The Madness Of Custom
How we consistently fail to see the obvious because we assume the inevitability of arbitrary things.
Anyone who’s glanced at the USA will know that it suffers from astonishing self-imposed gun carnage. Outside the USA the solution is obvious: don’t let civilians own firearms. Inside the USA, however, the obvious is entirely non-obvious.
Instead, discussion perpetually revolves around the Second Amendment, the so-called “right to bear arms.” And so nothing ever changes, and every single year, year in and year out, over 32,000+ people die from gunshot wounds and an additional 70,000+ or so are injured. That’s more than 100,000 people per year, which is a level of violence not seen even in war zones or unstable states like Afghanistan and Sudan.
If we reframe the debate, the madness becomes instantly obvious. Let’s imagine that the Second Amendment stated that people must be allowed to sacrifice babies in order to ensure a good crop harvest in the year ahead. This isn’t an unrealistic suggestion, as we have records showing that this was indeed the kind of thing a lot of societies did until quite recently.
Now, even if this right to sacrifice babies was a centerpiece of one’s Constitution, and even if one’s parents and grandparents had embraced this right, would we still think it was a clever idea today? Sure, there would always be…
