule, but an exception.  As noted, this wasn't the case for handguns and that would soon prove to be the model for what would next occur.
Just as it had never been the case that the nation had been without a longarm manufacturing arsenal, it had also not been the case for years that a major private manufacturing plant was left making a military model of weapon with only one customer, the military end user.  It had happened before during wartime of course.  Various companies had made M1903s, M1s and M1 Carbines, amongst other weapons, for the U.S. Government during wartime.  But the last instance of this happening had been during the Korean War when contracts for M1 Garands had been put out. Granted, that had not been a long time prior.
Colt, for its part, had a spotty history with longarms and was really a handgun manufacturer.  It had tried to introduce longarms from time to time but rarely with any kind of success.  Suddenly, however, in the early 1960s it found itself owning a longarms that was in sudden demand by the US. Soon thereafter, it owned the rights to what was now the standard US rifle, the first time in history that a private company had been in that position, although it must not have been a sole manufacturing right given the later history of what occurred.  The M16 would prove to be an economic boon to Colt.
Colt had always had the policy of selling the same models of pistols it manufactured for the Service to civilians. This had long been its custom. And indeed, it was often the case that a newly adopted military model was available to civilians slightly before it was delivered to the military.  With that being the history, it's no surprise what happened next.  In 1964 Colt started manufacturing the rifle for civilian sales as the AR15 Sporter.
That shows how vast the production capacity of Colt really was at the time.  Colt was fulfilling military orders for the M16 and yet was still able to manufacture AR15s for civilian sales.  Having said that, the AR15 received a bit of a mixed civilian reception at the time.
It had been a very long time since a major American firearms manufacture had offered the pure military version, nearly, of a military longarm for civilian purchase and it had never been the case that an American manufacture had offered what was the primary military longarm for civilians sales. That's a bit nuanced, however, as Springfield Armory had been the manufacture of that weapon since 1777 and it had done that on a periodic basis.  Springfield Armory offered a customized sporting version of the Trapdoor Springfield rifle to soldiers (officers were the primary customers) in the 19th Century and it had sold M1903s to civilians in various versions from 1903 until 1939.  Target variants of the full military M1903 were the most common to be sold by Springfield Armory to civilian customers but actions were also commonly sold for sporting rifles.  This, we should note, mirrored the sales of DWM in Germany which sold full military G98s, as well as a lot of sporting variants, to target shooters throughout the long history of the production of that rifle.  Following World War Two, when the M1 Garand became required for National Match shooting, it sold accuraized M1 Garands, as well as conventional used Garands (and other older rifles) to civilian customers.  When the M14 was introduced it sold a very few National Match M14s to civilian customers.
But there had never been a time when the primary military longarm was solely being manufactured by a private concern and that private concern offered the rifle, almost, for civilian sales. That was new. The closest thing that had occurred prior to that was military versions of longarms made by private manufacturers that were not official US weapons, such as musket versions of the Sharps .45-70 rifle, but which were sometimes adopted by states for their National Guard (New York in that case) or, more recently, private manufacture of M1 Carbine versions after World War Two (and up to the present day) by small manufacturers.
When Colt introduced the AR15 Sporter, as noted, civilian shooters were mixed in their opinions about it, and this continued for an extremely long time. There was no obvious use for it other than it being a giant plinker, which is the primary use it received.  At the time, the .223/5.56 cartridge was not legal for big game in very many places and the AR15 did not have a reputation for accuracy or reliability.  One of its primary drawing points, frankly, was that it was a military weapon and it appealed to individuals (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this) who liked military style weapons.  Even at that, however, quite a few true rifleman shunned the weapon and associated it with poor design and questioned whether a weapon that was a semi automatic variant of an assault rifle was really a rifle.
It dominated the .223 field however until Ruger introduced the Mini14 in 1973.  Even that event, however said a lot about how the AR15 was viewed, as Ruger chose to  introduce a rifle that looked, and was named, a lot like a miniature version of the beloved M14 rather than one that looked like the Stg44.  The Mini14 nearly supplanted the M16 in the Marine Corps, however, as the Marines, which never liked the M16, took a serious look at replacing the M16 with it.*****  As a commercial offering Ruger, however, reflecting the views of its owner, refused to offer the firearms with more than a five round magazine, in spite of losing sales on larger magazines to after market manufacturers^^
The M16 wasn't replaced, of course, and is with us still.  Accuracy of the rifle improved enormously with later variants and it isn't the rifle it was during the Vietnam War in a lot of ways.  And the AR15 is still with us as well.
At some point, the M16 went from being the only thing in its niche to absolutely dominant in the American firearms world.  How it happened isn't really clear, but it's happened.  Even though the rifle has never been reliable it's now enormously common and it virtually sucks the air out of the room to a certain degree.  Whereas in the 1970s a firearms store that sold Colt handguns would have one AR15 in the rack, now nearly any sporting goods stores selling firearms has rows of AR15 type rifles, although they aren't Colts.  Colt has been troubled for years and it no longer offers civilian AR15s for sale on a exclusive basis. There are leagues of other manufacturers and Colts are by far not the most common.  The rifle not surprisingly entered the target world when it was finally required to be used for standard National Match over the M14, it no longer being possible to pretend the M14 was the service rifle, but it has also entered the game fields in large numbers.  The process is mysterious, but very real. A person can't pick up any of the gun magazines without having to thumb through pages of M4/M16 knock offs in the advertisements and articles.
Now, saying anything bad about the AR is dangerous.  One writer lost his employment when he criticized the AR in 2007, stating the following:

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them "assault" rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them "terrorist" rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are "tackdrivers."

