Yesterday, Tam asked “I laugh at the sight of the pimped tactical N-frame, too, but why?” Allow me to explain with some fuzzy dice.

Yes. You read that correctly – fuzzy dice.

If you go to a car show featuring hotrods from the ’50s and ’60s, a common sight will be a pair fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. They’re always carefully chosen to complement the paint color, and I’ve even seen fastidious owners arranging the dice “just so” to get the proper look. Fuzzy dice are an accepted, and expected, part of the decor.

Take those same fuzzy dice, run over to the Tour de France, and hang them from Lance Armstrong’s bicycle. No matter what color dice you pick – to go with his jersey or the bike’s paint – they’ll just look silly. Fuzzy dice on a racing bike? Preposterous!

Yet, objectively, the function of the dice has not changed. That is, they really have no function. They don’t do anything, they serve no architectural or mechanical purpose, they simply have mass and occupy space. They derive whatever value they possess from the context in which they occur, but that value is not intrinsic; it exists only because the context allows it to exist. Think of it as Second Life with mag wheels.

Once taken out of the expected setting, stripped of the value of that context, the reality of the fuzzy dice becomes apparent. Understand this: whether on a ’57 BelAir or Lance’s Trek Madone SL, fuzzy dice are silly. In the former case, we don’t see them as silly because we’ve been conditioned to accept them in that environment. In the latter, if every Tour de France competitor were to carry them for a few years – perhaps a decade or more – they would become part of that context too. They’d still be silly.

The same is true for the tacticool accessories Tam questions. (A bit of a correction: the device hanging at the muzzle isn’t strictly a white light – it’s a combination light and laser.) We’re accustomed to seeing lights, lasers, and milspec red dot scopes attached to autopistols. In the gun rags, in the movies, and especially in video games, we’re told that “serious” guns carry these things. Tough guys, warriors and operators, have these on their guns. Thus the context is constructed, such that we no longer objectively analyze the value of those things.

Putting them on a revolver takes them out of context. (After all, “operators” don’t carry revolvers!) Once out of context their true worth becomes easier to evaluate, and laughter is the result.

This whole idea of context is particularly important to those of us interested in the concept of self defense. There are a lot of instructors out there who teach what can only be termed range tricks. In class, the instructor’s reputation and manner of delivery combine to create a reality distortion field that even Steve Jobs would envy; in that context even the silliest ideas sound valuable. They may be useless and even counter productive, but if the student can’t evaluate them outside of their context that reality will be hidden.

The same thing happens with people who get their firearms training from Hollywood – what I’ve heard called the “Mel Gibson School of Firearms”. In the movies, the good guy always orders the bad guy to drop his weapon. The good guy gives the bad guy a chance to redeem himself, to straighten out his horrible life and repent for his sins. Naturally the bad guy doesn’t take that opportunity, wheels around to shoot the good guy, at which point our hero drops him neatly with a single shot. Roll credits.

Inside the context of the movie script, this seems perfectly plausible. Through repetition the scene is burned into our subconscious, to the point that we start to accept it as normal. Unless we learn to force ourselves to evaluate the behavior outside of the theater we may find ourselves repeating it.

This apparently happened to a certified good guy up in Washington a few years ago, who faced a gunman in a mall. From all reports, it seems the good guy drew his legally carried gun, then challenged the bad guy to drop his. Life isn’t like a movie, and the rampaging gunman simply shot him – five times, paralyzing him permanently.

It’s important to develop both the ability to look at things objectively and critically, and the judgement to recognize when it’s necessary to do so. I’d say that anything dealing with defensive firearms needs such evaluation.

As for fuzzy dice…

-=[ Grant ]=-