Up in arms

After every mass shooting severe enough to attract the attention of the press and the populace, the NRA makes its case for more guns in our country.

Many people, some of them reasonable enough, assert that, since there are already so many guns in the hands of the American public, it would be impossible to disarm it, so we might as well encourage everyone to go armed--in a responsible manner, that is.

Maybe all writers ought to champion gun possession, it being hallowed by our Bill of Rights (although it does specify a well-armed militia), in a paragraph right next to the one protecting our freedom of the press. Freedom is precious and comes from God, we’re told, and perhaps our Founding Fathers were preternaturally wise, even while foreseeing an age of drive-by shootings and mass murders in enclosed spaces, in decreeing that guns are eternally good.

They did see clearly that government was bad, incorrigibly so, and that it would be necessary from time to time to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing have them repealed. “All political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” Chairman Mao reminded us, which may explain why, as citizens feel themselves more and more powerless to affect the elements that control their lives, they clutch their guns ever closer. With prosperity, security—even a modicum of contentment—forever slipping through your fingers, a gun is something you can grasp.

“You’re a liberal; you’re probably scared of guns,” I’ve been told by more than one person through the years. They were right, at least on the second count. Guns scare me. In an altercation involving a gun, I would be as a lamb led to slaughter.  

On the other hand, I am positively leonine in my opposition to guns. Well, not positively. How about somewhat? I would not, for example, argue too vociferously with those who love them—after all, they have all the guns.

Everyone is insane in his own way, Mark Twain once wrote, and at least several times a day we are all temporarily, murderously insane. These moments generally lead to nothing, he said, because the opportunity is seldom at hand at the same moment as the murderous impulse. “This saves a million lives a day in the world—for sure,” he concluded.

Today, there are more than 300 million guns in this country. Guns are responsible for roughly 33,000 deaths a year in America. Every month, it seems, brings another murderous event on a large scale. We are horrified, but then we move on. Our politicians steadfastly refuse to address the issue of gun violence. 

The pen is mightier than the sword, it’s been said, but a pen can’t stand up to a gun. A senator ought to be willing to, though. He ought to be able to imagine all those leading lives of quiet desperation, who may sooner or later experience the “immense upheaval of feeling” that Twain described, that can send them over the sanity-line and cause them to want to make a noise in the world. And when they do, “it is the noise the occurrence makes in the world that breeds subsequent occurrences, by unsettling the rickety minds of men.”

“Nothing will check the occurrences but absolute silence,” Twain wrote. “By abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by extinguishing God’s most elegant invention, the Human Race.”

Maybe God does want us to have guns.