Magic Bullets
Tragedies involving firearms always invoke giant waves of anger and passion, sending them charging at gun proponents. The armed brigade stands firm behind legally purchased weapons of every sort, ready to meet the force head on with patriotic Facebook statuses and weird communal gun propaganda. But most of the time we don’t see anyone drown under these unimaginable storms of criticism and pressure. Where any other ideological army would fall, these soldiers remain able to block any sort of infringement upon their God-given rights to own automatic assault weapons. But it’s not simply their strong wills that enable this, no. It’s their enticing spells.
The shallow reasons for assault weapon ownership quickly pile up like shell casings under a shooting bench.
Is it hunting? You’re not using an assault weapon to hunt, unless you’re a grossly incompetent hunter. Large deadly assault weapons aren’t anyone’s preferred choice for the stealthy, tactful game of hunting. This is sophistry at its finest.
Self-defense? You’re not using an assault weapon for self-defense unless you’re miraculously incompetent at defending yourself or your family. Even the most Herculean home intruder does not require 5.56mm rounds fired in rapid succession to be subdued. There might be some situations where using an assault weapon to kill someone as a defensive measure is necessary, no one is reasonably questioning the existence of that possibility. But most of the time, not really. Pretty much never actually, if we honestly look at it. Meanwhile mass shootings happen at an alarming rate, so you’d think this cost-benefit assessment would be pretty lucid.
Maybe you prefer easy bite-sized aphorisms instead. Go ahead! Reach into the hat and choose one of these cute little buzz-phrases that are used as legitimate arguments for owning guns.
“Stand your ground”, “castle doctrine”, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”.
These are all easy cop-outs to the nuisance of justification that pools of blood in an Orlando nightclub, a country concert, or a Florida high school require. They are the fruits of magical thinking. They are the shamanistic chants, mystically influential, that can fulfill our deepest desires to be powerful and to be feared. The desire to wrap your fingers around a sparkling metal frame that can instantly solve a tense situation, a roadside confrontation, or just to shoot a black kid maybe.
These aren’t real arguments for gun ownership at all really, but they don’t need to be. They’re the final bits of fairy dust that normalize homicide and rhetorically move the ownership of a gun from a passive activity to one that is dangerously active.
At the end of the day, gun advocates push to keep guns around because they like holding them and firing them. They are infatuated with the unique concoction of dominance and adrenaline that comes from gripping and owning a weapon. They build clubs that worship these devices and spread the divine word of the sacred gun throughout their social circles and families. This is both animalistic and ritualistic but, for the sake of argumentative simplicity, part of human nature.
Look, there are a lot of things that people want to do, but we use laws determine which things are healthy and constructive and which are not. Does this sound like a 6th grade civics lesson? It should, because we need to use child-like language to deal with the child-like fascination that many have with guns.
Many years ago, a young girl in my town was hit by a car and killed as she walked home from school down the side of the road. She had to walk down the road because there wasn’t a sidewalk for her to use, despite it being a high foot traffic area in general. As a result of the tragedy, the entire town grieved. They offered thoughts and prayers to those affected by this truly horrific scenario. But, most importantly, the county built a sidewalk. It was their actionable plan to do what they could to ensure something like that didn’t happen again. Sure, the sidewalk might not stop every similar accident on that road, but it’s a step in the right direction. If America wants to see its shooting problem go down, we need to do all we can to control and regulate the things that do the shooting. We need to build sidewalks.
But gun advocates hastily jump in front of their enchanted AR-15’s, trying to hide them from the encroaching government. They nervously throw out any half-thought sentence to try and protect these talismans. “Criminals don’t follow the law”, “Killers always find weapons somehow”. Tautologies as intellectually significant as “dogs say woof” become the altar upon which pleas for assault weapons are made. In a world of logical deduction and critical thinking, these false maxims shouldn’t hold up. But that’s not the world we are residing in.
Our world belongs to the witches and wizards of the GOP and the NRA, whose words can reanimate disproven and outdated arguments from the dead. Whose prophecies of fear and tragedy are clung to by the fanatical gun-toting masses. The two-party system confuses the players in the battle taking place. It’s not conservatives versus liberals, the republicans versus the democrats. It’s the magicians versus the logicians. Spell-casting versus reasoning. Love for assault weapons versus love for human life.