Guns, Germs, and Steel… And A Few Other Uncomfortable Topics

I spent most of my earlier career bootstrapping projects on greenfields and evolving them over PhD-length timescales. In my latest chapter I have found myself instead repeatedly parachuting into situations where unresolved tensions, social and technical, threaten to strangle, derail, or explode a valuable system. While the salient skill sets overlap, today I find myself engaging as much or more as archaeologist, therapist, surgeon, and politician as engineer, architect, and subject matter expert, while attempting to understand a system wrought over time by hidden pressures, forgotten decisions, and countless hands.

This has fostered in me a greater appreciation of the predicament in which the American system now finds itself — ancient architecture decisions that couldn’t possibly have anticipated subsequent technological and geopolitical developments, a patchwork of laws that accreted like layers of sediment over 250 years of “vibe coding” by non-engineers with rare attempts at refactoring, deeply embedded special interest groups of growing power and opacity, and dangerous tribalism that assumes the other side has no concerns worth hearing.

On some topics I perceive that we are capable of messily converging on a workable consensus despite having to stomach an ugly and chaotic interim period of cynical demagoguery that appeals to the darkest human instincts around Othering.

On matters of housing affordability, for instance, the present administration demands of us the Doublethink that illegal immigrants are both a drain on the economy yet somehow rich enough to outcompete middle class families in the housing market, all while terrorizing and deporting the hardworking immigrants who comprise a huge fraction of labor in the construction industry. The extreme left, meanwhile, would sell you on a solution that looks like rent control and government subsidies, imagining that private equity explains all our problems. The grownups in the room, bless their hearts, aim to shift the conversation to structural issues like local politics, regulatory thickets, market distortions, and labor shortages, in recognition of what is fundamentally a supply-side issue that we could fix by pivoting from a fear-based scarcity narrative to a hope-based abundance agenda.

Other topics seem inevitably prone to permanently jamming on religious grounds and so we need to step back to reframe the solution space instead of thinking that we can converge on, or impose, a universal approach that meets all of our own criteria if only we fight hard enough and win a singular decisive victory. These topics fall into two classes — the ones where we might reasonably (if grudgingly) say “you do you” to various cohorts and hold our noses while competitive pressures hopefully sort things out; and the ones that inevitably require fundamentally uncomfortable compromise because you can’t realistically operate a swimming pool with a peeing section. We must deliberately bucket these problems and adjudicate them accordingly if we want functional and stable government instead of a perpetual whipsaw between partisan extremes on the ideology axis while flipping between total gridlock and Leeroy Jenkins on the action side, a state of affairs that has citizens at each other’s throats while allies cautiously edge toward the exits.

For the sake of our own survival, if nothing else, let’s find our way to a 2028 election season less polarized than the presently posited hyper-partisan Vance-vs-AOC smackdown.

Consider one such subject so polarizing that we bogged down litigating it for decades and then, one day, just cut The Gordian Knot. Abortion comes to mind as both an inherent quagmire and one where we may have found a way out in the long-term despite the short-term feeling pretty gross — I am staunchly in the camp that says women should have total control over all phases of pregnancy, and yet I also recognize that certain arguments on this topic take root in religious views held so deeply as to foment charges of murder, as well as see that earlier legalisms rested atop lamentably shaky ground, and so I grudgingly accept that remanding the matter to the states may have been the least terrible approach in a highly path dependent situation. Most states are doing the right thing already and I expect that in the fullness of time inter-state competitive pressures will push us in aggregate toward enlightenment while, yes, also sustaining isolated pockets of barbarism.

Education represents an area of consideration that I imagine we can approach similarly. As I reflect on my own childhood experiences therein I find it lacking in areas such as American History and yet appreciate that my introduction to Biology included thorough treatment of the perennially contentious topic of Evolution. Why did I have to wait until 2019 to learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre from an episode of HBO’s Watchmen? How come serious discussion of the practice of Redlining didn’t go mainstream until George Floyd’s 2020 murder boiled over into the Black Lives Matter movement? And yet how do we deal with the fact that science doesn’t establish truth so much as approximate it as best we can at a moment in time, subject to imperfectly available information and the motivated reasoning of flesh-and-blood scientists? How do we teach history when most facts have turned to ash, the surviving ones have passed through countless unreliable hands, and most stories are written by conquerors and ideologues with a viewpoint to sell?

Perhaps we would best serve our country by having everyone attend public school while carefully proscribing which topics we teach, doing so with an eye toward fostering a robust foundation while avoiding fragmentary controversy, leaving the more contentious topics for parent-curated extracurriculars as well as later-in-life self-directed exploration underpinned by innate curiosity, passion, and practicality while grounded in due skepticism.

