Gun Ethos

(1)

The Gun Ethos is an extreme form of Individualism.

This statement is corroborated by the simple fact that even though the quasi-sacred Second Amendment speaks of groups called "militias", no such groups exist today, and most guns are used for the exploits of the individual: it is the individual who hunts and the individual who has accidents and the individual who kills.

The people who are pressing for any form of gun control or gun laws are thinking of guns within the context of a community.

This is obvious from the group of people from Newtown, Massachusetts, who press for laws that recognize that guns are a social fact as well as an individual fact, and they travel as a group to argue for their ideas.

Both of these viewpoints are experienced in the perplexing narrative of the Individual standing against their own democratically elected Government, which melds together the story of the "Good Individual" and the story of the "Bad Group".

Once again, we see the dim realization here that we as individuals are unable to form extended groups that incorporate our ideals: our examples of group-mind are debased, tyrannical, and entirely inadequate to the needs of attaining the highest aspirations of mankind and religion.

Tragically, we address here the ethically most trivial fact: guns, while ignoring the ethically most important facts: how good individuals go bad as a group, and how a community may escape from the taint of group debasement and attain greatness.


(2)

The detail from Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam is used to illustrate the dichotomy between the Individual and the Group, or the Community.
In its essence, the One desire that there be Many, and all the perplexities and messiness of Groups and Democracies are contained within that divine act.



(3)

What are some virtues of Community?

PLOS Blogs   Saturday, May 4, 2013

Confessions of a D Orbital
By Ricki Lewis, PhD
Posted: May 2, 2013

... “Work in groups? In organic?” I blurted, astonished.

“A group without a lot of smart people can get the right answer more frequently than just a smart person. This is very important in solving problems in the future,” Fowler said, insisting that today’s students are different. They eagerly work together, free of the anger and competitive streak that pervaded my own class, when everyone did anything to get the highest grades possible, lest they fail at the lofty goal of getting into med school. I even saw one student, whose name I still remember, spit into someone’s flask in lab, to better his own grade...

While discovering an answer is not at all the same thing as acting ethically, we know that we find it easier to be good with friends help and belief in us...
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