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I've always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don't use assault rifles. We've always been proud of our "sporting firearms."

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries [sic] and woods.

Now that writer probably hadn't thought out what he was writing at the time (and note, I'm not endorsing it) but his opinion was a lot more widespread than people might believe.  Back in the 1970s, before AKs (other than Vietnam War prize rifles, which did in fact exist at first) were around, older riflemen expressed similar views.  My own father was of the opinion that the AR15 was for one thing and one thing only, "killing people" and disdained them.  A career Army man who in retirement worked as a highly knowledgeable gun salesman locally openly disdained the AR15 and discouraged people from buying the one his store was required to carry in a the rack, a view that was followed by everyone else in the store including the owner.  Something really changed in regards to the AR following the 1980s, and I'm not sure what it was.

 U.S. Marines training in Iraq in 2004. This Marine is armed with the M16A2, a version of the M16 that was designed by the Marine Corps itself and then adopted by the Army.  The rear sight is completely different from that of the old M16 and M16A1 and the forearm is much stiffer. The barrel is also much heavier.  The M16A2 came about after the Marine Corps determined that Ruger could not supply it with adequate numbers of Mini14s and that it was stuck with the AR.  It is a hugely improved version of the M16 and is really the rifle people think of today when they think of the M16.

Other than that with the M16A2, a Marine Corp designed version, the rifle actually became truly accurate.  Indeed, for the type of rifle it is, its highly accurate.  Nearly all of the AR fans who decry other .223 semi automatic rifles for being inaccurate only have experience with the M16A2 and later versions, rather than the M16A1 which had lackluster accuracy and was flimsy. The M16A2 was a huge improvement and the manufacturers of AR type rifles followed suit.  That surely explains some of it.
Beyond that, however, it must be the old Winchester noted "sex appeal" of the rifle that drives at least a fair amount of sales and its unacknowledged but clear status as the king of the range plinkers.  M4 carbine variants are all over the place even though the military problems with the M4 are legion.  Indeed, the service has been struggling with how to replace the M4 with a larger caliber rifle for years, and its only a matter of time before it occurs.
No matter the problems, there are seemingly endless varieties of M16 and M4 knockoffs now.  Even Ruger, Bill Ruger now long gone, offers a M4 type rifle along with its Minis.  Every gun magazine features page after page of AR type rifles now chambered in big game cartridges in what is sort of the return and revenge of the AR10, even though going afield with a rifle as cumbersome, complicated and bulky as that when after a  member of the Cervinae genus is really not the best choice.  And even now and then some kid shows up with a AR look alike for a 4H .22 shooting practice until the awkwardness of the design for that replaces it with something more conventional.
So, after all of this, am I endorsing the view of the writer above and demanding that sportsmen turn in their ARs?  No, I"m not.  Indeed, National Match shooters can't, even as they find themselves repeating history by shooting a target variants of a rifle that' no longer the combat standard, as the M4 is (and can't be made into a target rifle).

 U.S. Army soldier armed with the M4 Carbine, which has replaced the M16A5 as the frontline longarm.  It's still an AR, even tall tricked out with optical sights and doodads.  Oddly, the M4 jams more frequently than the M16A4/A4 although nobody has ever been able to determine why.  It's also less effective with its shorter barrel.  The adoption of it as the standard combat longarm is due to pure fadism in the service and nothing else.

But I am noting a few ironies, and do have a bit of a plea that will be like casting dust to the wind.
The irony is that the M16 as originally introduced was junk, and now its much improved junk.  It only became what it was as a Secretary of Defense who was wrong about nearly everything gutted the Army's ability to produce rifles for itself, and when that occurred it left manufacturing of the new service rifle with Colt, which had always had a business model of also offering for civilian sales whatever it was making for the service.  If the traditional model had been followed, the service would have acquired full rights to the M16 (and it must have acquired some) assuming we adopted it, and Springfield Armory would have been making them by 1968, along with supplemental civilian purchases.  It's somewhat doubtful that, if that occurred, any civilian manufacturer would have been allowed to introduce the AR15 or anything like it.  Indeed, I highly doubt it.  And given as it took years and years for the AR to take on the dominant status it now occupies, that may very well have never have happened.  Indeed, I doubt it would have. Today Springfield Armory would stil have been making M16s in something like the M16A5 variant, I doubt the M4 would ever have occurred, and maybe the Government would have licensed somebody to make a National Match variant, or maybe not.
So, in a weird way, the Vietnam War created the current situation in which a substitute for Air Force perimeter guards in a rainy Asian land became "America's Rifle" and the subject of some raging debate.
And my plea, or comment I guess, is that frankly, the ARs, to include the M16 and the M4, just aren't all that.  They're a problem weapons that has managed to really stick around, just like the the Trapdoor system of the late 19th Century but more so.  Running down Rugers or the like really doesn't cut it.  It is accurate, to be sure, but it isn't the end all and be all of anything, let alone the various .223s out there.  Plenty of bolt action .223s beat the AR in the game fields any day.  The old Minis plink just as plinkish as the ARs do, and work every time.  On the target range for its class, however, the AR is very good.
And beyond that, and here's the part that people causes debates and for which even somebody whose views on gun control hardly match the banners, are sort of shunned for saying, there's a real shift that's occurred over time reflected by the ARs.  Racks of tacticool ARs are at every gun store but why?  That wasn't the case some 30 years ago or so.  What's that mean?
It may mean nothing more than they are fun and easy to shoot, and on the range the functioning problems aren't much of a problem.  Or it may mean that a fascination with combat weapons, or at least that particular combat weapon, has spread from a niche category of shooting fans who were nearly like engineers in their view of that category of weapons, fascinated by mechanics, to some other sort of less technical fascination.  Certainly there's something to that as its not hard to find gun magazines that feature monthly articles on tactical shooting, even though that's something that has to be trained into proficiency, not read into efficiency.  As I noted much earlier on this blog, the United States, recent horrific events aside, is at an all time low in regard to violence and the chances of any one person needing to engage in tactical shooting with a carbine here is really low.  Maybe that's part of it.  Men, and it's mostly men, crave manly things, and the era when a huge percentage of men had military experience is over.

