From Dave Grossman's book
On Killing.
Dr. Stanley Milgram's famous studies at Yale University on obedience and aggression found that in a controlled laboratory environment more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger. The subjects sincerely believed that they were causing great physical pain, but despite their victim's pitiful pleas for them to stop, 65 percent continued to obey orders, increase the voltage, and inflict the shocks until long after the screams stopped and there could be little doubt that their victim was dead. ....
Freud warned us to "never underestimate the power of the need to obey," and this research by Milgram (which has since been replicated many times in half a dozen different countries) validates Freud's intuitive understanding of human nature. Even when the trappings of authority are no more than a white lab coat and a clipboard, this is the kind of response that Milgram was able to elicit:
"I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse.... At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: 'Oh God, let's stop it.' And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end."
If this kind of obedience could be obtained with a lab coat and a clipboard by an authority figure who has been known for only a few minutes, how much more would the trappings of military authority and months of bonding accomplish?
Grossman went on to discuss the ways in which a commanding officer's presence and authority can impel his troops to make kills which they would not otherwise make, but I veered off onto a (hardly original) tangent of my own and got thinking about the many ways in which Milgram's research explains the evil that was Hitler's Germany, that was Stalin's Russia, that was Pol Pot's Cambodia. I've always marvelled at the sheer compliance of the masses in such cases, and wondered even more at the ordinary grunts who actually committed most the atrocities.
How could they?
Grossman's thesis is that most ordinary human beings have an inborn and very powerful resistance to killing other humans, and that it takes certain extraordinary circumstances before this resistance is broken down enough to enable one ordinary person to kill another at close quarters. You would think that with such a thesis, the book would be encouraging for the future -- but it's actually very bleak indeed, especially in light of Milgram's research.
If the government chooses to misuse and abuse its powers, what does Milgram's research say the ordinary grunt will do in response? Will he obey unlawful orders? Will ordinary citizens comply and cooperate with men in uniform?
I see no reason to believe they will not.
Worse than that, one of the recurring themes in literature (at least in the literature I read) is the beauty and power of taking responsibility for one's own actions and one's own choices. From Voltaire to Gandhi, from MLK to Andrew Jackson to e.e. cummings, from Emerson to Thoreau to Swift to Solzhenitzen, from Kepler to Abraham Lincoln to Spurgeon to Mark Twain to Bertrand Russell and Orson Scott Card, it seems to me that nearly every author who ever set pen to paper and nearly ever orator who ever mounted the podium has lauded the value and virtue of nonconformity.
And yet, it suddenly occurred to me that the very prevalence of these glowing words is pretty darn depressing. You don't, after all, often encounter people lauding the commonplace. Nor is a soldier decorated for doing merely what is expected of him. Such laurels are for those who do the extraordinary ... which leads me to the depressing (but again, hardly original) conclusion that if-and-when, it'll be the majority against a tiny minority; and of that minority, a predictably large number will lose their zeal when faced with nothing more than the
disapprobation of the crowd.
For all those reasons, if the order to round up guns is ever given, foot soldiers who refuse to obey it are going to be few and far between.
And let's talk about common gun owners. What will ordinary gun owners do? Looking at what gun owners are by and large doing right now, I see no real reason for optimism.
A lot of gun owners don't even vote, for apathy. Or because they think it "won't make any difference."
Sometimes they even vote against freedom, because they want to demonstrate that they aren't "one issue voters," or because the legislation suggested is just a "common sense safety measure" and the voter thinks it "won't affect me."
Some gun owners tell other gun owners not to vote for the best, most RKBA candidate -- because the best candidate has "no chance of winning." Well, duh. If all the people who really agree with the best candidate, waste their votes on someone else instead, the best ones never will have a chance.
Gun owners won't even show up at political protests to carry signs, or write to their local papers, for fear of "getting on a list somewhere."
They won't put RKBA bumper stickers on their cars, unless the sticker is so subtle that no one but a fellow gunnie would get it anyway -- for fear of "getting a window smashed or something."
Whenever one of our fellow gun owners has a run in with the law, gun owners are quick to denounce the gun owner, and support the unjust law. They do this to show that gun owners are "really law abiding" ... even when the law itself is unjust and wrong.
But it's okay. In the soi-distant future, when the goon squads are coming door-to-door to gather up guns, suddenly all the gun owners in America will grow a set of balls
twice as big as the ones they had before.
Unfortunately, two times zero is still zero.
pax
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. -- William Arthur Ward