Let us consider consolidating primary education around math, logic, language, rhetoric, craftsmanship, financial literacy, and art, as well as basic physics and chemistry of a kind that any child can confirm in a trivial lab experiment — topics that provide foundational general purpose skills, create proximity to what may become passion, and, most importantly, inoculate people to demagoguery. The squishier, though no less important, topics of history, biology, civics, ethics, etc. can either come later and/or in private contexts. Let’s not needlessly balkanize education and, downstream of that, our politics, because we couldn’t agree on the one true path across all subjects, but instead build unity around the inarguable and let the rest sort itself out later organically. Don’t let The Perfectly Perfect be the enemy of The Good Enough.

Other topics, alas, don’t so readily afford such tiering or many-science-labs style approaches, forcing us to live with whatever single solution emerges at the system level. Matters exemplifying these policy realms include public health and gun violence, areas at the intersection of rabid religious fervor and pool peeing section impracticality.

The controversies over epidemiology require no introduction. We have all lived through, and continue to live through, that particular turmoil. Instead of calm, nuanced, evidence-based discussions about, say, vaccines we see tribal signaling by their absolute refusal and religious adoption alike. Right-wing ideologues shout “FREEEEEDOM!” while their left-wing analogues betray their own religiosity with phrases like “trust the science”. On nutrition, we can’t seem to find a middle ground between fat shaming and blame absolution that recognizes all kinds of structural issues. The uncomfortable truth is that many public health matters take decades to understand and fall under the sway of special interest groups, Big Farm and Big Pharma alike, to name just two.

A reasonable worldview might look like believing both that certain childhood vaccines are absolute no-brainers while maybe we did rush the COVID approach compared to the measured roll-out of previous vaccines. It’s possible to both push for greater personal accountability while also holding space for genetic predispositions, environmental pressures, and structural incentives. What ought be entirely inarguable is that we need to have a diverse collection of viewpoints at the table duking it out over difficult trade-offs with imperfect information. And that, sadly, seems to be exactly the opposite of how the present administration is playing things — simultaneously marginalizing experts while elevating cranks. We can’t afford such behavior when navigating domains where we’re stuck in the resultant systems together — schools, offices, factories, restaurants, hospitals, buses, subways, airplanes, etc.

And now, finally, we come to the topic most on my mind this past week, and one that has vexed our political system without end and with such rancor — guns.

The founders of our country considered this such an important matter that they enshrined their thoughts in the Bill Of Rights only one slot down from freedom of speech — “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

There has perhaps never been so much ink spilt over the implications of the placement of a single comma. And just as a First Amendment crafted in the era of the printing press could not adequately anticipate radio, satellites, the Internet, Super PACs, cryptography, Generative AI, and highly manipulative multi-trillion dollar social media companies owned by centi-billionaires, so, too, was our Second Amendment born in an era of cavalry, caravels, cannons, and bayonet bearing muzzleloaders soon to be displaced by machine guns, detachable magazines, tanks, airplanes and their seaborne carriers, radar, lidar, radar-guided artillery, smart bombs and even smarter missiles, shoulder-borne rocket launchers, chemical weapons, lab-grown pathogens, submarines, nuclear bombs, submarines with nuclear bombs, nuclear powered submarines with nuclear bombs, drones, IEDs, drones with IEDs, 3D-printing, 3D-printed drones with IEDs, autonomous drones, 3D-printed IED-carrying autonomous drone swarms, and so on.

So many genies are long out of the bottle and just can’t go back. Three and a half billion years into an unceasing arms race on this ball of rock, that is just the inescapable nature of things. Authoritarian regimes episodically make a run at controlling these genies but ultimately fail because the controls prove too horrifying, the temptations toward abuse too great, and the complexity ultimately unmanageable. We would do well instead to take a cue from the domains of security engineering and distributed systems, accept an imperfect universe, and strive to have fault-tolerant systems where the design leverages compensating controls and operators regularly perform root cause analysis on failures. There are more choices available to us than authoritarianism and anarchy.

I’m bemused by right-leaning extremists laboring under the cognitive dissonance of, on the one hand, imagining that some degree of drug regulation results in harm reduction but, on the other hand, believing that no such regulation would be useful or appropriate with guns. And I’m equally flummoxed by left-leaning extremists who in one moment are advocating that the government should enact strict gun controls and the next moment bemoaning the horrors of an unaccountable ICE running around in masks and grabbing people without probable cause, because, you know, what kind of police force do you imagine would be enacting such a confiscation, and, furthermore, wouldn’t it be nice to have some guns as an insurance policy of last resort if the world devolved into total factional pandemonium?

But let’s back up and get super crisp on the high-level facts of the matter in the US that shouldn’t be under debate — there are literally more guns than people here; there have been in the neighborhood of 50k gun-related fatalities per year for a long time; about 60% of firearms deaths are suicides, nearly the whole remaining ~40% are homicides, and a vanishingly small fraction are the result of accidental discharge or police actions, while the most sensational category, so-called “mass shootings”, represent less than 1% with estimates ranging from ~0.1% to ~0.5% depending on the definition.

