I grew up with guns. Who didn’t? We had Han Solo blasters and rifles that shot little copper pellets ducks would eat and die from.
My dad kept an assortment of firearms, defense weapons, hunting rifles, a couple shotguns for when we went out for rabbit or quail. He never made a big deal out of them, taught me to keep the barrel pointed at the ground until it was time to shoot. Not once did I hear him mention the Second Amendment nor did he put a rack in the back window of his truck and drive around the city, but on more than one drunken New Year’s Eve he fired off a round or two from his backyard straight into the sky at the edge of Phoenix. I loved those nights, my dad in a Hawaiian shirt or whatever the hell he’d be wearing, taking a drag on his Benson & Hedges as he lowered his .357 and dogs barked in backyards answering his shot.
There’s a gritty sort of pride you can take from knowing guns. But I can’t love them.
When I heard yesterday of the second suicide of a teen who survived last year’s Parkland shooting, I couldn’t help wondering if banning overkill weapons would have infused them with hope when they’d already seen the worst from guns. If it might have prevented their deaths. First it was a 19-year-old last week, then, the day after she was buried, a Parkland sophomore boy took his life, followed like a domino by a father who killed himself, his body found Monday, 7 years after his 6-year-old daughter died at Sandy Hook.
I can’t love guns, not anymore. I’ve had one around, a .22 for putting down a skunk or scaring a bear off the front porch, but it’s like having a wrench, a hammer, a tool.
The shape of a gun, the stock and barrel, the curve of a magazine, are feeling more and more like sickness. You are holding the murder weapon of our age; in your hands is the despair of so many others.
The argument I hear is that we are not New Zealand. We are a gun culture dyed in the wool. But how flexible is human culture? Plasticity is held up as our greatest evolutionary trait. We are considered, by our own account, and by Scientific American, to be one of the most adaptive species on earth, which lifted us into sentience and civilization.
The bottom-up view of cultural change is that genetic evolution defines neural substrates, which set our cognitive abilities and in turn define the range of our cultural practices. But that chain of dependence may be nonlinear. There is evidence that culture can turn around and alter our nervous system. We are designed for change on individual and cultural scales, from the bottom and the top. If we’re as adaptable as we like to think, tell me again how we can’t do it, how grit and manhood are defined by weaponry, by wielding forces in excess of ourselves. The story is getting old and it’s killing us. It is to our evolutionary advantage that we stop loving guns.
I have agreed to a story that kills us. I’ve followed the thrumming of my nervous system, something written there a long time ago.
Some years back I put a bullet through a metal boundary sign with a .45 handgun. For three decades I’ve lived around small towns with bullet holes through their signs, like hands painted at the mouth of a canyon, a message. I was proud of what I’d done, proud of the shitkicker lineage I picked up from my dad born and raised in rural southern New Mexico. But we are not 1:1, generation to generation. We shave off a little here, add more there. We don’t have to be what we were.
The pride is eroding. The hole in that sign is now what I see as harm. So clearly, it is nothing else. With so much harm around, I don’t find room for this anymore. I’m seeing these weapons for what they are, not passion, not love, but at best a tool hanging in the shed, one whose space I would rather see empty.
Once again, the gun … the tool … becomes the evil, not the human being using it. Perhaps in changing our culture neurology, we need to alter the adversarial relationship we have with other people, with animals, with the authority represented by those signs that are often used as targets. Let’s really get behind whatever it is in the male spirit that demands males to destroy things, animals, and people. Why is it considered a matter of pride to shoot an animal for a trophy? Why is it even a meritorious act to shoot a .22 to scare a bear off the porch. The bear will leave of its own will when it discovers there’s no food or shelter for it. The gun is not the danger. The human male is the most dangerous creature upon this planet and needs to be altered.
Sue, it’s the relationship with the gun I’m talking about. Guns are dangerous, as are people, men in particular, who use them madly. Having all of the guns we could ever imagine, praying to them, worshipping them, is a problem.
Craig, based on the byline at the bottom of your page, can I please have permission to share your post? Well said, and these certainly are strange times…more compassion and patience would be so helpful.
Jane
I ,too, grew up in So. New Mexico, had a BB gun (never shot a living creature), reepected guns, knew people who hunted, but nobody I knew worshipped the damn things or seemed to feel they needed war weapons to feel powerful. I honestly think this crap began when Charleston Heston was elected president of NRA. Not sure what the exact relationship was, but I didn’t like like the moviestar image even then. I always appreciate your outlook on life and so grateful you are part of my reading world!
Jane: it’s all public, please share to your heart’s content. Karen: amen, I don’t know when this began but it’s done nothing but make guns look bad and made folks crazier.
So well said, Craig. I suppose it may be said I too grew up with guns, but only in the most oblique way. My grandfather had a twelve gauge. I can only ever remember his using it when a skunk or raccoon or weasel was in the chicken coop, and even then, remember no resulting death. Guns were not definitions of masculinity – only tools. In the years since, I’ve tried and tried to understand why we’re different than, lets’s say, New Zealand, and the one inescapable is the Second Amendment. Yes, the damned Second Amendment, whose authors had, at the most deadly, weapons accurate to maybe 50 yards and capable, in one very skilled, of no more than one round per minute. We will not change, not societally nor at the level of neural substrate until this is addressed. In the meantime, the wearisome non-solutions will continue.
Living in this violent gun culture is is so far from sanity yet it’s becoming the norm now. It frightens me to think this is the world we are leaving to our kids. We need the courage to speak up and take inspiration from places like NZ.
Thanks Craig for your concern and humanity.
I was raised by a Dad who was an artist, art educator, musician and also a shooting instructor. My sister and I were raised to respect guns as a tools for hunting or marksmanship. There were always guns around. I loved going to the gun range with Dad and his friends. I was a decent shot up until the time I became pregnant with my son. Now, my hands shake any time I hold any type of gun. I know their other uses. I know the results when they are used for murder. I hope and pray my son, in his Florida school, is safe from the terror (perceived or experienced) of a misused firearm. And I question why we are so militant, so aggressive – what is this necessity for offense in the strongest, most capable, modern society?
There are guns…and there are assault automatics. There are the people who use either or both of them. Without the people, the gun is a non-sentient mass of metal – and, sometimes wood. It does no harm. It leaves the living, living.