The Tranquilizer Bullet Campaign
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There is a solution to the 11,000+ gun deaths that take place in the United States that was not addressed by Michael Moore’s latest effort, Bowling for Columbine. I’ve thought a push for tranquilizer bullets would make a good campaign strategy in the gun control debate for a long time. It’s an idea I like to call the TBC.
As Chris Rock pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, “we don’t need gun control, we need bullet control.” He’s absolutely correct, and there is an even better solution to taxing the hell out of bullets to prevent gun violence. TBC is a solution to the dilemma posed to politicians who are faced with those people adamant about keeping guns to protect themselves and their families from intruders in their homes.
The solution could be to take the idea of tranquilizer darts used to capture wild animals, and incorporate the idea into conventional firearms. I use the term “tranquilizer bullets” because I believe there would need to be a slight evolution in what is currently available for the idea to work, but here’s the pitch: A politician, confronted with a person scared about protecting his or her family would be able to say, “Sir or madam, I understand your concern. And I’m not going to infringe on your right to bear arms. But I don’t think that the Second Amendment gives anyone the right to kill. You may keep your gun. But please, turn in your conventional bullets for tranquilizer bullets.”
An enterprising person might even develop a marketing strategy and call them “t-bullets.” Just as “e-mail” has virtually replaced snail mail, soon everyone will want t-bullets instead of conventional, boring bullets. Imagine a gang-banger bein’ all like, “Shiznit, yo lame bullets is whack. T-bullets’s are droppin’ mad, dawg.”
The Second Amendment reads, “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.” When I read this awkward phrasing, I think means that because a militia is necessary for a free state, people at the time the Founding Fathers were writing the Bill of Rights needed to be able to have guns to support said militia. Somehow over the last 200 years it’s been interpreted to mean everyone has the right to have guns, pretty much no matter what. I suppose those dependent clauses before and after the punch-line were just too gosh darn hard to remember.
I love the Bill of Rights, but I notice something missing from the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This campaign is not a proposal to take guns away from people, nor is it to regulate arms in the least. It would be a campaign to replace the bullets in the guns with bullets just as effective at preventing harm. They just wouldn’t be lethal.
Imagine a child discovering a gun in his uncle’s house and taking it to school with him. He shoots a little girl. It’s the horrible situation that occurred in Flint, Michigan depicted in Bowling for Columbine. But imagine that instead of a real bullet, it was a t-bullet. Paramedics are called because the dosage of the tranquilizer is a lot for the little girl’s body to absorb. She's losing blood because her body was too small to handle the velocity of the bullet, and it has penetrated deeper than it is designed to... But aid soon arrives, and eventually the little girl wakes up. This could be the rewritten ending to this tragic tale, and it can be if TBC is successful.
As a joke, TBC is an interesting thought experiment. All of a sudden you force people who claim they just simply want protection into looking like raving murderers hoping for someone to break into their home so they can take that person’s life. If you give them the alternative of shooting that potential burglar/rapist/kidnapper with a tranquilizer that would instantly stop the aggressor and give the person time to call the police, imagine the kind of responses you’d get!
The most likely response is if the tranquilizer is in dart form, as the kind of tranquilizers that exist today are, a person might argue that the aggressor could pull it out before the full dosage is received and have enough time to complete the attack before being knocked into a deep sleep. There’s more than just marketing to the t-bullet.
A t-bullet will probably have to actually penetrate the skin like a non-lethal version of a regular bullet for two reasons. The first is to help refute the objections that it might not work or be effective. The second is because I had a friend about five years ago who was talking about getting a tranquilizer gun so he could shoot people and tie them up in strange places in strange poses as a practical joke. A t-bullet has to cause a serious enough injury that it doesn’t lower the bar on shooting someone so low that a person can simply shoot others with impunity every time he gets pissed off.
This would also prevent rapists from using it on unsuspecting people, who might then wake up and not know what really happened. And while t-bullets could certainly be abused, and may even be lethal in some freak instances, I’ll take getting shot by a t-bullet to a regular bullet any day. For a new generation raised on violent video games with reset buttons, maybe it's an idea whose time has come. A reset button for real life.