As with so many topics in the zeitgeist, the sub-categories that dominate our mindshare in aggregate are the ones with stories that individually go viral, which results in some cases in our fixating on the wrong sub-categories, and in other cases ignoring whole topics altogether because the harm is so diffuse as to be invisible (think air pollution). For a long time our country has had on the rough order of ~50K gun-related deaths and ~50K automobile-related deaths every year but fatal car crashes barely register in the collective consciousness. Of the gun-related deaths we experience every year, tens of thousands of them are suicides, while only a few hundred involve “mass shootings”, but we know which one sells ad impressions while dominating the conversations, and it’s not stories like that time in 2023 when my sister impulse-purchased a shotgun and then killed herself the next day.

Much of the conversation about gun regulation from the left sounds like wanting to unplug the alarm that is telling you that many things are profoundly screwed up in our society, to include economic despair, social isolation, drug addiction, unresolved trauma, ideological extremism, and general lawlessness, while considering neither the practicalities of their proposed solutions in implementation nor their secondary consequences when ceding power to central authorities whose control regularly flips between increasingly extremist political parties.

Much of the conversation from the right, meanwhile, can sound like an admission that all these things are in fact screwed up but the only answer is to be ready to shoot people, because meritocracy or something, as if most of this weren’t the result of mismanagement on a good day and systemic cruelty on a bad day, and it seems evident that this has long been a favorite “wedge” tool to divide voters that might otherwise be able to converge on a more centrist policy regime across the board.

So, perhaps more than any other topic, the matter of gun control represents the most thorny one to resolve. State laws, as we have seen in multiple recent cases, don’t do much in a country where interior borders are entirely porous, which makes it one of the worst kinds of “you can’t have a peeing section in a pool” style problems. And the federal landscape, meanwhile, is far too divided for any kind of sweeping gun policy change, to say nothing of how scary the results of such a thing might prove.

Consequently, we have no choice but to put on our big human pants and accept that perfect safety in everyday life is a myth, that tail risks have outsized impacts in the fullness of time, and that the horrific visible outcomes are symptomatic of myriad underlying and interrelated problems, then set about addressing the root causes of so much misery and in the meanwhile emplace an assortment of compensating controls to short-circuit situations where we can and better manage them when we can’t. And we desperately need to stop allowing this to be a key wedge issue — because we won’t survive as a functional nation if we keep flipping between competing versions of crazy.

I remember purchasing my first gun in 1999 — a 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg 500 Persuader that to this day sits propped against the wall in my bedroom next to the nightstand-homed 9mm Beretta Mini Cougar 8000D that joined my collection a few years later. There was no “woo!” in me, just a sense of awesome responsibility, akin to driving a car or piloting an airplane solo for the first time. I don’t think of myself as a “gun person”, but I do nonetheless live with more guns than cats, and I have a lot of cats, arguably just one short of being the crazy (childless) cat lady. I’m weirded out by the many people who seem to fantasize about finding a reason to use their gun on another human, imagine that they should get some therapy, and know that they will need some therapy if ever their wishes come true. For many years I myself had to deal with the PTSD from the time in college when I woke up in the house shared with a few classmates to a shadowy figure in my room stealing my laptop, but I am nonetheless relieved that I lacked the cogency and wherewithal to shoot them for that PTSD would doubtless have proved far stickier still.

I imagine that we should, at least in part, draw inspiration from cars when reasoning about guns — their presence is inevitable because of the value they provide (whether you agree with that or not), the potential for harm is enormous when treated carelessly and callously, we can massively reduce said harm with wisely targeted and minimally invasive policy that nudges people toward safe, responsible, pro-social behavior, and we should grant the privilege by default with modest training while judiciously revoking it when an individual clearly demonstrates that they cannot handle it in a way that is safe for themselves and others.

But mostly that only remediates the scenarios of accidents in the home plus spillage into criminal markets that facilitate homicide and other violent and violence-adjacent crimes. And our overall statistics, meanwhile, remained swamped by suicide, something we stalwartly don’t talk about, and those statistics in turn are swamped by handguns and long guns, not the much politicized “assault rifles” which most people can’t even define beyond “looks scary”. Broadly speaking, there is an epidemic of suicide that is particularly pronounced in developed nations, and so what we may really be seeing is widespread despair that manifests in suicide by various means in correlation with their availability. Yes, many places have fewer suicides per capita by firearms than the US, and yet still have roughly comparable suicides per capita overall, which speaks to something much more pernicious than gun deaths and much more pervasive than the US.

We have collectively lost the plot as we fixate on the showiest disasters and most salacious stories while digging our partisan trenches. Good governance is difficult and boring, requires commitment and compromise, and takes all kinds of people, realities to which we desperately must attend.