Guns and Poaching

 As the national debate over gun control rages and subsides, the ineptitude of Congress is highlighted and the threat of another mass shooting continues.  The media promotes and thrives in two-sided impasses like this because they can appear fair as well as contentious, attracting lots of readers and knowing the script. You hear the standard arguments on both sides (need I repeat them?), but there’s one argument I stumbled upon that incorporates a larger worldview on the issue of gun violence and tips the scale for me: poaching. I’m not saying it’s the strongest argument, far from it, but it’s one more consideration to throw at the puzzle of gun control, with room for ponderment and debate.

While watching Wild Russia: Siberia, a Planet Earth offshoot at a friend’s house, I noticed how often the narrator Clifford Wells would say the words “endangered” or “critically endangered,” and I couldn’t help think about the reasons why these strange and magnificent creatures were diminishing. Wells cited only  “increased human activity” as the culprit, which could be a lot of things, roads, railroads, mining, pipelines, pollution from construction, but no doubt over-hunting and the use of guns had a part to play. 

Is it possible that proper gun control, say bullet tracing, could put an end to poaching or over-hunting? Is it possible that proper gun control could have prevented the decimation of multitudes of once-thriving species? Would we still have massive herds of buffalo on the Great Plains or packs of wolves in the Ohio River Valley if we had enacted gun control around the time of the Louisiana Purchase? Maybe we should all just blame it on Jefferson.  

Certainly, there are other types of poaching and resource extraction that don’t involve guns that affect the environment just as negatively or worse. Hunting of animals by humans has been practiced for centuries, it’s just the more modern form that has gone awry, whether it’s seafloor dredging, commercial farming, or cutting down bird and insect habitats for paper. There is a sustainable way we need to hearken back to before we deplete all that we cherish.   

It reminds me of a scene from Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, where a purple dwarf star morphs into a DNA repository for all the endangered species of the Universe. The Encyclopod decides to save a sample of human DNA, and Fry wonders out loud, “But I thought you only saved endangered species?” The creature offers a curt “farewell” and brisks away.   

I’ve always thought the world was a better place before guns; fighting with swords and bows, while admittedly more gruesome, is something an adolescent boy obsessed with fantasy and science fiction can’t shake off, but at least it was harder to kill something. You had to really want to do it. You had to be hungry and in need of protein or cold and in need of clothing to hunt down that wild animal for its meat and fur.

For most, it was probably an unpleasant experience or necessary chore, something they didn’t want to do all the time, hence natural population controls. Guns come along and it’s suddenly easier to kill something. Wars become quicker and more widespread, massacres and war crimes more commonplace, and the fate of wild animals and their ecosystems put into question. Guns and the more chilling effects of industrialization are inextricably linked.    

Here is where the media zeitgeist comes back into play. Guns and the fear of guns. People have documented and commented on the negative tone of news stories which always seem to focus on murders and robberies and accidents. You may be a responsible gun owner who goes off into the hills and gets his jollies shooting rounds into beer cans, but the story you hear on the news is “man gets shot in hunting accident.” Or “three die in car shootout” or “kid gets shot in eye by bb gun” or “police shoot man for pulling out wallet.” These news stories happened, but you don’t always hear about the “man who had a safe time with his buddies shooting pop bottles.”

Fear is a multi-edged sword (or mace) in that we fear these horrible news stories happening to us, so we go out and buy guns to protect us from such incidents. “Protect yourself from that cat burglar watching your house.” “Make sure you’re strapped when you walk past that crack dealer on the corner.”  The reason we have so much gun violence in America is because a lot of us are just paranoid and afraid.

There is no question that common sense measures (background checks, owner registry, ammo tracing, limited capacity magazines, etc.) are necessary, and do not restrict the Second Amendment rights of American citizens. The gun lobby, like a lot of lobbies, may be the real reason change has not come. There is plenty of regulation in other industries, but the ones with the most powerful lobbies in Washington, not so much.

I’m for banning certain types of weapons and/or at least making it real hard to obtain those weapons, but for me, the issue lies more deeply in our culture and how we interact as a community.  Are we being friendly, honest and transparent with our fellow citizens, or lying and manipulating to gain constant advantages of power and money? Is the greatest accomplishment in being human the power to dominate and destroy or do we have a softer, nobler and more holistic side?  Does the history of poaching and the extinction and endangerment of thousands of creatures due to unregulated human behavior teach us anything about failing to have gun control?  

I think so.

Print Extinction Level Event

Is anybody else worried about the possible extinction of paperback books? The decline in newspaper and magazine sales is evidence of a disturbing trend that the experience of reading, specifically print media, is dying away. The fact that you’re reading this, maybe on a tablet, possibly on a smartphone, most definitely on a computer of some sort, is a testament to the continued digitalization of media and the decline of what for millennia was the accepted form. Sayonara papyrus reed paper!

The popular rise in tablets and smartphones has predictably cut printing by nearly 10% according to some IT experts. This should make an environmentalist like myself happy, since less paper means less trees and water being used to make it.

However, I can’t shake this dark, dystopian fear of no longer having a paper trail. Editors and publishers could log in, on a market-driven whim or perhaps government-influenced decision, and “misplace” words, censor ideas, or change the identity and meaning of the whole piece. I’m talking about unsanctioned changes by the author, and this would most likely be long after the author is dead; God forbid a living author having to keep checking his online manuscript for the aforementioned errors.

Writing blogs as I do, I’m worried that even my Google docs are at risk. The cloud makes it easier and easier for third parties to solicit high-profile data and influence ideas to make them more palatable to consumers. You could argue this happened before on a much slower time-scale by market research firms, polling surveys and even king’s councils, and perhaps that’s natural for economies and societies to rule themselves, but the speed that this data, which makes internet videos viral and horrible singers pop sensations, is crunched into corporate policy and market trends is unbelievably fast. No single man or woman is above it. Contrast that with the speed that ideas in books spread and you’ll understand the change that our society is in the midst of.

Unauthorized editing already happens in theatre and film adaptations of books, usually to the begrudgment of readers and the fan base. A powerful studio with millions of dollars and lots of influence (look up the MPAA) comes in and says ‘Hey, this lovely, pastoral children’s story needs to be amped up with special effects and action scenes that never existed in the book because we need to sell 3D glasses and movie tickets to kids (and adults) who will never read the book.’ In fact, Hollywood, and it’s little sister television, is arguably responsible for the low levels of readership in America, contributing to the sad statistic that 20% of Americans did not read a book last year.

Perhaps it’s just paranoia and maybe I read too many books like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 as a child, but the possibility of unauthorized editing and potential censorship is still there, and the likeliness of it happening even once is very high. To my knowledge it hasn’t happened yet in digital literature, but we likely wouldn’t hear about it if it did.

Putting those fears aside, you can still make an argument that e-books and e-ink are bad for readership habits. Many people find themselves getting interrupted by the urge to surf the web on tablets and computers, and you can’t really lay out on the beach and read without getting distracted by glare, running out of battery, or worrying about sand and water creeping into the crevices of the device. These things can all lead to losing the desire to read for pleasure.

You may be one of those folks that really enjoys their e-reading, and I don’t want to knock you off your high horse, but I think we can agree there are tangible benefits to the experience of reading a paperback or magazine that can never be taken away. As long as future generations of media producers and consumers understand and respect that, and as long as fire brigades don’t go around burning piles of books and superstates don’t invent languages without seditious ideas, then I think the world will be just fine...