Why Guns?

---

Why Guns?

I was sitting here wondering: why guns? Why guns, of all things?

As far back as any of us can remember we’ve been watching movies and TV shows full of guns — you can live your whole life without seeing someone shoot someone with a gun in real life, but on TV it happens several times an hour. Our good guys have guns, our bad guys have guns. That’s the plot, that’s the movie industry, the television industry, some stuff happens while we wait to see how the good guy is going to shoot the bad guy with a gun.

They used to call a gun “the great equalizer.” The argument was that if two people each have a gun then it doesn’t matter if one is younger and stronger, or meaner, or madder, it doesn’t really matter if you’re in a wheelchair or walker. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or if you are winning the argument or losing it. You each have an equal chance to shoot the other.

That seems noble and useful, doesn’t it. A bad guy with a gun, good guy with a gun, they strike a balance. The bad guy is neutralized. This is the logic of the gun advocate. This is the model they have in mind when they advocate for firearms. Sometimes the bad guy doesn’t have a gun but is just stronger than you, in which case you can defend your home or whatever if you have a gun; but mainly the bad guy busting through your door is presumed to be armed and it is fair to shoot him.

But see, here is the problem. Honestly, most of the time everybody doesn’t have a gun. Usually one person has a gun. A gunfight is extremely rare in civilian life, two guys facing off with guns pointed at each other. Look — that almost never happens. When someone kills a burglar or rapist it gets lots of press, as an example of the good-guy-with-a-gun principle at work, but even so, how often do you hear about that? In the recent Texas church shooting, a guy passing by had a gun in his car and was able to chase the shooter and hold him, though the good guy’s gun played almost no role in any of it. That’s fine, but nobody in the church had a gun. The murderer walked around killing people at will. The Second Amendment didn’t help them — who would bring a gun to church, anyway?

Point: Guns aren’t about making people equal, they are about giving extra power to an individual who hasn’t earned it.

It would be great if there was an object that would make people equal, wouldn’t it? But — look at the news, a white guy with a gun is questioned by the police and sent on his way, second amendment and so on. A black guy who might have a gun is killed, and the police only have to explain that they thought he had a gun. Literally, “The suspect was believed to be armed,” that’s all they need to say. Guns don’t make people equal in a meaningful way.

Here’s what a gun does: a gun makes a person larger than life. It gives them more physical power than God and nature gave them. If two men have a disagreement and it comes down to a fight, then the one with a gun can kill the other and win the argument. If a business has valuable merchandise and a person with a gun wants it, they can just take it. If you want to rape somebody your chances of success are much greater if you point a gun at them. If somebody cuts you off in traffic, you can just pull alongside and shoot the driver. It almost never happens that the victim in a road rage incident is also armed.

Our American culture right now is out of balance and out of its mind. We are undergoing a kind of warping of perspective, where certain people are exaggerating their own importance. White people, in particular, are losing their majority status in the country and some of them are mad about it and they aren’t going to let it happen without a (gun)fight. Hence President Trump.

Equality is just the opposite of the current goal of today’s gun-nuts, who see the Constitution as a strangely misinterpreted Second Amendment with some other stuff before and after it. One subgroup is realizing that the self-importance of their own values and beliefs outweighs their actual influence and their proportion of the population, honestly counted. And so the gun is the symbol of their ability and their willingness to inflate themselves like some kind of cartoon figures, some Legion of Heroes, larger than life, because they can shoot somebody. They recognize that there are other groups in the country, but they see them as inferior, criminals and deviants and “takers.” White supremacists are not always able to win arguments by having more accurate facts and better logic, but guns aren’t bothered by that.

Some idiot redneck can’t win an argument with me but he can shoot me, and that makes him the winner. He wins because he is a coward and cannot stand the thought of fighting his fight with the muscle and grit and intelligence that nature gave him. No, he has to buy a toy that will put a hole in somebody.

The idea that guns enforce justice or equality is based on the very rare case where two opponents are armed. It is a fake case, and the NRA-blowing nazis of America who rant about the right to bear arms know that; they have no interest in “equalizing” anything. If they find themselves in a disagreement, these cowards want to be the one with the power to stop the other one, not by reason, not by persuasion, but by ripping a hole in the other person’s body with a chunk of lead propelled by an encapsulated firecracker.

The great lessons of life teach you your place. You are one person of many, your country is one of many. You have to stand up to evil and violence, you have to give your heart to loving your family and your people, you need to be taken care of sometimes and so do others. Humility is the name of that lesson. To today’s rightwinger the gun is a way to escape having to learn the lesson of humility. If someone thinks they are your equal you can just kill them.