Not that I'm arguing that they should be banned, or any such thing.  Truth be know, the AR isn't much more advanced than the Remington 08, the Remington semi automatic rifle that was introduced by Remington in 1908 and which only came in a carbine form.  And like the AR, its virtues (and it had plenty) were a bit oversold too.
At the end of the day here, this post is about letting a little air in the room.  The current focus on the AR is just as overblown as Remington's suggestion that that hunter is going to survive his encounter with that bear.  Indeed, that poster is the subject of an amusing parody in which you see his hat flying off the cliff, he's gone, and the bear is going around the corner.^^^
___________________________________________________________________________________
*They include:

Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Packing Heat

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. Looking Again.

**The M16, in its selective fire military form, is probably an assault rifle, although early on it was sometimes referred to as an automatic rifle, which isn't quite the same thing.  Defining the term has always been extraordinarily difficult, but generally it means a selective fire rifle, fulfilling the role of rifle and machinegun, which fires an intermediate sized cartridge.  The Stg44 was the world's first assault rifle, coming out in the early 1940s in German production and made in creasing numbers until the end of World War Two.
***A battle rifle differs from an assault rifle in that it fires a full sized cartridge and may be semi automatic or selective fire, at least by some definitions.  The Belgian FAL is perhaps the most famous example of a battle rifle, with others being the M14 and the German G3.  The AR10 may have been a battle rifle or perhaps an assault rifle, depending upon how a person views it.
****This was actually the second military contract for the AR15.  Malaysia had contracted to purchase them in 1961.
^One of the designers who apparently came to the conclusion that the AR had real problems was its own designer, Eugene Stoner, who went on to design a new rifle featuring many of the AR's better features but abandoning its problematic gas system.  That rifle became the AR18.  Armalite introduced the gun to the market in 1969 but it never had the manufacturing capacity to really effectively market it and it was already competing against Stoner's own earlier invention, the AR15.
The AR18 has usually been passed off as a project to market an assault rifle to poorer nations, but that has to be baloney.  It was not any more mechanically simple, and therefore should not have been any more expensive to manufacture, than the AR15.  It was considerably more conventional in design, however, and completely abandoned the AR's direct impingement gas system in favor of a piston.  It also abandoned the AR's high line of sight which had come about due to the feeling that this would reduce recoil in the larger caliber AR10. That has always been a problem with the ARs and has only bee addressed very recently as the M4 went to optical sights and the upper carrying  handle, which is the support for the rear sight, has become detachable. 
The AR18 failed to secure any major military contracts although there were small military sales to some nations and police forces.  The US Army actually evaluated it but didn't want to buy yet another 5.56 rifle, which would seem to have been obvious.  The weapon obtained some infamy, however, as it was popular (along with AR15s) with the Irish Republican Army which liked it enough to give it the nickname "the Widowmaker".  A civilian version was offered in the form of the AR180 but it received little interest.
*****The Mini14, in spite of being constantly slammed by the fans of the AR15 actually came close to supplanting it, although the details are hard to come by.  My information from it comes from a fellow who was involved in Marine Corps procurement at the time, although you can pick up bits and pieces of the story elsewhere.
That the Marines never liked the M16 is well known.  They approached Ruger directly about acquiring Mini14s to replace the rifle and the only thing which kept it from occurring is that Ruger was engaged in a major overseas contract at the time and lacked the production capacity to fulfill a Marine Corps order.  So the Marines gave up and went on to design the M16A2 to fix the accuracy problems of the M16A1. The M16A2 went on to replace the M16A1 in the Army and Marines and the M16 in the Air Force.
Minis actually have a notable military record, but AR fans hate to admit it as it means that a rifle that looks so much more, well, World War Two, competed and still does with the AR.  It equipped the Bermuda Regiment, in a selective fire variant, of the British Army and selective fire variants are used by Philippine paramilitary police.  British police also have used it in the past and the French produce their own selective fire variant for their police.  Various orders are believed to have gone here and there in shipments that the US doesn't really want to track back to the US military.  It was widely used by US law enforcement personnel at one time, but that has very much declined in favor of the AR in recent years.
^^Bill Ruger was castigated by some in the firearms community for that view at the time.  Now there'd be absolute riots on this statement. His view wasn't uncommon at the time.  Just as there are those who regard any such statement as traitorous to firearms users today, at the time there were a fair number of people who believed that firearms manufacturers, like Colt, who offered weapons that were so clearly military were undermining support for civilian firearms owners.
^^^After all of this I'll confess that a couple of years ago I was walking through a sporting goods store and came upon an AR in the M16A1 configuration made by somebody other than Colt.  I was surprised but actually looked at it, and found myself being nostalgic about it.  No, I didn't buy it and I'm not going to buy the Colt "retro" AR15 made in the M16A1 configuration either.

