I was browsing a web site that had an album of pictures of a recent Police Gun Buy-Back where a group of Caucasian men, most with shaven heads, showed up and tried to buy the guns that the Police were trying to buy back and responsibly destroy. These guys succeeded in buying quite a few guns that otherwise would have been taken off the street.
Following the photo album, there was a comment section and one of the comments struck me like a bolt of righteous lightning. It was an epiphany of sorts. The commenter pointed out that all of the guys trying to buy guns from the responsible citizens in line at the buy-back had “cold, dead eyes”. So I scrolled back up and looked at those pictures again and instead of reading their half-literate signs and trying to make out their license plate numbers, I really looked into their eyes. I mean I really studied them, trying to see the content of their characters, their motivations, their compassion, their person-hood.
And you know what? There was nothing there. There was no humanity behind those eyes. I’m not trying to say I think they were violent or were going to take the guns they just bought and use them in some crime spree. They probably just took them home, lubed them up, gave them clever or endearing names and then sat on the couch with them laid across their laps while taking in a Red Dawn double feature. No, I’m not inclined to think that they are violent, except perhaps in their “Wolverine!” fantasies. Statistics show that most gun-nuts aren’t violent, we can’t deny that. I just mean that they aren’t really like most normal, well-adjusted people.
They’re Throwbacks.
It’s almost like they’re a different sub-species. It’s a given that our species is continually evolving. Home Erectus. Homo Habilus. Homo Sapiens. That’s us, Homo Sapiens. Or, perhaps that’s them, those dead-eyed men clinging to their war clubs.
So maybe they’re not throwbacks, after all. Maybe the species has simply split and we’re just a bit further along the evolutionary path than they are. Maybe they’re the same, and it’s we who are different.
Regardless of whether they are throwbacks or we have advanced a bit beyond them, I think it’s obvious that we’re fundamentally different and while they’re not evil per se, for the good of our society (and our species!) we need to come up with some plans to leave them behind. In a hundred years when our great-great-grandchildren pick up an anthropology textbook, there needs to be a chapter on them like there is a chapter on Homo Erectus with a paragraph explaining how they are a part of our history, gone now, and that we need to understand them in order to understand ourselves, but that we’ve evolved past them.
Please, please don’t misunderstand me – I am NOT speaking about exterminating them! We are not Nazis! I am merely suggesting that we thoughtfully nudge things in a direction which gently yet carefully controls them while simultaneously discourages them from reproducing. This can be done compassionately, and I believe so subtly that most won’t even see it happening.
Just like the measured strategy of registering, criminalizing but grandfathering, and properly educating our young will eventually lead, via attrition, to a gun-free society, so can we implement strategies to phase out these men among us.
Encouraging immigration of more enlightened people is one tool we can use to dilute their proportion of the population. Instilling in them a low-level, even subliminal reluctance to “bring children into this immoral world” is another way to reduce their numbers, easily accomplished by forcing things they consider deviant into their everyday lives. Taxes aimed at socio-economic classes which proportionally contain more of them will, at the margin, limit their resources and their ability to reproduce. Conversely, aiding and assisting the reproduction prospects of enlightened people will have similar results.
In short, we must limit their reproduction and what we cannot limit, we must dilute through breeding. Just as the Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were intellectually out-competed and genetically subsumed by Homo Sapiens Sapiens so must we proceed.
The beauty of this is that it doesn’t even matter if they know our plans! As long as we move slowly enough, and acknowledge their concerns (while simultaneously ignoring them) they will never have enough moral or societal justification to stop us, especially if we ourselves are unrelenting but resolute. If we move slowly, and make it so the only way they can stop us is by physically preventing us from proceeding (i.e. make them use violence) then they cannot stop us, even if they know what we’re doing!
And then one day we’ll look around and there just won’t be any of them around anymore.
You and I must make that long, patient walk to our enlightened future. Quick solutions will not work. If we push too hard or too fast, we will delay our victory. But… if we use our in-born intellect and a patient self-control, we will win.
We must take the long view and not be afraid to stare into the rising sun.
Slow and steady. We must progress,
-Crimson Slip
This essay is also posted at Crimson Slip.