I promised a series of posts on gun violence, and so far I’ve only written two: one on the intersection of guns and whiteness and another on Christian responses to the Sandy Hook massacre. There will likely be more posts coming, as I’m still reading pretty extensively on gun ownership and gun violence in the U.S. A big part of why I haven’t written more, however, is that I find myself continuously circling back to what I see as the dark heart of gun ownership in the U.S.:
When people say they own a gun for “self-defense,” they are saying they are willing to kill another human being.
I honestly can’t imagine taking a human life. Fighting tooth and nail to protect myself or my family, and temporarily disabling an attacker? Sure. But taking another human life to preserve my own? Even if I or others might see that life as belonging to an “evil” or ill-willed person? That I cannot imagine.
It’s profoundly disturbing to me that others can imagine killing another human–so much so that they arm themselves and train to be ready for that moment.
And even if a gun owner claims she’s only going to “maim” an attacker. . . I suggest you look at Google images for “gunshot wound” and scroll past the Halloween make-up. How could anyone imagine inflicting that kind of pain on another human?
In the end, it’s this dark heart that makes it so difficult for me to write about this subject. Any data I might present, any cultural biases or logical inconsistencies I might try to highlight can’t pierce a darkness that dense.
Thank you for writing this beautiful post. It’s a dark place indeed. The heart of darkness… Sigh.
Hi Leslie-
For one, most people that I know who are into guns fall into two broad categories (this is, of course, purely anecdotal because I don’t know that many gun-toting people and those I do come from a small select classification of society): 1. Those who are just plain fascinated by guns and 2. Those who have an inferiority complex drawn from trauma. I know #2 sounds insulting and it’s not meant to be because I mean it to pertain to the number of people I know who had difficult (borderline abusive/neglectful) relationships with their parents and/or people who have, in one way or another, been victimized in their own lives. So, to them, the concept of ‘a threat’ is real, and in some cases, has been realized. Bear in mind that most of these people are not really aggressive, they are defensive (at least among my friends)–meaning, they may have an arsenal at home and they might talk about how advanced they are in krav magra or whatever, but they’re not out looking for a fight. And usually when they are thinking about “self-defense” they are thinking about protecting not only themselves, but their husbands and wives, their parents, and their kids; they would shrug and say, “If it comes down to say, an intruder and my child, kill the intruder.” I mean, you say that you could never kill another human being and I believe you, but I think that others would be incredulous that you wouldn’t take a shot at someone threatening the life of your child. You imply that you couldn’t live with the guilt of taking the life of another; but others would say that they would never live with themselves if they couldn’t protect their families.
In some cases, such people actually know the pain of living with victimization and its fallout and not only is it one way of coping (they need a gun to feel secure), it’s also because they don’t want that kind of psychological turmoil for people they love. And in their lives, they probably have come crossed paths with truly harmful people, and if you’ve seen that kind of violence in others and have been a victim of it, then it wouldn’t surprise me if the morality of killing someone becomes much more cut-and-dry than it would be for someone who’s never dealt with that kind of violence in someone else. And when I say violence, it doesn’t have to be as extreme and terrible as you were raped or beaten unconscious; I mean that the violence can be as simple as living with parents who expected you to behave as an adult when you were 3 and then got frustrated when you didn’t or parents who basically ignored you–that is a kind of violence if you are a developing child. In other words, these people, at least in my life (and I stress, I’m only going by like, 3 or 4 people I know) have an acute awareness that there are victims and there are perpetrators and they don’t want themselves to be victimized; they also don’t want anyone else they care about to be victimized. You see it as capacity to kill another human, they probably see it as capacity to save another human.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with my gun-happy friends because most of them have an oddly black-and-white way of viewing these things. For example, several have posed very strange hypotheticals in which they’ll say things like, “If it ever came down to it, I mean, I love your kid, but I love mine more and I’d choose to save my own”–which is like, uh…okay, dude…But um, why are you creating some sort of fantasy hierarchy between which one of our kids is more important to you? When would we ever BE in such a situation?? A lot like to play other kinds of hypotheticals–what they would do if someone broke in at night; what they would do if more than one person broke in at night; what to do if someone broke in and took their wife as a hostage…They say these things at regular old barbecues and picnics like it’s chitchat. They’ll sit around thinking about whether they’d save their spouse or their child if it came down to it…Or their spouse or their parent…Or the dog or the cat…I mean, It’s not something I enjoy or condone, but the fact that these kinds of thoughts go through their heads says something about how they view the world. I don’t see it as having a dark heart; I think that for some, it’s having a dark past.