Anyhow, I never liked the M16A1 when I was a Guardsmen and hardly any of the guys I served with did either. The Vietnam veterans in our ranks, and there were a lot of them, openly disdained the rife.  It's a powerful demonstrator of the nature of nostalgia that a guy like me, who had no love for any AR, would actually stop and admire an old M16A1 type one.  The power of the longing for lost youth I suppose.  A lot of people must feel that way, as why else would Colt be offering one in the M16A1 configuration?

Wow, this is a long thread, eh?

Okay, picking back up, what's the point?

Well, I disagree with the blogger whose blog I quoted above that there's "ABSOLUTELY ZERO" civilian or sporting need for this type of rifle, and in the current debate, it is actually usually the AR15 that's spoken of.  Prior to that it was the AK47 type rifle, which is actually subject to a bit of a different debate.  I'm not, I'll note, an AR fan (if you read the above you are already aware of that) but there are legitimate uses for one.  An entire class of target shooting uses only AR15s and they are target shooters.  A second and third class see them predominate.  And there are a lot of other sport shooters who use them.  

None of that completely answers the bloggers question, however, as if these are weapons of war, which they indeed were and are, and if their design was for killing human beings, which we've addressed above, and if they're particularly suitable for that, her question could easily be modified into a balance of values one.

Now, right there, quite a few shooters would start to yell at me, but then when I said there were legitimate civilian uses quite a few banners would.  This isn't a simple topic. So let's go on.

What seems to be little noted, and I'm only noting, not commenting on, is that what has really changed over the years are two things. There's become a weird glorification of violence that attracts a sort of violence admiring clan, some of whom have an exaggerated love of military violence.  And magazines are now much more common than they once were.

Eh?  Like Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue?

No, rifle magazines.  Or rather military type magazines.

Without lots of magazines these rifles are just rifles for the most part.  It's odd that the people who would seek to address the instrumentality don't focus on that.  Indeed, I've long wondered why the suggestion isn't to serial number the magazines to the rifle and allow a person to have only one or two magazines so serial numbered.  Indeed, that woudl be a much easier thing to do in reality than actually try to band the zillions of such rifles and carbines that there are.  

Not that I'm suggesting this as a cure myself.  Indeed, I don't know if that's Constitutional.  It might not be.  I'm sure if it was tried, that would be tested.

But circling back, somehow or another we produced a generational definition in the 1960sl that flowered in the 1970s that we were all about ourselves.  Following that, we produced technologies that rendered the some of us completely marginalized.  So we've produced a generation of people that has no values and nowhere to go.  Some take their own lives.  Some just become lost.  Others lash out.  And we don't seem to grasp that we've done that.

Che Guevera.  If you know anything about him, you'll know why he's posted here.

Lex Anteinternet: Legislatures. Back to the future and other diversions.

Lex Anteinternet: Legislatures. Back to the future and other divers...: 

Legislatures. Back to the future and other diversions?

A scene from the early 1970s Wyoming legislatures at the Hitching Post?  See below.

Former Wyoming Legislator Tom Lubnau, who was truly one of the great ones in the old school Wyoming way, has taken up writing columns for The Cowboy State Daily. That's to the CSD's credit and shows its effort to become a real electronic journal, something that's impressive considering it was set up as a right wing organ.  Lubnau is a conservative Wyoming Republican, but a conservative Wyoming Republican, something that's becoming increasingly rare.  

Or maybe not.

He's not afraid of poking at the wolverine.

He recently wrote this interesting item:

Tom Lubnau: Legislating Private Parts Is Popular This Legislative Session

This op ed is written from the point of view that virtually defined Wyoming Republicans for my whole adult life, up until the Obama/Trump Era, when things began to get really radical in the legislature.

His article is illuminating and I'm linking it in for several reasons.

One of those is that Lubnau give a really nice discussion of the law as it used to be, on some of the same topics that I addressed here:

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

I note this, in particular, from his article:

During the formation of the state, Wyoming statues on morality were very strict.  The 1910 Wyoming Statutes took a very strict view of what happened between adults in the bedroom.   Let me share an example, but if you are easily offended, quit reading. 

Quit reading now.  But, if you are still reading, remember this is the actual text of Wyoming law from §7206 of the 1910 code:

Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, by having carnal knowledge of a man or beast: or who being a male, carnally knows any man or woman through the anus, or in any other manner contrary to nature; and whoever entices, allures, instigates or aids any person under the age of twenty-one years to commit masturbation or self-pollution, is guilty of sodomy, and shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary not more than five years or may be imprisoned in the county jail for not more than twelve months.

This statute was repealed and replaced in the  disco era when the State of Wyoming determined that whatever happened in people’s bedrooms was no one’s business. 

I guess in thinking about it, I came of age in the Disco Era and that's the law I'm familiar with.  Lubnau is right, the GOP in this state, from the 70s on, really didn't care what you were doing, with whom, behind closed doors, as long as you kept your business to yourself, and it also didn't really care if your marriages broke up, etc., as a result of it, or anything else.  I'd assumed it had long been that way, but as Lubnau's quote from the Wyoming Compiled Statutes, 1910, shows, that's not the case.

