Sam Harris has recently published a new essay entitled “The Riddle of the Gun.” It is, to my mind, a piece of self-serving mythology, and a dangerous one at that. Repeated throughout the essay is the claim that a gun, in the hands of a good person, should be seen to be a clear benefit to society, and that those who think otherwise are living in a dream world. He even has some derogatory things to say about commentators who do not know the proper lingo, who embarrassingly pronounce or spell the names of weapons other than “Colt” mistakenly.
I can only imagine [he writes, with evident relish and pride] the mirth it has brought gun-rights zealots to see “automatic” and “semi-automatic” routinely confused, or to hear a major news anchor ominously declare that the shooter had been armed with a “Sig Sauzer” pistol. This has been more than embarrassing. It has offered a thousand points of proof that “liberal elites” don’t know anything about what matters when bullets start flying.
Harris really should have seen this comment as beneath his dignity, but the evident emphasis he places on it makes one wonder about the impartiality of other things he has to say. And while I know the difference between an automatic weapon and a semi-automatic, and already knew how to spell ‘Sig Sauer’, I wonder whether he really thinks it is important for people to know these things before they may be considered competent enough to comment on the American fixation on guns and gun violence, and its implications for the safety of people in the United States.
I also have some other difficulties with Harris’s way of expressing himself. He remarks knowingly on the perils of dialling 911:
Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.
Why would he put it this way, I wonder, except that something’s being a problem of “physics” seems to make what he is saying more scientific? For the real problem, if problem it is, is not so much a problem of physics, as one of time, geography and possibly personnel. But, surely, for someone to offer an argument about the effectiveness of 911 calls to the police, an important piece of information would be some evidence as to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of 911 calls as opposed to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the use of firearms for self-defence. Harris simply assumes that the evidence will fall out in the way that he presupposes, though he offers no demonstration that this is in fact the case. Does owning firearms pose no danger to the owner at all? And are firearms more effective than other means of defusing dangerously violent situations?
Added to this is the fact that where weapons, especially handguns, are easily accessible in the home, intimate partners or family members are in greater danger than they would be if such firearms were not so readily available. Though I have not checked the statistics, I am going to take Sean Faircloth’s claim at face value, when he says, in his response to Sam Harris, that
[f]irearm assaults on female family members, and intimate acquaintances are approximately twelve times more likely to result in death than are assaults using other weapons.
This is important evidence that Harris simply ignores. Indeed, Harris’s entire article is based more on a fascination with guns, and a personal conviction that he is a responsible gun owner, than on the facts that might be adduced in favour of stricter controls of guns. Indeed, the paucity of evidence used by Harris to argue his case is striking.
Repeated throughout Harris’s article is the belief that in a country so heavily invested in guns it is important for “good people” to have guns, and he considers himself (possibly for good reasons) to be one such good person. This is something that he repeats several times in the course of his article. For instance, he remarks on the remarkable priorities behind sentencing in American courts, and then follows this up with the claim that good people should have guns:
We live in a country where nonviolent drug offenders receive life sentences but a man who rapes a fifteen-year-old girl and cuts her arms off with a hatchet can be paroled for good behavior after eight years (only to kill again). I do not know what explains this impossible distortion of priorities, but given that it exists, I believe that good, trustworthy, and well-trained people should have guns.
I share Harris’s perplexity at a judicial system that punishes nonviolent drug offenders more harshly than those who have acted in such a way as to show violent disregard for the rights and dignity of others, but there is simply a mismatch between what he reprobates and what he approves. For, is it likely that there was anyone with a gun in the immediate vicinity of the unfortunate girl who was raped and had her body brutally maimed who could have prevented that senseless act of violence and brutality?
Besides, speaking about “good, trustworthy, and well trained people” with guns is arguably an incredibly self-serving judgement about Harris himself. As Faircloth says:
Does Sam — or Joe or Jim — think he’s “stable” when he buys a gun? Of course. We all think that. But in the real world — it’s later when the gun gets drawn. Men, often drunk, get in fights. Men, often drunk, become jealous or want to control women. As anger or jealousy boils “stability” and “commitment to safe handling” can change — and do change — often – and often very quickly — into a dangerous and often lethal rage.
