Essay
|
Gun control is always a hot issue in America - no wonder, since Americans commit more gun crimes than in the most war-torn regions on Earth. Jodie Foster, in an interview for her new movie "The Brave One," says "I don't believe that nay gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being." I concur.
Everyone should learn to shoot a handgun.
Pick up that heavy chunk of metal, or that surprisingly light plastic. Its shape, familiar to you from movies and television, may jolt you a bit. It has weight. It has a smell.
Have you loaded a weapon? Open the chamber, or pop the clip. Pick up a round. Each bullet passes through human fingers many times, at the point of manufacture, at the point of packaging, and now here with you. It is your fingers that will take each projectile from box or container, yours that press it into its spot in the clip or slide it into the gun.
Guns don’t kill people, they say. One bumper sticker follows this up with, “Big messy holes in vital organs kill people.” And behind every shooting is a finger on a trigger, a hand that loaded the gun. Guns don’t shoot themselves, and they don’t load themselves. We do.
So you should learn.
The gun is this century’s answer to the medieval moat. It is inferior in many ways. A moat was designed to keep out everyone unless the castle’s owner decided otherwise. It was a passive defense, but it allowed for a certain amount of measured choice. Imagine, in such an uncivilized time as that, you would have had time to survey a threat and choose how to answer it.
A gun, by its very nature, is an actively defensive weapon, which, in other words, is an offensive one. You can threaten with it, but it’s only effective if it’s clear you’ll use it. The threat must be imminent to have any power.
A gun is not a moat.
We should have learned the slippery nature of the threat-as-deterrent during the long Cold War. I was constantly aware during the eighties, when I was in school, that the United States and USSR both had nuclear weapons and either might use them. Did I feel safe? Of course not.
To make matters stickier for those who still want to believe in the potential for violent response making for a safer world, what was our greatest fear? That diplomacy might break down and that someone on one side or the other would sadly shake his great wise head and press the button? No, that some idiot, or group of idiots, would do it out of fear, or by accident, or out of sheer malice. We believed that by their very actions, by the proliferation itself, that the people at the top had demonstrated they were less than reliable. Who in their right minds would stock weapons they didn’t ever intend to use?
It follows that if a country commits so much of its money and resources to the development and purchase of weapons, someday it will feel a growing urge to use them.
If it can’t, what follows naturally is what we see now in the States: a government deprived of the ability to use its best toys – by its own rules no less – which now wants to develop new toys to ease its disappointment. What other excuse could there be for the revival of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars scheme, an idea so thoroughly discredited in its own time you’d think they’d also probably try to insist that, after conclusive tests dating it centuries too late, the Shroud of Turin is authentic. And why? Because that’s what they believe. And because faith is absolute.
Here’s the real problem with a lack of separation between Church and State. Their problem-solving methods are completely incompatible. That’s fine. The problem-solving methods of liberals and conservatives have kept them historically apart, even in times when their ends are the same. But Church ends are not State ends, and proof for one is hearsay to the other. Or heresy. Or worse.
But both, historically, have put guns in the hands of followers, be they true believers or soldiers. You could say this is where the Church and State traditionally come on side with each other, when there is a common enemy and force is the chosen response.
Most of us never will. Most of us can only imagine the smell of cordite on a firing range, if it’s described to us, perhaps in a thriller. Most of us have no idea just how loud a gun is, because if you believe the movies, you can stand right next to a gun being fired and not temporarily lose your hearing. Most of us have heard of recoil, but few have felt it pound them backwards, a fraction of a second after the round explodes away.
Most of us have never smelled the metallic scent lingering on fingers that have just pressed .45 caliber bullets into a clip, or slammed a clip home into the most deadly personal killing machine ever devised by man to use against man. And, thank whatever kind of god you believe in, most of us will never use that power against another human being.
But you should shoot a handgun. Because this is the handgun’s purpose: it is not a tool; it is not for farmers to use against marauding animals; it is an engine which causes an explosion to be directed, laser-like, through a thin tube, pushing ahead of it a tumbling projectile which will, on introduction to flesh, rip and tear and destroy.
We spend billions on health care to prevent and correct little flaws in the human body. A closed bile duct here, a blocked artery there. We train brilliant men and women to perform microsurgery with lasers and fibreoptic tubes, to save people whose illnesses we couldn’t even diagnose a hundred years ago.
And in a world where people can be saved from diseases that would have been an automatic death sentence within living memory, we still take up handguns and other killing machines, turn them on other people, and blow away vital organs, shred hearts and livers, scramble brains like eggs.
To make an omelette, say those who want to explain killing in the name of peace, you must break some eggs.
People are not eggs. When you break them, you do not get omelettes.
You get blood, exposed viscera, ruined organs. You can scramble a brain, but you will never get an omelette. You can in a second put a human being past the ability of the world’s best doctor to repair. You destroy, you maim. You kill.
You may say I am being harsh, but it is not liberal or conservative, hawk or dove, to state the following. When a high-speed projectile of any kind rips through a human being, be it a bullet from a soldier’s gun or shrapnel from a suicide bomber’s payload, the result on flesh is equal.
That is why you should learn to shoot a handgun. To realize no one should.
Read "The Brave One" movie review by the Popcorn Boys
back from essay - learn to shoot a gun to jenprose