I looked it up in the actual 1910 Code, and Lubnau was a little off.  He must have been reading the 1970s vintage codification, or miscited it.  The provison, and those otherwise cited in this thread, were still there in 1957, the last version of the by then much expanded Wyoming statutes I had handy, and they were almost certainly there up until the early 1970s.  In 1910, it was a different statutory section that the cited number (and the number was different in 1957), but here, right from the 1910 book, is what it states.

This is in a section of the statutes on offenses to public morality, and in looking at it, I found that something else I had thought to be illegal, but couldn't later fine, was in fact illegal, that being cohabitation without being married.

So, in my earlier statement that I had thought it was illegal, was in fact correct.  It was illegal.

Seduction of minors, keeping in mind that the age of majority, was a crime, but not quite in the fashion modern statutes provide for it, which would now be a species of rape. At the time, seduction of underage women, at least "older" ones, was a misdemeanor, although this raises interesting questions given that women could clearly marry at 18, or younger, at the time. This relates back to the earlier discussion we had, in the threat noted above, regarding Seduction at law.

At the same time, however, Section 5803 of the 1910 Code provide that rape, conventionally defined, was a felony, as well as having carnal knowledge of a female under age 18.  The dual age of majority, long a feature of Wyoming's law, was apparently already there.  Particularly notable, however, is that the law didn't distinguish between rape and statutory rape, they were the same.

It did distinguish between male and female.  A man could not be a victim of rape under the statute, although that would have constituted assault in any event.

Lubnau goes on in his article to comment:

It seems, now, there is a trend to sponsor legislation to invite the State of Wyoming back into the bedroom.

One has to wonder if regulating bedroom conduct is the pressing issue of the day, or if there is some other motive such as creating a campaign issue for the election season, that is driving the legislation.  In other words, how many people do you meet every day whose biggest concern is lack of regulation of private parts? 

Following that, he takes a look at HB 50 (What is a Woman Act) HB 68 repealing the obscenity exception for school, college, university, museum or public library activities or in the course of employment of such an organization, HB 88 making it illegal to “publicly communicate” obscene material, Democratic HB 76, making it illegal to interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion if the fetus is not viable*, or in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother., HB 137 requiring a pregnant mother to receive an ultrasound prior to receiving a chemical abortion “in order to provide the pregnant woman the opportunity to view the active ultrasound of the unborn child and hear the heartbeat of the unborn child if the heartbeat is audible.”

And that's probably not all of these.

They all did fail, fwiw, most failing to secure introduction.  The reasons vary, including procedural, but it might actually show that more of the old style, post mid 1970s Republicans remain in the legislature than might be supposed.  For that matter, however, it might also show that a lot of the populist legislators everywhere, at the state and Federal level, aren't hugely familiar with the legislative process.  In Wyoming trying to advance a bunch of these bills in a budget session, after declaring that you had the strength to advance them, was likely a mistake.

The obscenity one is interesting, as the 1910 Code had a section on that, providing:

The failed proposed statues state:

HOUSE BILL NO. HB0068

Obscenity-impartial conformance.

Sponsored by: Representative(s) Hornok, Angelos, Bear, Neiman, Ottman, Pendergraft, Penn, Rodriguez-Williams, Strock, Trujillo and Ward and Senator(s) Ide

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to crimes and offenses; repealing an exception to the crime of promoting obscenity regarding possessing obscene materials for specified bona fide educational purposes; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 6-4-302(c)(ii) is repealed.

Section 2.  This act is effective July 1, 2025.

And:

HOUSE BILL NO. HB0088

Public display of obscene material.

Sponsored by: Representative(s) Ottman, Davis, Hornok, Penn and Strock

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to crimes and offenses; prohibiting public communication of obscene material; providing a definition; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 6‑4‑301(a) by creating a new paragraph (vi) and 6‑4‑302(a)(iii) are amended to read:

6‑4‑301.  Definitions.

(a)  As used in this article:

(vi)  "Publicly communicate" means to display, post, exhibit, give away or vocalize material in such a way that the material may be readily and distinctly perceived by the public at large by normal unaided vision or hearing.

6‑4‑302.  Promoting obscenity; penalties.

(a)  A person commits the crime of promoting obscenity if he:

(iii)  Knowingly disseminates or publicly communicates obscene material.

Section 2.  This act is effective July 1, 2024.

The abortion bills, of which we have now had a variety, are interesting too, as I ran across the original 1910 statutes on that, which may well have been modified before 1973 (I don't know). Abortion was still illegal in 1973, I just don't know if the exact same text remained until then. In 1910, the law provided:

§ 5808. Attempted miscarriage. 

Whoever prescribes or administers to any pregnant woman, or to any woman whom he supposes to be preg- nant , any drug , medicine , or substance whatever, with intent thereby to procure a miscarriage of such woman ; or with like intent uses any instrument or means whatever, unless such miscarriage is necessary to preserve her life, shall if the woman miscarries or dies in consequence thereof , be imprisoned in the penitentiary not more than fourteen years .

§ 5809. Woman soliciting miscarriage . Every woman who shall so- licit of any person any medicine , drug or substance or thing whatever , and shall take the same , or shall submit to any operation or other means whatever , with intent thereby to procure a miscarriage (except when necessary for the purpose of saving the life of the mother or child), shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars and imprisoned in the county jail not more than six months ; and any person who , in any manner whatever, unlawfully aids or assists any such woman to a violation of this section , shall be liable to the same penalty.