To imagine that there is any way to distinguish those people, now stable, who might, at some future date, become unstable and unpredictable, is simply wishful thinking. We do not like to think that anger, jealousy, or drunkenness could ever tip us over into murderous, blind rage, but they undoubtedly can, and where this does happen, there is clear evidence that where hand guns are readily available, the outcome of such rage is likely to be more lethal. Just comparing firearms related death in the United States with places like Australia, where there has been a concerted effort to reduce the number of firearms by buyback and other programmes, or Canada, where firearms control, especially of handguns, is much more stringent, is a fairly clear indication that widespread private ownership of handguns makes it far more likely that one will be killed or harmed by firearms. Death by firearms in the United States is significantly higher than in any other high-income OECD country.
Besides this, Harris uses some obvious rhetorical strategies that do not amount to rational argument:
For instance, it is estimated that 100,000 Americans die each year because doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands properly. Measured in bodies, therefore, the problem of hand washing in hospitals is worse than the problem of guns, even if we include accidents and suicides.
This is such an obvious irrelevance that it is surprising coming from someone who hosts Project Reason: Spreading Science and Secular Values. As Faircloth points out, this is mere rhetorical flummery:
Similar reasoning works like this: “Women are about eight times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than by breast cancer, so all that concern about breast cancer is overblown.” Please. It is entirely reasonable that society can, and should, work to address breast cancer – and cardiovascular disease, hospital hygiene safety (Harris raises this chestnut too) and handguns. The either/or choice is a rhetorical trick, not a reasoned argument.
It is discouraging to see such special pleading used by someone who prides himself on rationality. Indeed, it leaves him — and others who strive to base their world view on reason — open to the kind of riposte used by Andrew Brown who ends his latest diatribe against the new atheism (et hoc genus omne) thus:
The real danger of his kind of atheism is that it replaces fantasies about gods (who don’t exist) with fantasies about human beings, who do. And which is more dangerous: to be wrong about something imaginary or about something real?
It is hard to argue with that, given the borderline paranoid fantasy represented by Harris’s “The Riddle of the Gun.”
Sean Faircloth makes very sure that he pays Harris a debt of gratitude and admiration for what Harris has done for the cause of reason, and I would not want to be remiss in this respect either. I have valued many of Harris’s writings, remembering in particular some of the trenchant good sense of his first two books, The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation. However, I have to add that some of the things that Harris writes have puzzled me. His qualified approval of torture, for example, or his rather remarkable essay on taxes as theft, have left me with more questions than answers. I now add “The Riddle of the Gun” to that number. I have found much to commend in his writings, and even used some of The End of Faith in homilies in another lifetime. I find, though, much unevenness and even carelessness in his work, and while Faircloth extends a hand to him “in undying admiration,” I find my admiration, though still genuine, increasingly qualified.
“For instance, it is estimated that 100,000 Americans die each year because doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands properly. Measured in bodies, therefore, the problem of hand washing in hospitals is worse than the problem of guns, even if we include accidents and suicides.”
This isn’t mere “rhetorical strategy,” but it is the stub of an argument. The argument is that use of our tax dollars should be prioritized to do the maximum good.
Thank you for posting this, Mr. MacDonald.
Sam Harris frustrates me in a lot of ways, and this article more than most. Sean Faircloth’s criticisms are really pertinent… everyone *thinks* they’re a perfectly rational, judgement neutral person, and could be trusted to own a gun. But the whole crux of this argument, and Sam Harris’s whole article, is just “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” And I’m sorry for Sam Harris, but what has he done, outside of write a few books, to prove this is really the case? What, really, can anyone do to show that they would never ever shoot their own wife, or a neighbor, or even just himself? What guarantee can Sam Harris give me to say that he will never have a psychotic break? Knowing how to use a firearm responsibly doesn’t mean *anything* other than that you know how to use a firearm without shooting yourself (and sometimes, not even then). Its not like he’s taking a course in anger management, nonviolent philosophy, and abstaining from alcohol along with that program he describes.
The sad thing is, you know that Harris has encountered plenty of people trying to make very similar arguments in favor of religious thought. “I’m a perfect responsible religious person, I would never be motivated by my religion to do anything bad, which means that religion isn’t dangerous, and shouldn’t be argued with.” I’m sure you see that argument made every single day on atheist blogs, and Harris would probably just laugh at it.
Hi Eric
I agree with all you say about Sam’s pretty dreadful piece, but I must say I find it very easy to argue with Andrew Brown’s words. I see nothing about new atheism (which is no doubt what he means by ‘this kind of atheism’) that leads to Harris’s conclusions on guns, and to suggest there is is a mighty stretch indeed. Perhaps you interpret his words differently, in which case I would be interested to hear it.
