Guns and more guns...

All this talk of guns...

I've always wanted to own a gun. Nothing crazy but a simple revolver or pistol that is easily stored and not a ginormous show of death and destruction. Why? Because I want to know how to use a gun. Because there are too many evil people who know how to use this tool and not enough good people. As if refusing to learn to use a gun will somehow protect you from someone who points a gun at you.

Knowing how to shoot a gun will not help you stop someone from shooting you either of course...

Which is why I'd also like to know how to disarm and unload at least three of the most common types of guns that are on the streets.

I think knowing how to shoot a gun to protect yourself as well as knowing how to disarm a gun to defend yourself are both skills that are as obvious and necessary as learning to drive manual transmission.  It is very ego-centric and naive to believe that just because my (family/town/state/country/belief/political stance) is against the use of something, everyone else should be too.

Example: How many Americans actually know how to drive a manual transmission car? And I don't mean like "I learned how to not kill the car shifting into first when I was 16" but realistically react properly in different situations and handle the car with control? Certainly not enough. And then when they (I say they because while I also didn't know how until last year, I'd like to believe that my truck and I are pretty friendly by now) travel to other countries to rent cars that turn out to be manual, it's like the world flipped upside down. "How can you only have stick? Can't you find me an automatic?" Can't you just not be stupid? The rest of the world drives manual... get with the program or at the least learn how to keep up.

While I don't plan on having a collection of guns laying around my house, I'd like to be confident that if there is ever a time when the need arises and there is a gun there to be used for my own protection, I know that I'm not the one who ends up dead.... or at least I know that I did my best to pop the fucker in the head first. How silly would it be to have a gun next to you and the bastard coming after you and you can't help yourself because "you didn't know how?" that's NEVER a good excuse in any context. Especially not one where your life is endangered.

Am I planning to go hunting murderers and piss off some local gangs? Hell no- I have way too much gardening to do before spring rolls in. There is (unfortunately) always news of "tragedy" from shootings in the media. Each of them are tragedies because they are always unexpected, completely unwarranted, and the victims are completely oblivious and undeserving. I don't have to go flaunting the wrong colors in gang territory or go visit Ted Bundy at his house because those crazies walk around town and hang out on the same streets we walk on. Worse still, that unstable teenager, the depressed office clerk, the financially strained father of 4, etc. etc. these people also walk the same streets as we do and it's hardly as simple as wearing the wrong color that sets them off.

Hear me, this is NOT to imply that the victims of tragedies were victims because they were merely unprepared. There are always tales of heroes in these situations like the teacher who was killed because she shielded her students until they could get clear of the shooting, or the guy who took bullets to his back covering his new girlfriend of only three months. No knowledge of guns necessary to be an incredibly selfless human being. But if there was a chance to take the gun away would they have known how? With the kind of courage that was displayed, I have no doubt that if either of them had the opportunity, they both would have tried.

Suicide by gun was also a sub-category of interest with all of this attention by the media on gun violence of all kinds. The NYT posted a story about lowering suicide rates by focusing in on gun laws that will keep guns out of suicidal hands. The story quotes an epidemiologist, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, "'The literature suggests that having a gun in your home to protect your family is like bringing a time bomb into your house...Instead of protecting you, it’s more likely to blow up."

What is disturbing to me about the many similar claims being made is the implied notion that we as the people who own these guns have very little agency in what actually is done with these tools. No the gun does not just blow itself up out of the blue- it is not a time bomb (and while we're on the time bomb: it too would also be completely inactive if the timer were not set to countdown by a human. Without the human factor as a catalyst for the destruction these objects are capable of causing, they are just a jumble of parts and pieces that fit in a very specific way. Go ahead, bring the time bomb into your house- just put a very secure lock on the stupid timer and see if the bomb will actually just "decide" to blow you up... because it is "violent"...right). The gun does not get depressed and decide to kill people. The gun does not go into a jealous rage and kill its spouse. These are feelings and reactions of people. People who then use the nearest and simplest tool to act on the feelings they are having.

The gun is not what made someone depressed. In fact, the presence of the gun does not even become a factor in the person's battle with depression until it reaches a point of climax and suicide seems to be the only escape.
The cheating person is not a cheater because there is a gun around. The gun does not encourage or discourage their cheating in any way. The jealous spouse does not get MORE jealous and angry because there is a gun somewhere in the house. As they are two separate sentences, they are two completely separate circumstances until there is a catalyst. There is a gun in the house. The spouse is in a jealous rage because they are being cheated on. At a point, the jealous spouse reaches a mindset where they no longer have the desire to confront, work through, understand, or do anything with the cheater but to exact their revenge. The question then, is how? This is the point at which the two separate circumstances come together. When the fact that there is a gun in the house becomes the answer to the question of how to take revenge on the jealous rager's cheating spouse. The gun is merely a tool. Were there not a gun in the house, the jealous spouse would use something else. That the end result would be fatal to the cheater is not a certainty: I believe that is what makes this issue of guns so clouded and charged.

But something like this cannot be clouded and charged because that's how people lose sight of the real causes- by fixating on symptoms. The gun is just a tool. The ridiculous volume of violence with which guns are associated is not the cause of guns and guns are not the cause of the violence. Guns and gun violence are the symptom of a MUCH larger problem to do with society, history, the way humans have chosen to deal with problems, etc. And why are we fixated on guns? Because it's easier to get rid of all one inanimate object in the world than it is to just get rid of human nature. Realistically though, remember Sleeping Beauty? Yeah, the king and queen got rid of every spindle in the land and she still found one on which to prick her finger on the day of her birth as prophesied by the evil fairy. Because she's human... and that's just how it is.

This post needs more fleshing out before it's done. However at 2+ months of dabbling and tweaking and adding and deleting it's time to post in all its erroneous glory. All I can say is that since starting this post I've shot a few different kinds of guns and I love it. I will own a gun and I will absolutely make sure to know how to use it like I know how to use a garden shovel. Because when I garden, I need the shovel and God forbid I am ever in danger but when I am, I'll need the gun. I don't know about you but "I didn't know how to defend myself" is not exactly a real excuse when it comes to my life.