I'm not going to comment on any of these, but I'm only noting that this provides a really interesting example of the evolution of the Legislature, and for that matter a Western legislature that's been Republican controlled the entire time. Republicans of the 70s and 80s would have a hard time recognizing the party today if they hadn't been there for the evolution.  I suppose that's true of the Democrats then and now as well.

I'm also noting it as I earlier quixotically argued that the heart balm statutes and accompanying provisions ought to be restored.  Lubnau has gotten into the weeks and found one of the statutes of that era that I didn't address, §7206 of the 1910 code.

Going back to that code, a fair amount of it would be unconstitutional today, as the United States Supreme Court had found that the sodomy provisions are contrary to some vague unwritten stuff in the penumbra of the Constitution having to do with privacy.  "Privacy" doesn't actually appear in the text of the Constitution.  The last crime noted, and the one about animals, is probably still capable of being illegal, and actually the last one, which would have to do with adults in relation to minors is probably actually still illegal elsewhere.  To some degree, with this statute, you have to read between the lines, but to some extent you do not.  The law basically criminalized anything contrary to nature, and it was pretty clear that there was an accepted concept of what nature, in this context, meant.  Frankly there still really is, although now, save for minors and "beasts" we license it societally.

The provisions on rape and abortion could probably have just been left alone, keeping in mind that abortion was legalized under Roe, and then taken back to the state under Dodd's.  Had that been all left untouched, the law would arguably have been clearer now than it is.  Interestingly, the statute drafters of that era tended to use an economy of words which tended to make their intent quite clear.

What about the statutes pertaining to "heart balm" and, well, sex?

Today's legislature of the Freedom Caucus variety, all over the country, clearly looks backwards to restoring society to what they imagine it was. This actually shows what it was.  And not just that, but the statutes regarding divorce as well.

Let's look once more.

"Shacking up" was illegal.  Given the present state of Constitutional Law, I doubt it could be made illegal (I'm quite certain it couldn't be).  Would the social warriors be game for trying?

This concept, quite frankly, underpins everyone other one regarding marriage.  It was designed to prevent what the 1910 statues called "bastardy" and the burden it created on society, and it grasped what marriage really was.  For that reason, quite frankly, I'd be for its return (although as stated, I don't think it can be under the current interpretation of the Constitution.  Those populist right-wingers who would not go that far, probably ought to reconsider their positions on things

Those who would be horrified by such a proposal, and frankly that's probably most people now, ought to reconsider their support for populism, if they are populists.

And then there is this:

Would the legislature of today go that far?  Again, this is clearly unconstitutional under the current law, and it would in fact outlaw homosexual conduct, as well as a bunch of non-homosexual conduct.  Presumably no modern legislature would be comfortable with what the pre 1970s Wyoming legislature, and pre 1970s Wyoming society, was in this era.  Probably nobody ought to be, as this is really invasive.

What about divorce, the subject that the other thread was sort of on, and this one sort of is on as well, and which again gets to the heart of the topic.

Ealier in the state's history, the legislature barred remarriage within a year, which is signficant if we consider that cohabitation without being married was flat out illegal.  The 1910 statutes provide:

§ 3951. Remarriage prohibited within one year . 

During the period of one year from the granting of a decree of divorce , neither party thereto shall be permitted to remarry to any other person . Any person violating the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of a mis- demeanor , and shall be fined in any sum not less than twenty - five dollars nor more than one hundred dollars , or be imprisoned in the county jail not exceeding three months , in the discretion of the court.

Frankly, I'd think this a worthwhile provision and it likewise, like the staute on cohabitation, ought to be restored.

Going from there, I'd note that in 1910 the statutes on dissolving marriages started off iwth annullement, which is now an afterthough in the statutes.  It wasn't theen, and was relatively extenisvely addressed, indicaditng that hte drafteres thought that a more likely event, potentially, then divorce.

Divorce required cause, those being:

§ 3924. Causes for divorce . 

A divorce from the bonds of matrimony may be decreed by the district court of the county where the parties , or one of them reside , on the application of the aggrieved party by petition , in either of the following.cases : 

First - When adultery has been committed by any husband or wife . 

Second - When one of the parties was physically incompetent at the time of the marriage , and the same has continued to the time of the divorce . 

Third - When one of the parties has been convicted of a felony and sentenced to imprisonment therefor in any prison , and no pardon granted , after a divorce for that cause, shall restore such party to his or her conjugal rights . 

Fourth - When either party has wilfully deserted the other for the term of one year . 

Fifth - When the husband or wife shall have become an habitual drunkard . 

Sixth - When one of the parties has been guilty of extreme cruelty to the other . 

Seventh - When the husband for the period of one year , has negected to provide the common necessaries of life , when such neglect is not the result of poverty, on the part of the husband, which he could not avoid by ordinary industry . 

Eighth - When either party shall offer such indignities to the other , as shall render his or her condition intolerable . 

Ninth - When the husband shall be guilty of such conduct as to constitute him a vagrant within the meaning of the law respecting vag- rancy . 