To expand, I don’t see that replacing fantasies about gods with fantasies about human beings is more dangerous, since, of course, fantasies about gods end up affecting human beings too, else we would not worry about them. There is an implication, too, that when one fantasy is dropped another necessarily fills its place, which appears to me, on the face of it, untrue.
Sam is an advocate of rationality and no doubt claims to be rational (who doesn’t?), but this is another case where the problem is not a surfeit of rationality, but a deficit. Brown is not telling Harris he should be less rational, is he, so he’s agreeing with what Harris advocates, just not what Harris argues for in this instance. So those like Brown who piously denounce rationalists are not showing anything when they point at those like Harris who fail to reason properly; this is not a gotcha moment for rationalism, just a confirmation that we are all fallible and need to be modest in our claims when we think we are being reasonable but might in fact be falling victim to our prejudices.
Mark, of course, I agree that there is nothing in the new atheism as such that leads to the kinds of conclusions represented by this piece of Harris’s. However, it does not do the cause of reason and humanism any good to have one of the prominent members of the new atheism (which was, as Brown rightly says, originally identified with the so-called “four horsemen”, of which Harris was one) identified with such a poorly reasoned piece. I have scant respect for Brown, so did not consider his article in any detail. Indeed, as you will see, I call it a diatribe. Image, however, counts, and Harris is not a shining image of rationality here, and that detracts from other things that he says, because it will send people back with questions in their minds as to the rationality of other things that he says. Brown, for example, is so hopelessly compromised (in my opinion), that I seldom take anything that he says with any seriousness. As to the rest of what you say, of course nothing that Brown says can serve to justify religious fantasy, nor did I suggest otherwise, but Harris does open himself up to such a riposte, and that is all I do say. I think, though, that this means that Sajanas’ point about religious people being able to use the same kinds of arguments as Harris, becomes an open possibility for those who take Harris as representative of a central strain of contemporary unbelief. “The Riddle of the Gun” unnecessarily weakens the new atheist position, even though it may not be representative of it, simply because Harris was such a central voice in the new atheist surge.
A lot of harris’ writing revolves around the idea that he is surrounded by people out to get him. ( Google ‘Sam Harris self defence’ ) A very strong paranoid streak runs through it. His imagination seems to dwell on the idea of thugs intent on harming him.
If his personal psychological makeup included a fear of germs instead then we might expect a piece on the importance of hand washing.
A few facts – the OECD countries except the US (median; mean)
% homicides by firearms 18.4; 23.4
Number of firearm homicides/100,000 people 0.21; 0.59 (skewed by Mexico)
Number of firearms/100 people 13.5; 16.9
US numbers
% homicides by firearms 60
Number of firearm homicides/100,000 people 2.97
Number of firearms/100 people 88.8
More guns, more homicides by firearms. Not much to quibble about here.
I don’t know why anyone would think having a gun would bolster your personal safety. I have seen in the news here where people who own guns have been killed before they had a chance to draw their weapons and situations where rational guys- i think they are- have drawn their guns carelessly and have even ended up injuring or killing others.
Eric, as you so ably put it, I think this is appalling coming from Sam Harris especially looking at the comparisons he is making. How can one compare a case of poor hygiene in one part and owning a firearm. I don’t get it!
So according to Sam Harris I need to know the different kinds of child pornograpy to be able to mak a rational argument against it.
Right.
I’m not going to suggest that Sam’s argument is the best answer for American society. However for someone who has received death threats, lives with some fear of violent home invasion, and lives in a society where gun ownership is perfectly legal, owning a gun and knowing how to use it seems an objective(!) response to personal circumstances.
However Sam fails to add in the risks of accidental gun discharge, accidental shootings, and the poor gun control exercised by American police. So overall a flawed argument, rational but incomplete, driven by emotions.
Someone with those views in places with markedly lower gun ownership would be seen as a dangerous person. But for the USA, not so much.
Don’t have time to do the links, but the data all show that a firearm in the home is FAR more likely to harm someone in that household than an invading intruder.
In fact, the whole “invading intruder” meme is so fraking tiresome, shopworn, and wrong that it positively angers me. Unless you’re a drug dealer, owe a drug dealer a lot of money, or in some other way have “invited trouble”, your chances of being invaded by an armed robber is practically nil. What is being offered is a solution for which there is not a problem.
It’s anti-rational and anti-empirical bullshit.
Sorry. Should have added FAR more likely to harm someone in that household BY an invading intruder…
A gun in the house does not make you more safe. Period. End of discussion.
> His imagination seems to dwell on the idea of thugs intent on harming him.
