6PM Wednesday 2nd January 2013.
Guns are scary, powerful, and can kill. Let's acknowledge that
up-front. They're instruments of death, designed to kill things, and
if you're anti-death you're probably anti-gun.
On the other hand, guns are just tools. They're inert, passive
objects, only imbued with purpose and power by their human operators,
and as such no different to a hammer, or a knife, or a car. (This is
the ‘guns don't kill people, people kill people’ argument.)
It happens that both perspectives are true. But the main purpose of a
gun, the reason for its existence, is quite different to that of a
car. A car primarily exists to move people and things about. A gun
primarily exists to punch very traumatic holes in things at some
distance. Cars and guns lend themselves to quite different sets of
purposes.
So let's set aside potential uses – basically anything can be used to
kill, and guns account for only a tiny number of (human) deaths in
New Zealand:
[In New Zealand] around 1,400 people suffer an untimely death from
criminal or accidental causes each year. Firearms typically
contribute to around 6 of those. That’s fewer than the number who
die through falling off their chair.
— Gary Elmes
What we really want to concern ourselves with are primary purposes,
and there is no denying that the primary purpose of a gun is to kill
living creatures. (Target-shooting is a pretty popular secondary
purpose, but a secondary purpose it is.)
The New Zealand Arms Code has this to say (emphasis mine):
People who have…
- a history of violence or
- repeated involvement with drugs or
- been irresponsible with alcohol or
- a personal or social relationship with people who may be deemed to be unsuitable to obtain access to firearms or
- indicated an intent to use firearms for self defence
…may find it difficult to satisfy the Police that they are fit and
proper to have a firearm. […]
Self-defence is not a valid reason to possess firearms. The law does
not permit the possession of firearms ‘in anticipation’ that a
firearm may need to be used in self-defence.
— Section 4 of the NZ Arms Code
So, this allows us to focus our discussion a bit; in New Zealand,
self-defense is not a legitimate justification for gun ownership, and
intent to use a gun (or actual use) against a human being is most
likely already criminal. If our concern is guns being used against
people, that's a question of the details of effective regulation, but
there's otherwise not really any discussion to be had, here.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
— Mao Zedong
An armed society is a polite society.
— Robert A. Heinlein
This ‘not for self-defence’ restriction pretty well neutralises the
fact that guns can serve (politically and socially) as an implied
threat of violence. Obviously the armed forces and the police still
have access to guns with a certain scope for use against people, but
‘civilians’ do not, so we can (in New Zealand) safely ignore the
political and social overtones. (The government monopoly on legal
violence is a whole 'nother discussion.)
(To me, incidentally, Heinlein's ‘polite society’ seems more of an
intimidated one, where citizens have to tiptoe around and offer
opinions carefully and quietly lest they offend the wrong person. Guns
in Heinlein's society are simply another form of power and
privilege.)
So, if you're here in New Zealand, the ‘gun question’ boils down to
really a single problem: what is the place of hunting in our
increasingly urban, gun-shy, and blood-shy society?
Personally, I think hunting springs from a very similar impulse to
veganism. I know that sounds quite strange, but think of it like this:
both hunters and vegans recognise that factory farming and
exploitation of animals is a problem; that we are out of balance with
nature; that our rule of the natural world is more oppressive
domination than benevolent management.
The difference is in the response to such a recognition. Those with
the vegan impulse (who usually live in cities, and I don't think
that's incidental) react in much the same way conservationists do when
they recognise we are damaging our environs – that is, they distance
themselves, limiting their interactions. ‘Take only photographs, leave
only footprints’ is a pretty succinct summary of the philosophy;
essentially, enjoy it, but don't get involved, don't interfere. Look
but don't touch. For vegans, that means completely avoiding all animal products and by-products.
Hunters, on the other hand, (who are frequently country-dwellers, and that's not incidental), upon recognition of this damaged
relationship, seek to increase their involvement, to insert
themselves back into these natural systems in a more integrated fashion.
Animals have hunted animals for millions of years; this is how a
system stays in balance. Why should we be any different?
(Of course, this is a post-facto justification; likely a majority of hunters have never consciously thought this. I think it would be fair to describe hunters as generally less ‘aware’ than vegans. But you don't have to be conscious of a thing to be living it.)