To arguments that t-bullets might not be effective, there’d really be no reason to suppose they’d be any more or less effective than regular bullets. You could miss a person with either, and you could shoot someone in the arm with a real bullet and piss them off in much the same way it might be argued that a gun loaded with t-bullets wouldn’t be an effective enough weapon.
Is it technologically feasible to make t-bullets that are both non-lethal, yet cause instant knock-out? I suppose if they can make Teflon–coated bullets that go through “bullet-proof” Kevlar vests, they could make t-bullets work.
If TBC is successful, however, it could shift the focus to what is really important to realize. Right now the tranquilizer drugs are extremely well regulated, and it is not at all easy to come by the drugs that would be in the t-bullets. And sure, you’d probably have ravers trying to pop open t-bullets to get all hopped up on Special K or whatever tranquilizer would be in them. But by contrast, you can buy bullets almost anywhere with no regulation whatsoever. This is part of the main import of Bowling for Columbine, and I deeply appreciated Michael Moore’s efforts.
The problem is, it is far easier for those on the left to criticize than to offer solutions, but I think TBC is an actual, bona fide real solution to the gun control problem. The strength lies in the t-bullet alternative maintaining a balance of countervailing power. Even if the criminals still have real bullets, the law-abiding citizens are on equal footing, except if they hit the aggressor first, the aggressor doesn't die.
TBC at least puts things in an interesting perspective.
Art by Todd Berman: http://gallery.passion4art.com/members/toddberman
www.michaelmoore.com (tell him to take the TBC off my hands)
www.pneudart.com (the only website about tranquilizer dart guns I could find)
www.truemajority.com (tell congress how you feel)
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article527.shtml
& http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/24/health/main510084.shtml
&
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/15/convention.protests.02/
& http://nigelparry.com/diary/media/cnnrubberbullets.html
(articles about "less lethal" rubber coated regular bullets and rubber
bullets in different contexts)
www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/10/stiglitz.htm (this is completely off topic, but it's an article by Joseph Stiglitz I think everyone should read. It's long but worth it)
(coming soon--- maybe in blog form if you're lucky!!!)
At this point, I've got no time or energy to actually put into this campaign. I'm hoping just to get the ball rolling and hope other people take this idea and run with it. This sounds like a cop out, but I'm so busy right now it's not healthy.
The t-bullet would essentially be like a heat resistant latex rubber bullet designed with a metal backing or metal casing, so that it can be fired from a conventional firearm. The rubber bullet would be designed not to penetrate deeply into the body of a person, though it would be designed to go through jackets and thick sweatshirts. Upon hitting the body, a small metal pin in the head might help pierce the capsule of tranquilizer inside the hollow bullet, so that if it were to hit a rib or a person's sternum, it would release quickly enough that the bullet would be effective, even if it could be quickly dislodged by the assailant. Of course it could be lethal, anything traveling that fast could be lethal. I suppose a BB gun could be lethal in some circumstances. You could always poke somebody's eye out. But through the wonders of good engineering, it should be possible to design a t-bullet with a dosage that would work on people of all sizes without killing small people. But even if the dosage was enough to kill people under 100 pounds, my question would be, what are you doing shooting someone that small, ostensibly in self defense? Could this work in real life? I don't know. Do you?
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The TBC manifesto was originally written between 4:00 a.m. & 5:00 a.m. on December 7, 2002 by insomniac Stephen Blackburn, a Second Year Law Student at the University of Michigan Law School, who hopes the Supreme Court doesn’t infringe on his right to choose a school because it is ethnically diverse. In his delirium he hopes this manifesto is more intelligible than the Second Amendment. He can be reached at ahimsan@hotmail.com. Please include “TBC” in the subject line. This material is copyleft 2002, feel free to reproduce, rebroadcast or retransmit without express permission of the author, unless you're going to try to make a profit from it, like by making a satirical movie or by marketing t-bullets. In that case I want my damn royalties.