Spokelogic supports the rights of individuals to bear arms. Now, let’s take a look at what that means…

Swimming in the mythological land of the free, or close enough to its floating boundaries, it is easy to lose track of a fundamental truth: Freedom and Responsibility are directly proportional. With increased freedom comes an equal increase in responsibility. When it’s handed to individuals, Freedom is easily snatched up and greedily stuffed into pockets. What is not immediately evident is the doubling effect of responsibility. It’s the ferryman’s levy, the wages of sin, the glory tax. Ask Faust or Robert Johnson. You don’t have to sell your soul necessarily, but if you are free to do something, you cannot do it (for long) without due consideration of how your actions affect the world around you. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are forever tethered together in balance. The rope never gets any longer, but the spaces between the three are always vying for advantage. The balancing arbiter is Responsibility, each for the other two.

So, when you are granted a right or a freedom, what you are really gaining is a responsibility. Take for example the right to bear arms; you should have that right. But remember: the right to bear arms is really the responsibility for arms borne. If truth be told, those on the “pro” side of the gun lobby should be trading their call for rights to a proclamation of responsibility. Yes, the rights should be yours, but know that when you ask you will receive responsibility in equal measure – not just individual responsibility, but a greater civic one. When a kindergarden class is strafed by an irresponsible free man, the responsibility is not his alone. And if an individual breach of responsibility can have such tragic, civic consequences it is not good enough to throw our hands up in profound despair. If a law-abiding gun owner, one fully conscious and attentive to his or her personal responsibilities is rendered impotent against a neighbour’s lack of responsibility, society must implement regulatory safeguards to ensure against our neighbour’s shortcomings.

So, how do we do this? Some recommendations:

1. Licensing with thorough background checks. If your ability to purchase on credit the most innocuous of consumer products is limited by your credit score, surely your ability to purchase a firearm should reflect an absence of anti-social, illegal, and emotionally unstable behaviour in your personal history. Any vendor of firearms or ammunition who fails to adhere to these protocols and their regulatory reporting requirements becomes criminally liable for any damage or death inflicted by their customers’ use of the vendor’s products.

2. A license is not for life. If you have to renew a driver’s license, a passport, or any other regulated right, the same should pertain to firearm ownership. If any of the personal qualifiers mentioned in Item #1 comes into question, so too should the gun owner’s right to bear arms. If ones eyesight fails, the authorities should step in to prohibit driving of a vehicle. If the right to personal transportation is not assured, surely that should extend to ones right to walk the earth on a hair trigger.

3. Buyers’ contract of legal responsibility. You own the gun. It’s in your name. You are fully responsible for its maintenance, safe keeping, proper handling, and inaccessibility by anyone but you. Should any of these conditions break down and an injury or death result, you are responsible as though you were the perpetrator up to a level equivalent to manslaughter. Owner beware: if you choose to exercise the right to own a firearm, these are the measures of responsibility. The only way these responsibilities would be lifted would be if the firearm were stolen from you, and only then if the theft was reported within a legally designated timeframe.

Death by firearms will never go away completely. By their nature and creation they ensure this. In so far as gun ownership is supported under the auspices of ones right to defend oneself, it has never been, nor should it ever be society’s responsibility to simply consign our trust to the volition behind a faceless trigger finger.

Photo Credit: Erich Ferdinand

And guns don’t kill people. We get it. You could say the same for alcohol; yet, we hold criminally responsible those who purvey alcohol, along with those irresponsible enough to get behind the wheel while under the influence. If you are a waiter, a bartender or a liquor establishment owner, you are in the line of liability fire should one of your patrons kill someone on their errant drive home. The establishment owner may not even be on the premises at the time. As for the serving staff, they’re dropped in the middle of a tip-based, morally ambiguous zone in which they are asked to shoulder the burden of social responsibility on behalf the wider society. And that’s before booze-addled minds are expected to assess on which side of a fuzzy line they stand on their way out the door. So, if guns and alcohol don’t kill people, nor do fully functioning vehicles involved in automobile accidents, how do these differ?

Answer: In an alcohol related traffic death, there is a chain of contributing culpability; whereas, the only person held accountable in any meaningful way for a gun related death is the one who pulled the trigger. Here’s where the irony deepens. Alcohol was not brought into existence as a means of disabling or ending life (that is, at times, an unfortunate by-product). Automobiles too are designed for constructive use. Firearms, on the other hand, are specifically designed to injure or kill while their manufacture, distribution and ownership have, at best, a token monitoring in place. Why should this be allowed to persist in the face of repeated tragedies?

In the next instalment, let’s consider a way to iron out the irony. As a teaser, the opening line to that post will read, “Spokelogic supports the right of individuals to bear arms.” Stay tuned.

