Despite obvious diversity, people all over the world have a lot in common. We say we want peace. And all our wars are defensive. But doesn’t every biped who takes up a weapon – the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Romans, the Islamic campaigns of the seventh century, the Crusades of the twelfth, the Reconquista of the fifteenth, the European conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth, to the political revolutions of the eighteenth to the Confederate States of America in the nineteenth to the wars for and against communism in the twentieth – conceive the action as “defense”? Often actions that are obviously offensive to every objective vantage of the matter are conceived by the actors on the inside as “defending the honor of…,” or logically defensive. For example, incredibly, the Japanese, in December 1941, viewed their attack on Pearl Harbor as a reasonable defense. And the famous al-Qaeda attacks in America in September 2001 were – again incredibly – construed as a kind of “defense” of the holy places in Saudi Arabia. Yes, even terrorists think of their barbarism as a legitimate defense.
Various traditions arrive insidiously. Our history – or our construction of it – and our list of uncompromising traditions afford us a stronger and more agreeable self-image. We start out defending a virtue of some sort – the nation, the ethnic group, the “one true god,” the family, the “sanctity of life” – only to end up numbering among the countless misguided souls who end up on the wrong side of history. And it all starts with our self-righteous claims at that moment when we join oh-so-incrementally with an institution, an agenda, a movement, etc. that embraces the methods and the preparations of tyranny and oppression.
In the 1700s an American Quaker named John Woolman wrote of his society: “The seeds of iniquity have been sown on this continent, and are growing fast.” The English word “iniquity”comes from a Latin word that meant, basically, “unfair”, and the unfairness is associated in the word with the idea of being “uneven”. So, it seems inequality and iniquity have something very much in common. And if we pause substantially to give it thought, a great deal of the (imposed) suffering we see in the world arrives because of some manifestation of inequality. Woolman was referring to slavery. He could see that his people were headed in a very dangerous direction with the horrifically oppressive institution.
There was indeed a lot of trouble to come. Oppression carries something deeply inauspicious in its figurative DNA.
We can, if we try, identify the ideas and practices that establish or support inequality. And we need to do this before it is too late. When we are already profiting from drug trafficking or human trafficking, or when we are already armed and on the battlefield, or when we already own slaves, it is too late. In the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore offers an instructive quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” When you’re profiting from something, even if it is not a material gain that is yours but a gain in felt “safety”, and that thing is iniquitous in its DNA, it’s already too late for you. You’ve gone over to the dark side, wittingly or no, and you’re profiting in the moment, on the wrong side of history. I recall seeing a woman in a TV documentary who was the wife of a big-time drug operative in the 1980s, and I recall her astonishing words about how she played along for so long in a game that had ultimately such a horrific ending: “The money was good.”
We go wrong lots of ways. Sometimes we try for material gain, sometimes for acceptance, sometimes for an improvement in how we feel about our nation, our people, our nationality, our family, our status, our security… and the design sets us on a wrongheaded path. Here I discuss how so many go terribly wrong when they think of the firearm.
In popular culture, guns are seen in the hands of heroes on the battlefield. Hence we do not think of buying a gun as a cowardly or fearful act. We think the person is getting the gun for “protection”, but we do not go so far as to actually speak that which is unwelcome in a gun culture (like that in the United States) – that protection is sought by those who experience fear.
How does a person go from righteous and necessary defense to factual offense? And how do so many countless millions, indeed billions, add their piteous voices to the already cacophonous wrong side of history?
In my time, in the United States, there is the tradition of owning firearms, and some estimates have put the total number of weapons in private hands at over 300 million. Every so often we have a mass shooting, sometimes where children have been killed, and the media bashfully re-enjoins the obvious question: Why does our country have no ability or intention to limit or control the spread of firearms into the hands of every criminal, every sociopath, every deranged person, and every terrorist?
Some point to the very successful tactics of the National Rifle Association, some to the United States Constitution, and some to American history itself, which made ample use of firearms to subdue the native population of what is now the United States of America.
There are more reasons than these, however. One reason is almost laughably simple: people grow up in a gun culture and learn the twisted logic and stupidity of that culture. And mind you, reader, that I do not use the word stupidity casually, as a mere pejorative. We live in a time (early 2016) where bombast and bumptiousness and ad hominem criticism are more and more common, and when we hear the term “stupid” nowadays we count it only in its critical sense, not in its literal sense. But I mean my words literally. The term “stupid”, inasmuch as the term is descriptively and accurately used, refers to an inability or disinclination to learn. My phone’s voice system, Siri, for example, cannot put one statement together with another. If I ask a question and Siri responds, “I don’t know what you mean,” I cannot then add to what I previously said: Siri behaves as if the verbal exchange of the past fifteen seconds never occurred. It is stupid.
When I remark that my own American culture is stupid with respect to guns, what I precisely refer to is the inability of a person who has fallen into the errant mindset of gun-afforded security to find his or her way out. In this it is like the jihadist who has begun to think a certain way, and his increasingly romantic view of himself becomes a kind of intoxicant. It is indescribably wonderful to think of oneself as a “soldier of God,” acting wholly on behalf of God and without worry for the safety of anything at all, not even himself. Similarly, the gun-owner only grows and grows in the certainty that his gun indeed makes him and his family safer. No statistical information contradicting this notion fully enters the cavity of the ear. The gun is associated with safety and security and protection from being victimized, and every day that one possesses the instrument one grows in the conviction that the (felt) security and the weapon are closely linked.
And one’s own security, being non-negotiable from the outset, becomes one’s religion and mantra.
