Gun Nuts, Nuts About their Guns and Maybe Just Nuts

Gun enthusiasts live in a strange world. It is a dystopian nightmare in which laws are useless, their families are threatened by imminent attack and a soon-to-be fascist government is going to try to seize their weapons. Their concern for human life is passing, their love of guns is eternal. Some seem in many ways to be reasonable people who will weigh both sides of an argument. But when in comes to guns their position is intractable. Their paranoid delusions have been created by none other than the NRA. This is perhaps the worst of the NRA's foul contributions to the US, they have poisoned minds, convincing their members that any gun law, no matter how reasonable or bengin, is the first step to gunless totalitarian rule.

I had a reasonably sane conversation with a gun lover on Twitter in which we exchanged opposing views but I was ultimately frustrated by his unwillingness to concede that their might not actually be forces in this country looking to disarm the entire populace. He was sure that the next restriction on gun ownership or sale passed would begin the slippery slide into jack booted thugs confiscating his guns. These are guns, mind you, that he is convinced are needed to protect his family (how many home invasions are thwarted by good guys with guns?). The fact is that a gun in a home is far more likely to be used on a member of the household than on a stranger is evidently of no import to the gun aficionado.

Other gun owners have asserted that citizens must be armed to protect themselves from the government which again, they think is a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into an authoritarian regime bent on appropriating privately owned guns. Apparently an armed citizenry will be able to rebuff a government that has at its disposal a military fully armed with tanks, missiles and bombs. Good luck with that. Evidently some gun lovers imagine a future in which they may gallantly die in a hail of bullets while standing on their porch shooting soldiers. Or perhaps they envision succumbing to a tank that steamrolls them as they wave the flag in one hand and fire a pistol with the other.

One of the more disturbing things about gun owners is their conviction that laws simply won't work to deter gun violence. So why bother? It begs the question of why we have any laws at all. People gonna rape, gonna embezzle, gonna steal and gonna jaywalk so people gonna shoot regardless of laws. Seemingly gun lovers don't care about laws protecting them because they can protect themselves perfectly well enough with their personal arsenals.

Then there's their total misreading of the second amendment (not that gun toters are terribly good at the niceties of reading and comprehending). Amendment numero dos begins: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. That's right a "well-regulated militia being necessary." Here's the deal, when the constitution was written the United States had no standing army and relied on the aforementioned militias for protection. There was no intent to ensure that everyone had a gun as a right of citizenship. Former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger called the NRA contention that everyone is entitled to a gun"a fraud on the American republic." From an article in Politico magazine by Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and author of The Second Amendment: A Biography: "There is not a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation in (James) Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor was it mentioned, with a few scattered exceptions, in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor did the U.S. House of Representatives discuss the topic as it marked up the Bill of Rights. In fact, the original version passed by the House included a conscientious objector provision. “A well regulated militia,” it explained, “composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

It's odd that the NRA and their minions so extoll the second amendment when they clearly don't understand it. Then again the NRA is a twisted group of people whose sole raison d'être seems to be to boost gun sales -- by any means necessary. I hold them responsible for making paranoid delusionals out of so many gun owners. I further hold them responsible for much of the wholesale gun slaughter that is forever going on in the land of the free (not free, mind you, from the fear of being shot).

I find this love of guns bizarre. Sure some people like to go hunting (in other words they like to kill animals for sport) and target practice can be fun and it's not impossible to rationalize having a gun in the house or glove box for protection and owning an antique gun or a gun that great grandpa used to use might be cool. But gun lovers have a weird obsession with the gun itself and one can imagine how they are possible phallus substitutes. When I was about ten I had a bee bee gun that I liked to use, to "play army" with and to shoot twigs off trees. One day I got a little bird in my sights and felled it with one shot. As it twirled to the ground I felt sick. I never shot at an animal again. I can't even begin to imagine shooting a duck or a deer or even a damn squirrel (maybe a rat, I hate rats). But some people love to hunt, love their guns and are as scared as hell of said guns being taken. Weird.

The impossibility of talking to gun lovers, of moving them one iota from their firmly entrenched positions (concrete provided by the NRA) is truly depressing. The NRA has become part of the right wing's crusade to eliminate compromise from US discourse and politics. Everything is binary. My way or the highway. And in the case of the NRA, their way leads to more senseless violence.

(My position on guns was summed up well in a tweet by a gent by the name of Lawrence Tribe: No guns till age 21, no bump stocks, ban AR-15s & equivalent guns, ban multi-shot clips, ban body-shredding ammo, make background checks & registration universal, use red flags & restraining orders, no guns for those on no fly list, boycott NRA, vote out its puppets.)