It is not hard to understand why some people love guns.
They're beautiful, in their way. Crack one open, you'll see. Machined to tight tolerances, it clicks and fits together like a steel miracle. There is an undeniable erotic tug to the instrument, a palpable frictive pleasure available in the snug and oily workings of bolt and chamber. They are amazing little machines, they can throw bits of metal far and fast with amazing accuracy. When you get proficient with one, it's almost like you can think a bullet to the center of a bull's eye five or 10 football fields away. Or further. Some people can, anyway.
If you can divorce yourself from their most gruesome functions, you can admire the way they compact power. A gun is a handful that elevates man to god, that delivers lethal power. You don't ever have to exercise that power to experience the way it builds your confidence. Maybe it's even better if you keep the source covert, hidden in a holster under your coat. The steel may be cold, but the feeling's warm.
Guns don't have to kill things. They can just put holes in things. Like epees the fencers use, they can be totemic representations of old ways. Like football is stylized combat. Targets don't have feelings, they don't bleed, they don't leave behind bereaved parents or orphaned children. They don't cry and beg.
People hunt, and you may not like that, but that's what people have always done. You may not have a rifle in your house, but chances are your father or your grandfather did. If your neighbor wants to go out in the woods on a brisk fall morning and kill a duck or a deer, that's her business. If you eat steak or hamburger, you're complicit in the natural cycle of taking another creature's essence for your sustenance. You want to talk about cruelty, well, we're all cruel enough when it comes to suppertime.
You want to talk about guns, be honest. They're tools. Cool tools. Fun too. They look good.
Most of us get that. And most of us also understand that they're serious, dangerous items that shouldn't be handled carelessly or casually. Most of us understand that society would be well served by the imposition of a few regulations on who can have them and a clear delineation of the responsibilities that attach to gun ownership. Most of us understand that a national conversation about these kinds of things is desperately overdue.
Only we're not going to have that conversation. Because some people hold guns sacred. Because guns are essential to their religion.
Most of these people will never shoot anyone (despite their wishful fantasies). Most of these people are probably nice to their families and decent to their neighbors. Most of them probably don't believe the government is really coming for their guns. But they don't want to take any chances.
Their guns are more important to them than the lives of children or college students. In their calculation, the emotional succor they derive from knowing they're able to have and hold any weapon they can afford outweighs all the blood spilled in the streets and classrooms and workplaces and homes of this country. Because it says right there on paper that they have the right to bear arms, everybody just has to shut up about it and continue to let people die.
They're not being selfish. They're being virtuous. Because they believe so hard in their guns.
Now don't get it twisted. The Second Amendment means something. It means whatever the Supreme Court decides it means. We can parse that language any number of ways, we can debate what exactly the founders meant by "militia," or by "well-regulated," we can even argue about whether they could have envisioned the development of the kind of street-sweeping personal armament that's available now, but no magic Obama or Bernie or Hillary fairy is going to come along and make the guns that already inundate this country disappear. There are so many guns in this country that, even if you believed in firearms prohibition, it could never work.
I don't even think guns are our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is that weird American propensity for finding the paranoid credible, for attending to the darkest tuggings of our nature. The great American vice is our susceptibility to irrational fear.
What I believe is that most people ought to be able to have a revolver in their nightstand or a hunting rifle or shotgun handy if that's what they want to do. I don't think it really makes them any safer than they might otherwise be, and I think that one of the reasons people tend to break into houses is because they want to steal the guns inside, but that's a call I'm willing to let adults make for themselves. I would like every gun owner to be responsible for their weapons, to carry liability insurance against the damage those guns might do.
I'd like people to be careful who they sell guns to--I'd like them to ensure that the buyer has a clean record and no obvious mental deficiencies.
We could do that if our leaders had the political will and weren't beholden to fantasists given to creepy sloganeering about "cold dead fingers" and how "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun." That's nutty and vile and absolutely untrue. What we need is fewer bad guys, and failing that, fewer bad guys with guns. We don't need vigilantes hanging around schools looking for potential trouble to stop. We don't need people imagining themselves as self-sufficient heroes, as patronizing sheepdogs who imagine themselves charged with protecting the rest of us.
But we can't have a conversation that offends the hard believers. After all, so many have died for their right to keep guns. And some of them were 4 years old.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 10/11/2015