The results of this difference in philosophies shows up in the
Department of Conservation's use of poisons to manage New Zealand's
ecosystems. As all our mammal species (deer, possums, goats, rabbits,
wallabies, pigs, tahr, chamois, rats, stoats, ferrets, dogs, cats…)
were introduced to New Zealand (by both white and Maori settlers),
these species aren't in balance with the environment here; that kind
of balance takes long ages to form. So, to avoid our bush being
destroyed, native birds made extinct, and our environment left in
tatters, DOC has to do something about it.
And the unfortunate reality is that poisoning is the best way to
manage animal populations; hunters definitely contribute to this management, as do possum trappers and commercial
game-meat sellers, but there just aren't enough of them, and they
can't do enough between them, so it falls to aerial poison drops to
manage numbers.
And while poison causes painful deaths, and is thus awful and inhumane
in the small, in the large it's still better than doing nothing; a
sufficiently large animal population can strip their habitat of food
so quickly that the usual natural (intrinsic) population controls
don't have time to kick in; it's not unheard of for animal populations
in New Zealand to destroy their habitats and starve themselves to
death.
Hunting used to be as Kiwi a thing as ever there was. Take these
anecdotes of the good old days
[sic]:
Don't think I would try and catch the bus back from National Park
[like I used to], throwing the venny [venison; deer] into the cargo
hold then climbing aboard with rifle, blood soaked swanny and a big
smile from all the passengers.
My stepdad moved from Aussie to NZ back in the day - he carried his
gun on the plane in the overhead luggage […] - carried it through
the airport and cruised through customs no worries they just asked a
couple of questions. Walked down Queen St in Auckland with the rifle
shouldered without raising an eyebrow.
As this old video shows, air travel with a rifle used to be a truly
casual affair!
Neither my dad nor my uncle were ever professional hunters, but my
uncle used to keep all the meat he hunted and still cover
the costs of his trips by selling all the ‘interesting’ bits to a
chinese man who made alternative medicines.
If you became a professional hunter during the culling days of the 60s
and 70s, you'd disappear into the bush with a rifle for months at a
time. The government would sell you cheap ammunition, and pay you for
every deer tail you carried out. Plenty of guys did well enough to buy
their first homes, or set themselves up in business.
New Zealand has a long history of hunting; we even had moose
introduced to Fiordland in 1910 (and there's some evidence that a few
are still kicking around down there.)
There aren't many countries in which all mammals are introduced; in
some ways it makes New Zealand a hunters paradise. Our introduced
species are considered pests, and as such there are no bag limits or
restrictions on hunting them. (There are restrictions on access to
many hunting areas, but that's a different story.)
New Zealand now is a far cry from New Zealand then. We're an
increasingly urbanised country – our three largest cities alone
account for half of our population. A large number of New Zealanders
will never see a gun outside of a TV screen.
We laugh about the vegetarian who doesn't realise that chicken is an
animal, or those who say ‘hunters are cruel, why can't they just get
their meat from the supermarket where no animals have had to suffer’,
but the reality is that we live in a society of increasing distance
from the gory, bloody bits of life, and in this context hunters are a
regressive force, swimming against the tide. Often-times media reports
about hunters and guns make errors of the same kind of magnitude as
the ‘chicken isn't meat’ vegetarian, but no one outside the ‘gun
community’ knows enough to spot it.
Hunters and other gun-owners aren't always sympathetic figures,
either. Cowboy spotlighters, idiots shooting at road-signs, Ewen
Macdonald, people who got the license but have no background and no
knowledge of ideas like ‘humane killing’, and just want to go hurl
bullets at things for a laugh – these people exist, and they don't do
anyone any favours.
On top of this, we're also in a place where many people only ever
experience guns through TV, movies and games, and usually only in very
limited situations. Almost all on-screen depiction of guns sees them
used against other human beings; primarily in crime/law enforcement,
terrorism, or military combat scenarios. We don't tend to see movie
depictions of deer-stalking or duck-shooting, and our perceptions of
firearms become coloured by what we do see.
(Which of course creates a feedback effect; there are gun-owners who
just want to live the movie fantasy of Dirty Harry or John McClane or,
god forbid, Travis Bickle.)
Hunting is one of the oldest traditions in the world, and even in its
modern form it has a long history in New Zealand. However, the world
moves on, and traditions run the risk of being left behind. I think
hunting is an important, perhaps even crucial part of our relationship
to our world, and it would be a tragedy to lose it.
I shoot with a .25-06 in which the “-06” is short for “1906
Springfield,” which is when and where its predecessor was designed.
It hasn't been changed much since then, either. I also shoot a
.22LR, which was designed by another American company in 1887.
A few related links:
permalink