One sentence of mine, correctly described by Mark Kleiman as a bad pun, has, uh, triggered nearly five thousand words of attack from Dipnut at Isntapundit. He ranges freely over the question of guns and gun-ownership, my views about guns, my alleged insults towards gun owners and a (wholly imagined) history of my personal experience with guns.

Along with the throwaway line, Dipnut attacks two posts of mine, this one, and this one written after Eugene Volokh suggested that the prospect of a breakdown in social order in the next 50 years was a reason that “smart” guns should be banned.

Dipnut works himself up into a fine old rhetorical lather at my expense insisting by the end of his post that my views imply the U.S. should be “a crumbling, entropic, bloody mess” and asking, a tad dramatically, whether anyone should listen to

someone whose ideas on the subject are so tendentious and shallow, who insults and misjudges his fellow citizens, who could not tell you the Four Rules of gun safety, who has never owned a gun, fired a gun, been to a shooting range or gun show, or fought off an armed attacker?

Well. Dipnut is very confident in asserting all those things. (Has he been spying on me all these years?) I do wonder why, if I’m so tendentious and insulting, I’m worth almost 5,000 words of his time. Plank in thine own eye and all that. But rather than take the bait and have this become Yet Another Pointlessly Hysterical Gun Argument, let me make a few short points.

First, the post that set him off was a joke. Haha.

Second, read Post #2 yourself, including the exchange with Clayton Cramer in the comments. If I seem to go too far in the post, bear in mind that (a) I back off a bit in the comments, and (b) I wrote it just after three of my fellow faculty-members had been shot to death by a student.

Third, I’m not sure the views expressed in my third post are all that different from Dipnut’s, his bloviating aside. I agree with Eugene Volokh that the central fact about gun control debates in the United States is that there are 200 million guns in the country and they’re not going away. Unlike Eugene, I speculated that restoring social order in the U.S. might be more rather than less difficult after some huge catastrophe (like a limited nuclear war, etc) the more guns there were:

In some respects the situtation would resemble that of regions of Africa caught in endless civil wars propelled by the easy availability of weapons and the ambitions of local strongmen.

I then said,

While we’re speculating about all of this, let me say that I think the U.S. would stand a pretty good chance of recovering from [that] kind of chaos. But we wouldn’t have guns to thank for the restoration of stable civil government. Instead, we’d be thanking the availability of shared cultural templates for organizing a political and legal system, together with the presence of people able to transmit the detailed knowledge required to make those templates work as real, staffed institutions. People like Eugene Volokh, in other words.

Dipnut says, in response:

Now, Healy is absolutely right about this last bit. America’s greatest asset is our culture of peace and lawfulness. We have considerable practice living in a society of laws, and we’re not likely to settle for anything less.

This seems to me to be the main point. Guns are just simple machines. Anyplace can have them. A strong civic culture, commitment to the rule of law, robust institutions and all the rest of it—that’s the hard part. To put it very crudely, if we imagine a 2×2 table with “Guns / No Guns” as one dimension and “Democracy / No Democracy” on the other, then we will find that all four cells are populated. (Let “Guns” here be shorthand for “Widespread Private Gun Ownership,” or WPGO.) The U.S., and maybe a very few other countries (e.g., Canada) go in the Guns/Democracy cell. There are many countries in both the No Guns / Democracy and No Guns / No Democracy cells. But there are also a bunch in the Guns/No Democracy cell, most notably one that the U.S. recently invaded. This rebuts two strong theories and suggests a weak conclusion. The claim that WPGO is necessary for continuing freedom is wrong, as is the claim that WPGO is sufficient for continuing freedom. The weak conclusion is that there’s no simple connection between WPGO and political arrangements in a country. At a minimum, the cases suggest more than one pathway.

Of course, you may say that very few people really make either of the strong claims, but I think that the perfervid atmosphere of the U.S. gun control debate might lead one to forget this. It’s the culture and institutionalisation of gun ownership, in the context of the wider world of politics, that seems more important to me than the mere presence of the things themselves. Dipnut seems close to holding something like this view, except he also argues that NRA members regard “individual gun ownership as a necessity for the defense of society itself” and that they are correct in thinking this.

Unlike him, I think that the whole “From my cold dead hands / Guns secure your freedom” idea put out by the NRA is just a foundational myth— an organizational rallying cry that bears little connection to the forces that maintain and reproduce robust democratic societies. Note again that I do not say that WPGO is incompatible with such societies. Nor do I say it makes no positive contribution. But the empirical diversity of outcomes makes the catchphrase version of WPGO theory impossible to take seriously. Those 200 million real and not-going-anywhere guns also make for a big endogeneity problem when evaluating gun laws. If anyone who wants to commit a crime can easily own a gun, then it may well make sense to own one yourself. But this follows from facts about the overall context, not from magical freedom- and safety-enhancing properties of guns themselves.

Ordinarily, we might expect to gear up to a sensible extended discussion. Unfortunately, Dipnut goes on to say this:

What Healy doesn’t understand is, gun owners are the better among us. … Again, there’s a grain of insult in the assertion that “the situtation would resemble that of regions of Africa…” America is not Africa, and the least important difference is the geographical one.

Oh dear. The first assertion is, of course, made on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. And the second—well, it’s always around this point that I begin to wonder whether engaging these guys is worth my while. Mostly it’s not. I really have very little invested, personally, intellectually or politically, in this debate. (I didn’t grow up with it.) So maybe everyone would be happier if I just pretended to be made of cardboard or straw instead, and the argument could just settle into its usual going-nowhere groove.