Photo credit: Ben Hulley

Original Draft – August 25, 2011: There can’t be many Canadians who, in a week that saw us embracing the reality of Jack Layton’s passing, aren’t receiving the news of Steve Job’s resignation as a finality. Jack, too, resigned suddenly citing health reasons generally known but specifically mysterious. Steve is still with us, and long may he enjoy a contented private life. Still, the blogosphere and trad media outlets are all twitterpated with praise for Steve. Almost two days into the delirium and we’re also starting to see the inevitable counterpoint from the punch abstainers at the wake. In Jack’s case, this came from Christie Blatchford who punched holes in the hysteria of the myth builders with her National Post article. The first detected swipe at the edifice that is Steve comes from Ken Wheaton in his AdAge article entitled, “Counterpoint: Steve Jobs isn’t THAT Awesome” in which, among other things, he mentions the overlooked flops in the Apple juggernaut. In fairness, Ken notes that those missteps are necessary on anyone’s walk to glory and that it is only in the fullness of that acknowledgement that he is comfortable citing them. And let’s be clear, Steve Jobs was singularly instrumental in changing (numerous times) how we function and communicate in the world. What he didn’t invent he appropriated and made useful.

If your company is stewing over whether to throw your marketing efforts behind an advertising or subscription model, there’s probably good reason to believe either could work. Solid market research and conscientious due diligence may show one to be foolhardy by comparison with the other, but sweeping it aside will as likely result in the dull “thump” of wasted opportunities falling off the table. Consider how the two working in tandem might build your company. Let’s call it the Adverscription Model.

The first rule of adverscription is to never operate the two sides as hedges against the other’s failure or underperformance. They should run as an integrated whole. Increased subscription will fill your advertising coffers, and your advertisers can be leveraged to increase the benefits they provide to your subscribers – many of whom are also advertisers. With this dynamic in mind, campaigns emphasizing growth in one should be explicitly tied to how they can grow the other.

The trick comes in being able to evaluate the contents of two storehouses: one labeled “Abundance” and the other, “Scarcity”. No secret here. Any effort to sell by subscription that which is abundantly available is doomed to fail. Equally, discerning the nature of what you truly control is invariably obscured by layers of uncertainty. What is certain, however, is that any attempt to force control over something that limits market access to others will end in tears – your own most likely. Instead, identify proprietary qualities such as expertise, convenience, resource access, personal networks, etc. and use them as value-adds to your products or services. Exchange that value for subscriptions and as pass-alongs to your advertisers.

The New York Times is taking another run at charging a subscription fee for access to its online content. For many this is hubris, tinged with wafts of arrogance. What makes the New York Times more worthy than, say, The Times of London, The National Post, el Pais, or any other international broadsheet? The short answer would be, Nothing. That is, the choice to charge is anyone’s; the propriety or legitimacy will be decided by the market.

There was a time when the subscription model was a given. Closely held information streams of specialty (if not societal) interest were salable. There was value in the content and an appreciation for quality packaging and ease of delivery. But that all dissipated with scarcity giving way to abundance and the build up of universal entitlement. Why should I pay for something now when I can get it – often in an identical form – elsewhere at no apparent cost? The beating of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the globe no longer has to generate a tornado in Kansas to be recognized. In a digital, connected world, insignificance can travel unchanged at lightspeed and the subscription model just gets in the way.

So it is with the Times’ latest attempt to put lightning in a bottle. The quest to determine where scarcity truly lies has become our latest Klondike. As with every gold rush, the victors are few and the tales of the hopeful become the stuff of questionable fiction. But let there be no mistake: there is a point, a time, and a place where value can be recognized through commercial exchange. This is the separation of abundance, which should be given freely, and the scarcity peppered within and around it. The next challenge for those panning the silt churning out of the information cloud is to determine if the nuggets of scarcity are sufficiently valuable as to fund the occurrence and availability of the abundance? Again, a market decision.

The Times should not be ridiculed or vilified for the attempts it is making in assigning a market value to its content. Certainly it is valuable. The quality of its journalism (not unlike many other sources) holds undoubted merit. The expenses associated with making it possible are deserving of revenue offsets. In going to the market for compensation through subscription we must allow for there being flawed rationales – if only because the content’s value is a moving target, fleeting in its legitimacy. If the Times chooses to charge for some content and not for others, or draws seemingly arbitrary lines in the sand as to who can access, through which door, the market will inevitable instruct the proprietors in what is deemed fair. Adjustments will inevitably be warranted, and so we will arrive eventually at an equitable understanding.

What would be wrong is if efforts to compensate for quality were not explored and we lost the content altogether. That would be regrettable. Let us take heart from the fact that subscriptions are only one element in a broader mix of revenue possibilities. Let the business models shift; communication will out.