Yes indeed. I only had to read one article salted with links to various self-defense gurus (this was a couple years ago, now) to be reminded of one of my old co-workers, who told me in great detail about how he had reinforced all of his doorjambs, found the perfect shotgun load, and picked the perfect spot up on the landing to shoot intruders without any risk to the other people in his home.
Sam Harris has totally lost the plot on this one.
This is very good piece here, Eric.
I really cannot find the rational in trusting everyone on their worst, most muddled day with the lives of as many people as they can point at and pull a trigger, limited perhaps only by ammunition and the response time of authorities. There are doubtless those that can be trusted with the responsibility, but the only gain seems to be entertaining vigilante fantasies. The cost in lives has been clearly demonstrated in many statistics. I have yet to see any tangible benefit at all, and a made up scenario is not a tangible benefit.
Harris has a really bizarre assurance in his moral conclusions in the last few years. This latest piece of his is as far off the rails as I can remember him going. I sincerely hope the trend reverses itself. The Harris I have read from other pieces is much better than this.
Thanks Eric
I don’t disagree with what you say about atheism’s image, and no doubt those antagonistic to new atheism will use Sam’s article, as they have others, to deprecate it. There is more to say on that subject, but that is going a little off topic, and I don’t think that is the thrust of Brown’s piece or the words you quote. Rather, he wants to tar all atheists of a certain kind with the attitude displayed in ‘The Riddle of the Gun’, but, of course, that simply does not follow.
But I don’t want to harp on; much more important for the welfare of the US population, I think, to argue against what Sam Harris writes.
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Harris has put up an FAQ response to Faircloth’s criticisms now. And it seems like he’s still of the ‘gun problems are a problem of not enough guns’ bent. Ugh.
My hope is that one day owning a gun will be seen as just as backwards as owning a slave. Imagine replacing “gun” with “slave” in Sam’s article. Wouldn’t the following logic fit back when slavery was acceptable?
right, Harris is a scientist… crunch the numbers … taking the example of that “unfortunate girl who was raped and brutally maimed” above … how many MORE guns would it take to significantly increase the probability of a successful defense of that girl? i mean, we’re always hearing “how would ‘x’ law have prevented ‘x’ specific case of gun violence (though we all know that the effort to curb gun violence would have to be a multipronged approach of gun control and cultural shift, etc. etc.) from the gun-nutters… so please do tell me how many MORE guns exactly we need to have out there in the hands of the “good” people to prevent these crimes that I’m always hearing would not happen if only more of us were armed. i’d like to know.
It is sad to see such simplistic rhetoric from someone who has published a book on morality.
“I find my admiration, though still genuine, increasingly qualified.”
I’m not sure what took you so long to come to that conclusion. Among other things, Harris has advocated for:
- Torture.
- A first strike nuclear strategy against Muslim nations.
- The right to kill someone simply for their beliefs.
- Gun nuts 101.
On top of that, Harris is exceedingly condescending. If one can’t glean that from this latest piece, you’ll never get it. Harris chides his readers right off that bat for not being adequate thinker, which he is (self-ascribed, of course).
There’s a reason why Harris almost exclusively appears on Fox News. He’s not only a conservative, he’s an extreme conservative. He has successfully cloaked his extremism in a shroud of being the reasonable one in the room. The cloaking device is wearing off though every time Harris opens his mouth. More and more people see Harris for what he is, and that’s a good thing. My hope is that he soon falls off the radar completely and is left only with his fanboy base.
Well, Jerry, it hasn’t taken all that long. Sam has not been high on my radar. Though I read his first book when it came out, I have always had reservations about his work, and found his The Moral Landscape embarrassingly amateur. I already had some concered questions when I read The End of Faith. There was nothing in that book that required him to speak favourably of torture, so he had to go out of his way to do it, and it seemed to me incongruent and unnecessary at the time. So, questions I have always had, but I find now that my admiration (such as it was) wears very thin.
I think Sam’s problem is that he doesn’t understand irony, and has very little sense of humour. What troubles me about the guns thing is that there was no need to give comfort to the NRA, which he has certainly done. He could simply have made a declaration that, for him, personally, having a gun or guns makes sense, but that he recognises that fewer guns would make for a safer America, and that the journey towards that safer America would be reasonable course to take, however long or short.
Instead he comes across as a gun nut unable to see that change, though slow, might be possible, given enough support and impetus from clear thinking people. Indeed, he claims to be such a clear thinking person, and he is unwilling to put his thought, and his public persona, in support of something that might improve the safety of his fellow citizens. That’s deeply irrational, and pusillanimous to boot. He apparently knows that too many guns makes for less safety, but is unwilling to lift a finger to meliorate that situation, so he makes the ridiculous suggestion that more guns in the right hands would make things better!