Tenth - When prior to the contract of marriage or the solemnization thereof, either party shall have been convicted of a felony or infamous crime in any state , territory or county without knowledge on the part of the other party of such fact at the time of such marriage . Eleventh - When the intended wife at the time of contracting mariage, or at the time of the solemnization thereof shall have been pregnant by any other man than her intended husband and without his knowledge at the time of such solemnization . [ R. S. 1887 , § 1571 ; R. S. 1899 , § 2988. ] 

 Evidence was required:

§ 3947. Corroborating evidence required . 

No decree of divorce, and of the nullity of a marriage, shall be made solely on the declara- tions , confessions or admissions of the parties , but the court shall in all cases require other evidence in its nature corroborative of such declarations , concessions or admissions . [ R. S. 1887 , § 1597 ; R. S. 1899 , § 3011. ] 

§ 3948. Proof of adultery insufficient when . 

In any action brought for divorce on the ground of adultery , although the fact of adultery be established , the court may deny a divorce in the following cases: 

First - When the offense shall appear to have been committed by the procurement , or with the connivance of the plaintiff . 

Second - When the offense charged shall have been forgiven by the injured party and such forgiveness shall be proved by express proof , or by the voluntary cohabitation of the parties with the knowledge of the offense . 

Third - When there shall have been no express forgiveness and no voluntary cohabitation of the parties but the action shall not have been brought within three years after discovery by the plaintiff of the of fense charged . [ R. S. 1887 , § 1598 ; R. S. 1899 , § 3012. ] 

Provisions were provided for to restrain and examine the husband during divorce proceedings, but not the wives.

Again, the old law here would work, or at least it would with modification. Would anyone be bold enough to suggest it be restored.

I doubt it, and therein lies an element of built in hypocrisy of the modern populist social warrior.  To really get at the core of this, you have to get to the core of it.  But hardly anyone is willing to even contemplate what that means.

Lubnau has pointed out that, at one time, the laws were much more restrictive in conservative Wyoming.  In the 1970s, the Republican Party, not the Democrats, radically liberalized them.  But not only did the US become much more liberal, all society did as well, for good or ill (probably mostly for ill).  Many of those who carry the banner for a return to what they regard as having been great aren't prepared to go back to what that really meant, but like Dr. Zhivago states in the novel, an operation cutting out corruption, if that's what you are really doing, is a deep operation.  

Put another way, you can't really address these social issues unless you are prepared to go to the very core of them, and that would mean addressing male/female, male/male, female/female "adult" relationships at their core.  The only thing that the populist far right is really willing to do is to address homosexuality in its various expressions. But that's relatively rare, and if you aren't willing to go further, and say that those relationships outside of marriage are wrong, and that you marry once and for life, well then, you really are just pointing fingers.

  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

Our perfunctory favorite couples again.

Footnotes:

* This bill provides an example of  why the Wyoming Democrats go nowhere.  There's no reason for the Democratics here to be the party of death, like they insist on being elsewhere, and bills like this keep moderate Republicans who would cross over from doing so.  This is particularly the case as this bill stands less than 0 chance of being introduced.

Related Threads:

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

Et Ux*: A legal and societal history of marriage

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Courting

Throwing out the puzzle and keeping only once piece.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 2: Common Law Marriages

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Lex Anteinternet: "We are weary".

Lex Anteinternet: "We are weary".: 

"We are weary".

That's a line from Crisis magazine's editor, Eric Sammons, about the Papacy of Pope Francis.

I’m not going to carve sections out of the article, as I will sometimes do, as I try to be constantly conscious of the fact that he is the Pope and deserves respect. Additionally, as Pope Francis tends to be vague, which I think is his nature, not intentional, as Sammons and others like to claim (and in the professional world I've known professionals who were absolute geniuses, but whose instructions were completely impossible to understand) I don't want to be in the position of criticizing something that's magisterial, when I think it isn't.  Indeed, Ed Conte, the Canon Lawyer, regularly puts out statements on his blog, which is linked in here, that people making some specific criticism have fallen into heresy in regard to this item:

What if the Western World is the "special case"?

And it comes in the wake of The Synod on Synodality, which "progressives" in the Church have celebrated but which has been fatiguing in the extreme on the orthodox.  

And given this, Sammons is correct in at least that statement.  Many of us are weary.

Sammons is also correct that to a certain extent many are marking time, that being the old military term for marching in place.  Pope Francis is now quite elderly and there's a sense that we're worn out and waiting for the changing of the guard. This isn't the same at all as wishing somebody dead, which would be gravely sinful, but rather just knowing that we're at the end of things in this Papacy, probably.  The next one is around the corner, one way or another, probably.  Pope Francis is 87 years old.  At 87, as a man, you could pass any day.  Of course, it's not completely impossible by any means that he'll be the Pope for another decade, and perhaps, although it's unlikely, another two.

I think this is true, FWIW, of politics as well.  People have fatigued in a major way of Donald Trump, whom I'm not comparing to Pope Francis, and of Joseph Biden, whom I'm also not comparing to Pope Francis, and are marking time.  As with all of these individuals, there are the ardent supporters and the ardent opponents, whom are not tired, and they are the ones who do most of the talking.  As Sammons notes, however, there are now a lot of people who sort of shrug their shoulders and simply go on. They aren't ignoring things per se, they're simply too weary to react much.

Whether you'd be inclined to react much or not depends on how religious you are, in regard to the Pope, or how political you are, in terms of American politics.

