Guns, Robots, and the End of the Second Amendment

Last month, at the meeting of my Presbytery, we discussed guns.

It went as I would have expected, our Presbytery being a liberal one and all.  There was a presentation from an elder at a local progressive church, calling on the denomination to again affirm its longstanding position on sane gun safety measures in our culture.

Then, there were the rebuttals.  The first was a painful, multipage speech, prepared by an elder regrettably unaware of the core principles of rhetoric.  If you want to sway a crowd, you need to establish connection.  If you establish that sense of shared ethos, a gathering will listen.

Using a laundry list of talking points from your silo, none of which have any purchase?  That's as useless as if the Apostle Paul had stood up on the Areopagus in Athens and started speaking in Hebrew.  You're speaking the wrong language.

Just because it sounded good in your car when Rush Limbaugh said it doesn't mean it's the right thing to say.  By the time we reached the inevitable reference to the Holocaust, the room was actively groaning.

The second individual who rose to speak against the motion was more measured.  He'd been a senior navy officer, and he almost...almost...registered with what was by then an impatient crowd.  He was focused and disciplined, but when he made his point about the need for citizens to bear arms as a ward against tyranny it again fell flat.  In a room full of liberals and leftists, arguing that you might need to know how to use an automatic weapon in the event a despot seizes power works only under two conditions.

Those conditions involve 1) referencing Leon Trotsky's argument against a disarmed proletariat in his anti-Stalinist screed "The Revolution Betrayed," and 2) Using the words "President Cuccinelli."

But honestly?  That Red Dawn fantasy is dead.  The idea that small arms are a meaningful ward against tyrants may have made sense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but now?

Things are different.  I've argued this before, but just how different was reinforced yesterday.  On the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, an Unmanned Combat Air System was successfully launched from the flight deck.  That's not that big a deal.  It had been done before.

What was a big deal was that the same UCAS then successfully pulled off a carrier landing twice in a row, although on the third attempt, it aborted.  Why does that matter?  Carrier landings are one of the most complex and demanding skills required of military personnel.  And now, robots can do it.

This isn't a Waldoed machine, like some big fancy remote-controlled helicopter.  This is an entirely autonomous system.  And it can 1) land on a carrier and 2) determine that its approach is wrong, and make the decision to abort...with no human intervention.

Watching the F-18 Super Hornet escorting the UCAS in reminded me of that scene in Michael Moore's Roger and Me, the one where an animatronic worker and robot sing a song together in a failed GM theme park exhibit.  That human being?  The expensive, highly-trained fighter jockey flying that plane?  They're escorting in their replacement.

For those who imagine the Second Amendment still provides protection against the power of a tyrant, this is worth noting as well.  That Walther P90, Remington 1100 Tac 4, and Ruger SR-556 Carbine you've got in your responsibly locked gun case?

When it comes to resisting a despot armed with the next generation of robotic combat systems that we're so blithely and eagerly producing, you might as well own a collection of Nerf Guns.

What's the point of a right if it's functionally meaningless?

The Theology of Drones

So a friend posed a question on FB recently.

The question had to do with the relationship between American drone strikes and Just War theory.   As a means of projecting national power, drone war-machines are going to increasingly become our weapon of choice.   From their genesis, the use of drones seems to track along the same tech-development tree as aircraft.  Initially, both technologies were used only for reconnaissance, as a way to put eyes-in-the-sky risk free.  There was little functional difference between those first slow-moving prop-driven drones and the slow moving recon planes of the first days of the first World War.

But just as aircraft quickly evolved, so too have our drones.  They can now take out folks--usually in the form of a Hellfire missile or other precision ordnance--without putting the controller in harms way.  Drone tech will likely go even further, moving towards both semi-autonomous craft and becoming much more lethal, with the potential for that lethality to be projected into combat with other military forces.  A drone airframe, for instance, could be built without the need to worry about the limitations of the human body.  The tech for impossibly maneuverable airframes is there, and has been there for decades.  A drone-variant X-29 could easily pull gees that would kill a human pilot.   We're going to head that way.  It is inevitable.

As we leap forward technologically, Christian ethics struggle to keep up.  Where do drones fit in the whole WWJD thing?   Clearly, it's an area in which both our current Christian POTUS and the Mormon GOP challenger find concurrence.   They're fine with the use of drones.  They permit targeted strikes, relatively little collateral damage, and no risk to personnel.   It is a technology that allows for radically asymmetric conflict, in which one side can project power and another cannot.   In that sense, it is like iron in the bronze age, or the chariot, or the longbow at Agincourt.  If your task as Head of State is to project power, well, drones are just power.   Plain and simple.

From a Just War perspective, drones in combat...well...they're just a particularly effective weapon.  Like, say, Joint Direct Attack Munitions or cruise missiles.   The asymmetric use of drones in conflict would not, in and of itself, represent a violation of Just War theory.

Problem is, Just War theory cannot apply to our current use of drone strikes, because we are not at war in any traditional sense.  There is no declared war, no struggle for territory, and no nation-state to serve as a direct adversary.

The pursuit of peace as a primary aim of Just War also does not apply.  The "enemy combatants" do not represent any state or jurisdiction with whom negotiations would be possible.  This means the goal of current drone strikes is not to force an opponent to parley for peace...because there is no authority that could speak on their behalf.

The focus of Just War on limiting warfare to combatants is also meaningless.  The blurring of the lines between civilians and combatants is so complete as to make the distinction irrelevant.

Does this mesh with the teachings of Jesus?  No, not really, not if we're honest with ourselves.  Christ has always stood in difficult tension with the power of the state.

But this also exists outside of Christian efforts historically to theologically justify combat and military operations.  What we are doing with our drones is not war.  It is simply the crudest form of law enforcement, the coercive suppression of a restive population.

Good thing that will never happen in America.