), but he's a fine writer.
I am a gun owner
Revised June 14, 2016
Original: http://havedash.wordpress.com/2016/05/0 ... gun-owner/
I bear no ownership, responsibility, complicity, shame or guilt over what others do with their guns.
I have multiple firearms and many hundreds of rounds of ammunition in my house, all secured to my (and the law’s) satisfaction and purchased legally. I own both pistol and long guns, including one that’s probably a scary notion for some. I shoot mostly shotgun because I find it the most challenging and fun.
I’d mostly like this essay to not be about my guns. They are just blocks of plastic, wood and metal. My gun ownership does not define me to any large degree, although our cultural debate—as I see it in most media and in online posts after mass-shooting events, at least—would make it seem so.
Because that portrayal is often incongruent with my life experience, this essay is about my beliefs. I’m tired and drained from reading news of mass shootings. They are undeniably awful and a crime against decency, community and humanity.
However, I’m also tired of being cast as an other, a knuckle-dragger and an outsider to polite company every time some twisted, sick person commits a crime with a gun. I am tired of being told I need to have a conversation about guns, or take action, or “do something.” I am tired of being educated about new proposed gun laws that are condescendingly called “common sense” but don’t address common problems for—or make sense to—me. I am tired of being lectured by politicians and celebrities who are protected by men with guns, and particularly by those celebrities who also make their living by glamorizing or normalizing violence in our culture.
I write anonymously so that I am not threatened, harassed or bothered. The notion that I have to do so saddens me. I write to give (what I hope is) an articulate voice to others like me. Feel free to share that voice.
I am a middle-aged husband, father, brother, son, nephew and uncle living in the heart of “blue” America. Fierce Democrat once upon a time, then a Republican for a while, but now an unenthused independent. Agnostic. Maybe atheist. I don’t know. I guess that means agnostic. I have two degrees, one a master’s, and a white-collar, middle-management job. I’ve literally never had so much as a speeding ticket, which is a miracle in its own right. I volunteer in my community. I am a lifelong, many-gallon blood donor, one of my proudest accomplishments. Contradicting a blanket claim about gun owners that numerous friends have posted on social media, I have an average-sized male body part that works fine. I write as a hobby, one of many things I do for myself, like kayaking, jogging, hiking, camping and reading. Shooting is another, and has been on and off since I was about 12.
I shoot for fun. Lost in the news cycle and discussion about guns is the fact that they’re incredibly fun. My youngest and I have a great time shooting. We have a tradition of going out for lunch after going through boxes of ammunition, clays and paper targets in a morning at the range. It reduces my stress. We look forward to it all week. It brings us together outdoors to talk and laugh and share. It’s cathartic, like running, in that the skill of sport shooting is always you against you. It’s a fun thing to achieve, or try to achieve, eight clays in a row, which is presently our record. OK, my teenager’s record. We recently participated in a sporting clays tournament, which is a little bit like golf with shotguns. It was an amazingly enjoyable and safe two hours in the woods with other groups of shooters.
I shoot for heritage. I said this essay isn’t really about my guns, but this part is. The semiautomatic pistol my teen uses is the one my father used to teach me when I was that age. It’s easy to shoot and maintain, ammunition is comparatively cheap and it does the job of punching holes in paper. One of my shotguns is a family hand-me-down, which has now provided four generations with countless hours outside with family, as well as a few meals. It’s a handsome but not especially great shotgun, however, its history is pretty marvelous. I hope all my firearms end up with my kids. I hope there are still places for them to use the firearms at that point. I suspect there will not be.
I shoot to teach and learn. Responsibilities. Consequences. Rights. Danger. Safety. Physical and mental discipline. Practice. Craft. History. Civics. Nature. Politics. Mechanics. Science. Physics. F=MA. Hobbies that get me outside and don’t involve a screen or a cord. Something real in a world where everyone seemingly spends their lives looking at their phones.