Some, on both sides of the Papacy, react quite a bit.  Most people trudge on. As St. Paul notes, married men have the concerns of the day for their families, and women do as well.  Being assailed by the constant winds of religious storms adds to their burdens, and they close the windows and doors, or mostly do.  Probably a lot frankly did when they received a handout on the Synod on Synodality and saw its childish artwork and cartoon sans serif font.  "Oh great, more 1970s stuff".

The devout, including clerics like on Catholic Stuff You Should Know, will complain that Americans pay more attention to football than religion.  Lots of people note that most Catholics just ignored the Synod process and didn't participate.  Some assert that participation came more from the Catholic left than any other. And indeed, all this is probably true. But fatigue is an element of it.  At the time of the Synod, we were already years into the Francis Papacy and occasionally distressing quotes. The German Church was years into its march into heresy, and nothing was stopping it.  We were right out of COVID 19 when the doors of the churches had been closed.  And now somebody wants us to participate in a Snyodal process?

Most people are just going to ignore that.  Those who don't, are the already fanatically devoted, perhaps temporarily in the case of those without the burdens of making a living and providing for a family.  Some are the tirelessly devout, who are to be admired.  Some of the tirelessly devout, on the other hand, who already were suspicious of Pope Francis, turned their back on him.

And the same with American politics.  People are endlessly weary of Donald Trump and his extremism, and of the extremism of the American left, and have had enough.  For that reason, the current polls, which we already know most people will not participate in, may not mean very much.  The primaries are marching on, and a lot of American voters may simply skip them.  In the end, Biden may stand a better chance than things currently reflect, simply because people detest him less than Trump.

There probably are lessons to be gleaned from all of this, but they're hard to pick up from the inside.  If you are the person leading the charge, looking back to see who has dropped out of it, or never joined it, probably isn't something that you do much.  Those right around you, at the head of the charge, obscure your vision anyhow.  

And, particularly for the elderly, effecting change takes on a sense of impending mortal limitation.  If you don't get your work done, it might never get done.  For Trump and the MAGA, if he isn't reinstalled as President, his movement will fall apart and his goals, whatever they are imagined to be, will fracture into pieces, some irreparably broken. For Pope Francis, if he's attempting to steer the Church in certain directions, and it certainly seems to some extent, with the Synod, he is as to how the Church is structured, if he passes before his hoped for changes are complete, the next Pope may see that they are not in the form which he hoped for.  Pope's after all, are monarchs.

In an odd way, however, there's some comfort for the weary in all of this, particularly for Catholics.  The Pope many feared would make radical changes really has not, and his most controversial act does not change any doctrine. While it does explore things theologically, it does so on the topic of blessings (and is hard to understand for a layman).  Its issuance has made the rise of the African Church manifestly apparent, and that the future lies in that direction, and towards orthodoxy, pretty clear.  Catholics can rest in that the Catholic belief that the Holy Spirit will not allow the Church to fall into error has not been tested and found wanting.

Politically, we have yet to see how things will resolve.  It's scary out there, to be sure.  But perhaps the weariness disguises disgust at a system that's been increasingly failing since the 1980s and needs to be fixed.  Perhaps that will happen as well.

Lex Anteinternet: What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Lex Anteinternet: What if the Western World is the "special case"?: 

What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village.  Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.

Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".

"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.

We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures.  This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings. 

I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.

For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.¹

The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world.  That just isn't the case in this instance.

A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing.  Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true.  That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.

In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing.  Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization.  And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.

We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again.  Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time.  Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.

This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.

Food is a good example.

Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat.  In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations.  Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad.  People took measures they normally wouldn't.

Not everyone did, however.

At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't.  People would starve instead.

Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight.  Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things.  Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.  

As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:

Sergeant Chillum:  Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.

Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?

Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.

This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one.  Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight.  No culture in a state of nature does.

When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people.  When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.

So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.

Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.

Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand.  While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families.  Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well.  Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.

In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio.  Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time.  A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days.  Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.

Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours.  Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game.  There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.

Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:

Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.

Emperor Haile Selassie

Married men, take your wives.  Not married?  Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.

It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true.  Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable.  War provides a pretty good example again.

Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known.  If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder.  Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.  

Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war.  This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.

Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt.  That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go.  Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.

Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time.  The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers.  However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.

So too are much of our current living patters.

Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.

And that's deeply unnatural.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours.  And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses.  In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.

It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:

Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches.  But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated.  What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life.  AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours.  They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.

Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like.  Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor.  Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.

By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s.  Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars.  Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed.  Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period.  The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.

Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice.  Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating.  When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did.  Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.

Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.

Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses.  This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it.  That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured.  While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak.  Secretaries and assistants.  Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses.  One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.

There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature.  Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife".  I've even heard a person refer to herself that way.  Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.

Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.

In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none.  As we earlier posted:

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.¹ And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?

We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear.  We should be looking at how it comes about.

Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.

Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this.  Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks.  It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.

Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .

The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated.  It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual.  It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual.  Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.

Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies.  It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy.  A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will.  As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution.  Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.

It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class.  In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy.  In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.

English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason.  Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease".  Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender.  Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school.  Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to.  Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.

It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.

In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally.  But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis.  People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.

Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution.  We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one.  While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost.  The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating.  Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.

None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.

But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about.  And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.

All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.

And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.

But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in  Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything.  This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.

The evidence supports the contrary.

Which gets us back to our original point.  African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have.  But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.

And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle.  Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about.  We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.

Footnotes:

1.  Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed.  My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.

When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has.  Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change.  The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage.  In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.

Related Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.