Race is a human construct. At the genetic level, there’s no such thing. We are human beings, homo sapiens, despite different skin tones, hair types, eye shape, height and all the other variations our species enjoys. Men and women can procreate and create fertile offspring no matter our place of birth, and anyone with a few functioning brain cells knows the truth of this. Our diversity is a cultural thing, not a “racial” thing. Only ignorance and fear of “the other” drives the mistrust and often outright hatred of anyone not like us. We are all descendants of African ancestors, more closely related than any of us are likely comfortable acknowledging.
Unfortunately, our ancestors gifted us this innate distrust of anyone not in our tribe. One can imagine how a small hunter gatherer tribe, living a peaceful existence would get their hackles up at the sight of a rival tribe approaching. Fear that these newcomers would be looking to take their food, their land, their women or any of their meager possessions would be a perfectly understandable reaction. And this ingroup bias persists in every one of us today. It creates a powerful us vs. them feeling and we see the impact of it in our daily lives.
I don’t know that anything can be done about it as it’s a part of being human. Education certainly helps and has done a lot toward helping us live together as a society. But it’s not going to eradicate it. At times, our biases are going to result in confrontation and some of those will be violent. People in influential positions, suffering from their own ingroup bias, can radically escalate both the frequency and intensity of the confrontation. In the USA we have seen the tragic results of this misplaced anger and hatred by individuals, who due to their ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, can create unspeakable horror upon their fellow humans. If we can’t defeat our nature, we have no option other than removing the ability to cause such widespread casualties. There just is no other way.
At a minimum, we must remove access to assault weapons by ordinary citizens. The name itself makes its purpose obvious. We don’t need to give hatred the means to assault others in such deadly proportions. We must tie public responsibility to gun ownership. Our rights to own a gun do not trump others’ rights to be safe from said gun owners. We have to succumb to testing, education and registration to be able to drive a car. We need to tell the state that we own a car, register it with the state, and insure it against liability to others. No one argues against these positions. There is no logical reason to not do the same thing when someone wants to own a gun. They have to show they’ve taken the necessary education on gun use and gun safety, they have to get a licence to own it, they have to register it with the state just like their car, and dammit they should have to insure it against liability to others. I am confident these requirements would immediately cause a dramatic decline in gun ownership as it just wouldn’t be worth it. The illegal possession of a weapon should face a serious penalty, just like illegally operating a vehicle does. The use of a weapon in an unlawful way should carry an even more serious penalty.
We really have no choice here. Either we do these things, or we suffer and die at each other’s hands, driven by fear and hatred, and powered by a destructive force no individual should be wielding.
Joe's Blog 