I shoot for self-protection. I will not and do not say, brag, boast or make a spectacle about whether I do or do not carry regularly. But I shoot in part so, if I ever need to, I can protect myself, my family and my property. I don’t expect that will ever happen; statistically, it’s pretty safe around here. I like and respect the local police, but I know they will not respond in time should I need them. The first and only time I called 911 for an emergency, it took 20 minutes for help to arrive. “An error in our processes” was the explanation. That’s nice. The police station is fewer than two miles away. I am under no illusion the police can protect my family. I actually don’t believe that’s their primary job. I believe that protection of self, family and property is an innate right. Speaking of which…
I shoot for my rights. Rights—all rights, no matter what for—are harder to gain and keep, and easier to lose, than they should be. I like practicing the use of my rights, all of them. I like that the Constitution isn’t written to GIVE me rights, but instead written to detail what the federal government cannot TAKE AWAY. Read the words; that’s how they wrote it. I think that’s clever.
I do not hunt. I have nothing against it, and I have killed animals before and eaten what I’ve killed. I had some venison backstraps in the freezer recently, thanks to a hunter friend who had a good season. Venison is tasty, and the deer died a lot more humanely than the cows did for the burger I ate tonight. But I don’t have a desire or the time to hunt right now. I think hunting requires an accuracy I do not have, and my worst fear of hunting is wounding, but not finishing, an animal. I have respect for those who hunt responsibly. I respect nature a lot. I get the appeal of hunting. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not about the guns.
I do not belong to the NRA, nor have I ever as an adult; I think I was a junior member as a teenager when I took a rifle class. I have nothing particularly against it. I have nothing particularly for it. I know fairly little about it, to be honest, beyond headlines. I know they provided the safety course material I recently took. I simply have no need to spend more money, or join another thing. I get enough mail.
While life and nature are often violent, I abhor gratuitous or unnecessary violence in entertainment. I abhor most depictions of firearms in entertainment. I am astounded by the persistent, inaccurate use and portrayal of guns and their terminology by those who wish to restrict my ability to have and use my own.
I am aghast at gun violence, particularly the inner-city, drug- and gang-fueled madness and random mass shootings. Only the latter seem to turn into a media spectacle and political hay for our “leaders” on both sides. I often wonder why.
I say that sarcastically. I know why.
I mourn for the dead. I know friends of those who have died of gunshots from their own hand and from others. I wouldn’t be human or a parent if I didn’t feel deep sorrow or grief for those killed by madmen with guns. However, I can feel no more responsibility or shared guilt from those deaths than I can by still driving while thousands of Americans die in drunk driving crashes every year. Or by still drinking a glass of wine, when alcoholism destroys families around us. What happened in Orlando or Newtown or the countless other crime scenes bears no, zero, zip, nada connection to what I do with my guns. And yet, many are pushing for my rights to be restricted because of it, to no measurable end in reducing evil acts.
I have a few basic beliefs tangentially about the gun “debate” that inform my deeper views on a lot of things. Evil will always find a way to do evil. Criminals, by definition, don’t follow laws. Gun laws do not stop gun damage. Many laws regarding guns don’t ensure, and may not even improve, safety. Guns don’t cause action. We have an awful lot of gun policy and laws already. There are clearly people with access to guns who shouldn’t have that access. They cause a lot of pain and damage. They don’t really care much about what a law says. Our legal, moral and societal inability to face who those people are means they will continue to abuse guns.
Replace the word “gun” in that paragraph with “junk food,” “children/child safety,” “free speech,” “alcohol” or “cars,” and no one bats an eye. It’s an interesting exercise.
Another interesting exercise is to wonder why it’s almost always men who commit criminal shooting, and particularly young men who commit the random mass shootings. How do they get to this point? I don’t know the answer to the question for sure, but to me it’s a toxic brew of cultures or religions that show and accept violence everywhere, where guns are easy to get, and where the criminals know they can get the attention they apparently so crave from the media and information flow today. I think all of those parts are obvious enough. Remove the guns from the equation, as many want to, and you’ve still got emotional timebombs on your hands, living in their own manufactured worlds made possible with technology today. They can kill just as many with other means, and even if the larger-than-life “assault” weapons were magically banned, even my hand-me-down shotgun and cheap plinking pistol could cause just as much damage in as short a period a time. They choose to do what they do, in my opinion, because we’ve normalized and glorified violence by gun. It isn’t people like me who do that normalizing and glorifying. It isn’t the people I see next to me in the woods or at the range.
