There is a gift of fear. People often have a sense about people and situations that they’d often do well to listen to. They might not realize why that person is giving them the creeps, but their subconscious has picked up on a lot of clues and is using fear to warn them. Folks should listen to that.
Yet fear is only as good as the inputs you give it. A lack of knowledge about something could create fear where there’s no need for such a thing.
On the subject of guns, gun rights, and gun control, there’s a lot of media hysteria about how dangerous our society might be. They use manipulated statistics to try and stoke that fear. I talked earlier today about how people are convinced mass shootings are happening everywhere, which is one way things are manipulated.
I saw the results of that first-hand on Saturday.
My son and I went to eat at a local restaurant with some friends. We sat outside because it had been cool, so the inside was crowded, but as we’d just finished a two-hour class on 15th Century Italian longsword techniques–yes, I teach the nerdiest martial art on the planet–we were used to the cool weather.
After a time, as it warmed up a bit more, part of a girls’ basketball team came out on the patio area to sit. These were probably middle school girls, still wearing their jersey from their school–a school from a somewhat nearby town–and their mothers.
Everything went about as you’d expect until the peaceful conversation was shattered.
A car going by was in desperate need of at least some work. That was clear from the ear-splitting backfire that echoed throughout the area.
Everyone jumped, but a second backfire–this one a tad quieter–startled the girls and mothers even further. They got up and started trying to flee inside for the safety of being on the other side of brick walls.
I recognized what was happening and told them it was a backfire.
“Are you sure?” one asked during the pause. My son backed me up and explained that he was a mechanic, so he knows what a backfire sounds like quite well. I told them I was a firearms “expert”–by their standards, I probably am, though I don’t refer to myself as any such thing ordinarily–so they’d understand I knew what gunshots sounded like quite well.
Now, it was a loud backfire, to be sure, and it startled everyone who heard it, but backfires don’t really sound like gunshots. For one thing, when a gun is fired, there’s a kind of ringing that follows. It’s a sound that anyone familiar with gunshots can recognize pretty quickly.
But we’ve lost that as a society. More than that, we’ve lost the assumption that loud noises probably aren’t gunshots.
“Yeah, but that’s because it’s so much more violent these days,” someone will claim, but a quick look at historic homicide rates will show you that no, we’re really not. Not compared to the time when we assumed loud noises were probably cars backfiring and not a mass shooting taking place. The 70s, 80s, and 90s were much more dangerous, yet people didn’t assume that every loud noise was a shooting.
The issue, though, is that media sensationalism doesn’t work if they tell you we’re not in the middle of some grand crisis. They can’t play you, manipulate you, into not just accepting restrictions on your rights, but begging for them if you’re not scared.
For them, a bunch of kids seeing their enjoyment shattered over fears of being shot isn’t a terrible tragedy. It’s exactly what they want. They want people afraid of every loud noise.
And that’s a shame.
We need to rebuild and restore our firearms heritage as a nation, when even the average person knew what a gunshot sounded like because they’d been to the range a time or two, even if they weren’t “gun people.” We need to make sure people have the proper understanding so they know when fear is warranted, even if they opt to not be in any position to do anything about that fear otherwise.
And we need a media that doesn’t try to manipulate and lie to people, to prompt them to jump at shadows, all so they can get their own way.
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