Another Shot At Guns

It’s all been said already, but here we go again. The massacre at the grade school in Texas this week was indescribably horrendous, one of those things that even infinitely more skilled writers than I cannot find adequate words to describe. So now that that’s out of the way, here are my words.

There are those who say that guns are useful. They can serve very worthwhile, even essential, purposes. If an armed invader breaks into your home and is about to kill your child, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to reach for a gun and shoot the fucker in order to save your child’s life? When your homeland is invaded by another country whose evil oppressive intent would render you nothing more than a slave, wouldn’t it be nice to see the cavalry rushing to your rescue armed to the teeth (or hopefully armed to a body part that would better serve them)?

But see, even from these pro-gun hypotheticals, it is apparent that the justifiable need for guns is only valid because of the existence of other guns. It’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s more than that. It’s a self-fulfilling construct. Is it any different from a business that justifies cheating on its taxes because if it doesn’t, it won’t survive against other businesses that cheat even more? In both cases, dangerous, if not illegal conduct is justified by that same conduct in others.

Is that really the kind of world we want to live in, a society governed by the circular reasoning that says that another person’s unacceptable behavior justifies mine? All that does is perpetuate the unacceptable.

You can say that such thinking is naïve. You can say, as the speakers at the recent NRA convention said, that we will never rid the world of guns, and so self protection will always be necessary. We are even now confronted with ghost guns and firearms that can be built at home with 3D printers. You know how they say it, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” Very glib. But, on examination, it’s the NRA’s thinking that is naïve.

The history of the world is a history of change. Nothing the people of prior centuries imagined that the world would be like today is what the world is actually like today. I’m a grandparent of a four-year-old. No one who reads this can tell me what her world will be like when she is my age in 2081. And that’s the point. Those, like the NRA, who insist that nothing will change – that there will always be the threat of dangerous guns – they are the ones who are naively ignoring history.

And they are also the ones who are retarding history. We all control the future. Not entirely, but as best we can. The best we can control the future threat of guns that will exist when my granddaughter is a grandmother is by starting now to reject the pro-gun lobby’s antediluvian view that nothing will ever change.

Will our efforts get rid of gun deaths tomorrow or the next day, or even the next decade? Probably not. We have some very hard-core obstacles to overcome. But that should not deter us. All profound changes take time.

History and Darwin teach us that our species naturally evolves toward survival, but that is not the tendency toward which the NRA bends. History and evolution are on our side. Ironic, isn’t it, that so many of the pro-gun forces are also anti-evolution? Ironic or unavoidable?

Yes, today’s politics may not be on our side, but history and science are. That’s some powerful stuff. Hang in there and keep fighting.