I don’t believe the 2nd amendment, or any other, is an absolute. History, culture and case law have adjusted the meaning of all of them over time, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. It’s part of the deal in our Republic. I do think most of the Founders would broadly be on the side of gun owners today, from what I read of history and 2nd Amendment law history. They knew what they were writing and why. It wasn’t about hunting. Many of them lived a hard, rough life (full of gunfire, incidentally), and they understood tyranny and governments not accountable to the people.
And, let’s be honest, laws aside, the reality is there are simply a lot of guns in America and always have been. Hundreds of millions of them. In my liberal town in my liberal state in my liberal region, I can step out onto my driveway and know for a fact that the Democratic-Party-lawn-sign family across the street has a gun because they hunt deer with it, and I know the single woman over there has a pistol permit. I suspect that another neighbor has a gun, although we’ve never talked about it, but he’s got a Gadsden Flag bumper sticker. Another neighbor is a retired combat vet, and I bet he either has or has once owned a gun. So, counting my house, four of the six houses around me have or likely have guns. Americans, even here in blue country, like our guns. I’m totally fine with that.
While I understand it’s not like this everywhere, in my state and town, the process for law-abiding citizens to get guns, ammunition and permits is Kafka-esque and a pain in the ass for no good reason. Actually, I guess there is a reason…it’s to make it difficult enough that people don’t want to go through the hassle. I’m not really fine with that. It’s not good policy, principle or practice. Those who wish to place my gun rights under such random and ineffective bureaucratic oversight would likely not be so lackadaisical about some of their other rights treated so poorly. Imagine being able to get a trial by jury only if you can produce three letters of reference, only to find that, well, the law doesn’t really REQUIRE these letters, but the local chief likes to get them. Or imagine going through a process of paperwork and hours of waiting, or trying to get in during the limited window your town allows for fingerprinting, or finding out that your government doesn’t accept its own cash for payment for your permit to exercise your rights. My state and town deliberately makes it hard to complete the process. This isn’t done to allow for a background check; I’d understand that. It’s done to dissuade you. That is, in a word, nonsense.
I believe guns are not inherently dangerous but should be handled responsibly and seriously. In 30 years of shooting, I’ve never had an accidental discharge and I’ve only been near one once, which was alarming, completely preventable and its damage mitigated by other safety precautions. The moment stays in my mind because it was an outlier. I have no sympathy or tolerance for the—in my experience, few—people who handle firearms casually.
I worry far, far, far less about being shot at the gun range, literally surrounded by people with guns, than I do at, say, a “gun-free” school or the mall. However, I don’t think the blanket solution is for everyone to be armed. By the sheer statistical odds, more people doing anything—carrying guns, driving, eating ice cream, running with scissors, whatever—will mean more incidents, good and bad, with those things. Just like some people shouldn’t drive, drink or become parents, some people who legally can shouldn’t have a gun. And good luck to us controlling that, if we even could or should, since we do so well with restricting people driving, drinking or becoming parents. I have very little trust in government to get it right, since they generally get so little else right.
And, despite their statements otherwise, I do firmly believe many in government and those who support them would happily take all my gun rights away from me in their perfect world. They often try to do so incrementally under false pretenses and in bad faith. I have a tremendous and rightfully earned lack of trust and confidence in gun control advocates. Most of the language used to justify the restriction of my rights is either false, knowingly misleading or wrapped in language and causes that make me distrust the intent. “Assault” weapons, “machine gun,” “automatic,” “military style,” “common sense,” “need,” “loophole,” “we need to conduct a study” and on and on. I’d say it’s Machiavellian, but I think Machiavellian also means in part that the manipulation is clever. This is ignorance dressed up as faux-compassion and faux-logic, and by many people who are good souls with good end goals. They throw stats around, and I could match them one-for-one with counterpoint stats. It’s a tired argument.
They rely on emotional pulls. I find arguments along the lines of, “If it saves even one life…” or “Even if it works a little…” to be vapid. No one would want to live in a world where policy and law was made based on that benchmark. It’s a argument for people who choose to think only at the surface.
In the end, I have no “answers” to the “problem” that are simple, protect our individual freedoms and also protect our society from the fear caused by those intent to harm others. I don’t think there are many answers like that.
I am a law-abiding gun owner. I bear no ownership, responsibility, complicity, shame or guilt over what others do with their guns.
There are many dozens of millions like me out there. We don’t all look alike, or fit a neat stereotype, but we have something in common: we are not a problem for someone to fix, and we increasingly resent people trying.
