Eric rather famously relied on Larry Corriea to help him with more esoteric and detailed aspects of writing about firearms. If you haven’t read Larry’s books, you really should. You can even download the first book in his massively popular (for good reason!) Monster Hunter International series for free from Baen. Fair warning: once you start, you won’t be able to stop!
Getting back to 1632, firearms are baked into the universe and have been since the start. Because he lived in WV, Eric understood the importance and centrality of firearms to life in the small communities Grantville is modeled on.
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baen’s Bar
20 March 2015 09:54
I’m not going to get too far into this discussion because if I did it would turn into a long-running political wrangle which I don’t have time for even if I had the inclination (which… I might, depending on how pissed I got). But I will make a few points:
First, on guns. People tend to obsess far too much on this subject, in real life as much as in fiction. That’s true no matter where they are in the political spectrum. Conservatives nowadays ascribe mystical and even religious significance to gun ownership. And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider the title of Mike Huckabee’s recent book: GOD, GUNS, GRITS AND GRAVY. I grew up in hunting county in the California mountains and I owned guns like every other male over the age of 10, and a fair number of girls. But I owned guns for practical reasons: a rifle to hunt deer and a shotgun to hunt birds. The only people I knew who owned handguns fell into two categories: men like my father, who had fought in World War II and kept their .45 service pistol, more as a memento than anything else; and bow hunters who might encounter a bear in the woods and nobody in their right mind wants to deal with a pissed-off mama bear with a bow at close range.
But we didn’t worship the damn things, which is what conservatives do today. My father was a highly-decorated combat pilot in the war and a serious big game hunter. I spent a good portion of my childhood reading books while sprawled on a rug made from a Kodiak brown bear my father shot. But it never would have occurred to him that there was any connection between owning guns and God and he didn’t like grits and gravy anyway. (For the record, he would have despised Mike Huckabee. My father had no use for people who tried to shove their religion down other people’s throat.)
For their part, liberals ascribe a malevolent power to firearms that is every bit as mystical as the idol-worship of right wingers. The NRA is a loathsome outfit which today is nothing but a front and a shill for gun manufacturers. (The NRA was completely different when I was a kid. I still have a couple of NRA medals I got for learning gun safety and marksmanship from NRA instructors.) But there is one thing they say that I agree with: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
If you study the statistical correlation between gun ownership, homicide and suicide, you will find that while there is a slight correlation it is overwhelmed by societal factors. In the United States today, homicide is essentially a phenomenon concentrated in a narrow demographic — young men of color in the worst areas of inner city ghettos. I stress “worst areas” because the phenomenon is social, not racial. Most black and Hispanic communities are perfectly safe. I know — I’ve lived in them most of my adult life. Lu and I are the only white Anglos within half a dozen blocks of our house except for one other family three blocks away. The town I live it is 95% black and Hispanic. In our neighborhood — this varies from one place to another — the proportion is roughly 2/3 Hispanic and 1/3 black. We’ve lived her for over twenty years and never had any trouble except that fifteen years ago some jackass broke into our garage and stole some shovels and rakes. (A new pawn shop had opened up in the area, which invariable triggers a minor surge of petty theft.)
Prior to that, Lu and I lived in a mostly-black community in Chicago for twelve years and our daughter went to a school that was probably 90% black. Again, we never had any problems at all. And for the record, I don’t own a gun and haven’t in almost forty years. In my case, because I was more concerned about being framed by the police because of my political activity so I made it as hard as possible for them. I owned no guns and I didn’t use any illegal drugs.
But the worst areas in the ghettos are essentially third world countries. In an act of gross political irresponsibility and social immorality, the United States has simply abandoned them. The murder rate in these areas is about 50% worse than it is in countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, generally considered to have the worst murder rates in the world. But if you subtract those neighborhoods from the equation — i.e., subtract both the perpetrators and the victims from the statistics — then you’ll find that U.S. homicide rates are not much different from those in western Europe.
There’s a similar reality when it comes to suicide. The demographics of suicide are completely different. In the U.S., suicide is essentially a phenomenon also concentrated in a narrow demographic: middle-aged and elderly white men, especially in rural areas. There is a certain correlation here with gun ownership, granted, because the rates of _successful_ suicide attempts vary tremendously. A huge number of people in the U.S. attempt suicide every year, but the big majority of them fail. The one exception is if they use a gun. Then the success rate (using the term “success” in an admittedly grotesque way) skyrockets. When people try to kill themselves with poison or overdoses — by far the most common method used by women — they fail 95% of the time. When they use a gun, however, the success rate reaches 80% — and the people who fail usually suffer terrible injuries.
So if you have a demographic — remember: middle-aged and elderly white men, mostly in rural areas — which has a disproportionately high rate of gun ownership, then you’ll have a higher success rate. But the reason people attempt suicide in the first place isn’t because there’s a gun lying around. It’s because of societal factors. In this case, extreme personal isolation among a population that places a premium on social success but has generally lousy communication skills.
All right. Now let me segue into the novels. Whether or not a given population swept up in a time travel event prospers or fails has damn little to do with whether it owns a lot of guns or doesn’t. Yes, it’s _a_ factor, but it’s only one and it’s by no means the most important. What are really the critical factors are two: social cohesion and — most importantly — leadership. If those two factors are present and connected, as they were in 1632, then you will get success. You had an excellent leader in Mike Stearns and he had at his immediate disposal a social force that was coherent and united — in this case, his local union — that he could rely on and which backed him up. More broadly, he had a small town that was more socially coherent than most gatherings of several thousand people in the U.S. would be. The fact that the town was well-armed was a factor, but it was a variable one. It made the immediate response to the crisis easily manageable, but became less and less important as time went on. That was the whole point of Mackay’s little speech to Mike at the battle outside Eisenach: no matter how well armed they were, there simply weren’t enough Americans. Mike agreed with him, which is why he pursued the political course he did at the end of the novel (and which has determined the shape of the series ever since).
The situation was quite different in TIME SPIKE. There, you had a small and very coherent — indeed, quasi-military — force, the prison guards, who had good leadership and they were certainly well-armed. But they soon ran into major trouble because, unlike the situation in 1632, the broader social unit around them was not a coherent and well-organized small town but a population about as incoherent and badly-led as you could imagine: the inmates at a maximum security prison. Again, guns were _a_ factor, but not the critical one. The critical change came when a sector of the prison population got itself organized under good leadership and with a coherent purpose.
In the upcoming ALEXANDER INHERITANCE, there is yet a different situation: A population which is even larger in numbers than Grantville and has a coherent social group with good leadership to provide immediate direction — the ship’s captain and his officers, quickly aided by intellectuals among the passengers. And, happily, a good leadership that emerges from among the passengers.
But there are almost no guns at all in the possession of the up-timers. Cruise ships don’t allow passengers to bring guns aboard and the number possessed by the crew is minimal and for minor security purposes.
And… as you will see when the book comes out, that doesn’t make a spit’s worth of different. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And when they’re threatened, the up-timers on that ship figure out how to use the immense quasi-industrial resources of that ship to make themselves very dangerous indeed.
Yes, that’s a shameless plug. 🙂