What I can’t understand about Harris is that he doesn’t seem to be able to put 2 and 2 together. Religion is similarly powerful. The religious lobby is stronger than the NRA ever hoped to be. Why can’t he see that opposing religion and opposing gun violence are very alike so far as the strength of religious and gun lobbies go. The voice of reason in the case of religion told him to oppose religion despite the strength of the opposition, but the voice of reason regarding gun ownership and the dangers involved takes him in a completely opposite direction. This is irrational, and he should be able to see how irrational it is. I get his condescension. I simply don’t get what he has to be condescending about.
Your last paragraph is new to me. I haven’t been following Harris, so did not know about his association with Fox. That comes as a surprise, though, given his evident social conservatism, not all that surprising, I suppose.
A new report from the US National Academies claims that the US has on average 6.5 violent deaths per 100,000 individuals compared to 1.6 for its neighbor Canada. Canada is third highest out of the 16 peer nations included in the report. The high incidence of violent death 70% due to guns contributes to the US having the lowest life expectancy of the group. There are other problems due to inadequate health care and lack of exercise, but guns are still a big issue.
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/CPOP/DBASSE_080393#violence
His comment about handwashing is also specious; you don’t choose a solution to a problem that results in more of that problem, such as guns. He’s claiming that more guns solve murders or assaults in the home – something that is so rare the FBI doesn’t count it – while guns in homes create more than twice as many suicides than there are murders in the US! That’s not to mention the injuries and deaths which are just accidental.
Ugh. It’s like solving one deadly disease with a deadlier one.
Well said. What struck me most about Harris’ essay is the way he so cavalierly used terms like “good guys” and “bad guys” unironically and uncritically. Apparently Harris, despite his amateur efforts at writing on ethics, has failed to internalize a lesson I learned as early as about eight years old: “bad guys” never consider themselves bad and usually their friends and family don’t either.
I came upon this simple observation by asking myself: “Do Darth Vader and the Emperor know they’re bad guys?” I decided that they probably did not consider themselves bad guys. Then my precocious little self took the argument to the absurd: did Hitler consider himself a bad guy?
Maybe, but probably not. He likely cooked up some warped value system in which everything he did was not only justified but done for the greater good.
The point is simply that “good” and “bad” aren’t self-evident or self-explanatory. It is not always clear who is the good and who is the bad guy. The Trayvon Martin case is perhaps not the best example but it’s a decent one. I don’t think George Zimmerman is a “bad guy” but I think he had some warped ideas about what constituted a threat to himself and his community and that caused him to act badly. And I don’t think Trayvon Martin was a bad guy but at this point I think it’s reasonable to conclude that he did escalate the situation to the point where Zimmerman thought it was either himself or Martin — and acted accordingly.
“Good” and “bad” are fantasies we tell ourselves to justify our own actions or to condemn those of others. In the real world there are only conflicting interests and points of view. Any account of the morality of self defense that relies on simplistic — and in Harris’ case, completely undefined — uses of “good” and “bad” is simply not taking the issue seriously. I was very surprised at how moralistic and shallow Harris’ argument here was. The essay was not completely devoid of sense and Harris had a few good points but I was (as I frequently am with Harris’ writing) quite underwhelmed.
I thought Mr. Harris was one of the good guys. I’m so disappointed.
aj… I thought so too, but my reservations are growing.
“His qualified approval of torture, for example, or his rather remarkable essay on taxes as theft, have left me with more questions than answers.”
Any link to the essay where he compares taxes to theft? I’d be astonished if he had written one considering that he thinks rich people should pay more.
Well, Riff, you are more or less right in this, although he does say, a bit cryptically, in “How to Lose Readers (Without Even Trying),” that “I agree that everyone should be entitled to the fruits of his or her labors and that taxation, in the State of Nature, is a form of theft.” It’s the “state of nature” that holds the qualification, and he does say in his essay “How Rich is too Rich?” that conservatives consider taxation a form of theft. It seems to me that, by speaking about the state of nature as he does, that he is, at least sub rosa, suggesting that it is, but that, as things are, such theft might be justified. I would have much preferred a simple acknowledgement that organised societies must provide services, and that citizens must pay for them, and that the only fair way to do this is through a system of taxation. But he studiously avoids saying it quite this clearly. I find this to be a kind of double-speak, which he uses in respect of torture, guns, and, yes, I think so, taxes as well.
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