How is the mass murder of children dealt with by such persons? The locus of blame is entirely – no, not 99.9%… entirely – on the perpetrator of the violence himself; systemic causation is invisible to a mind so prepossessingly skewed.
The gun itself has served to obscure important learning; the seeds of iniquity have been sown. Here is the way it all plays out in real life.
A woman (let’s call her “Virginia” in honor of a place that has sometimes been called “the gun running capital of the United States”) grows up in rural Tennessee. In her youth she learns the rightness and sensibility of gun ownership. Accidental deaths and gun crimes of passion are known, of course, but the guns themselves are not to blame for anything; it’s the damn fool who left the gun lying around or the idiot who lost his temper that is to blame. And the weapon itself is as perfectly harmless and innocent as the daisy.
Virginia grows up in a gun owning household. Her father had several guns and each of her three brothers owned at least two. She marries a gun enthusiast who happens to be a U.S. Marine. He is stationed overseas after their marriage, and she lives alone in her mid-twenties in an apartment complex in Memphis. During the eighteen months that her husband is away, her feelings of loneliness, fear and anxiety increase, and she predictably buys a gun for her own protection while she lives alone.
She herself can recall several incidents reported in the news media where young people or children were killed accidentally by guns, and she knew of two passion crimes of murder involving guns. But none of this weighed at all with her. She learned by rote the cliché, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” never once allowing herself the insight, Yes, but people with guns kill people better! The guns were blameless and that was that.
The “safety” Virginia enjoys with her gun is so appreciable that she persuades two of her girlfriends to “protect” themselves likewise. Her girlfriends become gun owners.
One day, one of the two girlfriends has a heated argument with her boyfriend and she shoots and kills him. She is tried for manslaughter and convicted. She serves two years in prison for the offense.
And you know what? Virginia does not change her mind about guns at all. Her friend was not sent to prison for anything that involved the possession of the gun, even though that was what was used in the slaying that was categorized as “manslaughter”. The gun is the daisy and the unfortunate killing a whoopsy daisy.
Beware all that obfuscates and inclines us away from learning! Guns are such devices! They make the terms so drastically unequal – a little woman of 93 pounds can quickly end the life of a 250 pound athlete. Guns tell us a comforting lie: that we are safe with them, even though the woman who possessed the weapon was not safe from prison and her boyfriend was not safe from being murdered. The mass shooting at an elementary school is relatively rare, but these personal stories are common.
Several years ago, I met a retiree named John on Long Island, New York. We discussed guns and our personal perspectives on the issue. John related two experiences that stand out from his childhood. He recalled an episode when he was seven years old, arriving in class one morning to see that the boy who usually sat in the adjacent seat was absent. John asked the teacher about the boy’s whereabouts, and the teacher told that the boy had been killed in a gun accident. Since the kid was utterly dead, I don’t think I need to comment further; this is the end of this paragraph.
John’s second experience was with a gun safety instructor when he was living in Rhode Island around 1942, when he was thirteen years old. The safety instructor was showing two youths, John and another boy about the same age, how to hold the weapon, and how to point it. The man became distracted at one point as the gun was pointing toward the ground and it went off, and the bullet ricocheted around before it settled. No one was hurt by this incident, but it is very much worth noting that this was a “safety” instructor who actually fired the gun.
Then there is the story from early 2015 in Arizona. The United States is such a freaky place! And late-night stand up comedians get more material than they can use from just observing the absurdity of American life. There was a family visiting Arizona as tourists, and they came to a place that (bizarrely!) offered restaurant dining and also the opportunity to fire automatic weapons outside. What a fine birthday treat the nine year old girl would have that day! What a delightfully unique experience to have some delicious food and then go outside and, for the very first time, get to fire an automatic weapon! Hooray!
She was being shown how to use a handheld automatic weapon by a licensed safety instructor. There is video of this “instruction”. It shows the man telling the little girl how to hold the gun and how to point it. She fires. Hooray. Then he shows her something again and tells her to fire again, and as she fires the recoil causes the device to pull her little arm fully out of position and the gun fires directly into the man’s face. He died. End of paragraph.
If gun safety were a myth, tens of millions of Americans would be fully unable to disabuse themselves or to be disabused by others. ABC News reported in the early 1990s on the results of a study that found that household guns were 43 times more likely to be used in an accident or in an act of rage or fear against a known person as they were to be used in defense against an intruder. I don’t know about you, reader, but there’s a huge difference between 4.3 percent and 4,300 percent, and if the prices in the grocery store went up by 4,300 percent, I’d notice.
If I eat a food that has spoiled and I get food poisoning and die it is not because the food was created with the design to put poison into the consumer’s body. But when a person gets shot in the face, he is shot with a device that is designed for shooting someone in the face. Surely, spoiled, poison-containing fish, as a victual, kills better than ordinary fish, but guns kill people better. And in my lifetime more than one million people in the United States have been killed with firearms of some kind.
I am relatively safer than the average American because I do not own any sort of firearm, I refuse to ever own a firearm, and I will not knowingly associate with people who own guns.
Look still deeper. It is necessary to dispense with war and oppression and violence of every sort. It is necessary because our terrific technological capabilities form a civilizational challenge of unprecedented proportions. Former U.S. president John F. Kennedy once remarked, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” He might as well have said that humankind needs to put an end to the mindset of malevolence, misanthropy and excused violence, or this dubious trinity will serve its verdict regarding our continuance.
Much of our beliefs about guns and punishments and war and justice all largely follow the sway of emotion. There is no easy way out of this firearms conundrum (that we cannot really learn after we’ve “learned” that we’re safe with the gun).
Alas, the seeds of iniquity have been sown on this continent.