A gun is of course all about power. And so it is not by itself a bad thing. You can use power for good as well as for bad. But whether for good or bad, a gun is always a dangerous thing. And it is not enough that you have all the best intentions for it. Beyond that you would have to be very careful. Guns kill. They kill very efficiently and horribly. In the wrong hands they can be the civilized person’s worst nightmare.
And yet the bumper sticker reads, “Guns do not kill people. People kill people.”
Which would seem to make sense immediately. And yet on close contemplation one realizes it is as ludicrous as that old question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Those questions miss the point entirely. A gun by itself cannot kill. Murder is always a partnership between a person and his weapon of choice. And besides a gun it can be a knife, an axe, a large dose of poison, or that proverbial big red button. We have been told never to press it. So why do we always feel the urge anyway?
And so it is with a gun. You would think it is just a simple metal thingy. But for some it can be more than that. It can become in time a companion not unlike a loyal dog or a friend.
Give a man a gun and the first thing he will do is point it at something and feel the trigger. Which is not strange. He is only simulating a real life situation. He is only imagining a target in his head and visualizing how it might be brought down.
And there might be days when he will get bored. And so he might play with his gun in bed, sliding its cocking mechanism backwards as far as it will go only to release it suddenly. A bullet slides smoothly into the chamber. He can hear it do so. It makes a particular pleasurable sound. He cannot hear enough of it.
But a bullet inside the firing chamber with the gun’s safety off is still even so only a loaded gun. Its power is only just potential. To make it fire he would still have to pull the trigger. And so he carresses its surface with the tip of his index finger. Not for too long, of course. The rule books say his finger should not even be there until he is ready to fire.
And yet, to come to the edge is always the essential part of all these. He is not supposed to do it but perhaps that is exactly why he wants to know how close he can come to doing it without going over the edge. It gives him a sense of control over destiny, his own and somebody else’s if they should ever have the misfortune of coming within his target range. But all these are only in his head so far.
In real life he will if he is not a bad person use the gun only for defensive purposes. What if a burglar should come into the house? Or some deranged person should attack his family? How should he defend himself?
A gun is his hedge against most fears. He imagines his enemies crawling over his fences and gate. This validates his feeling of good fortune for owning a gun. He whispers a vocalization to himself of its make and model, the size of bullet it fires and how fast it will do so. This gives him a modicum of control over his fears. He tells himself, in a perfect world, I will not even need to own a gun.
But this is not a perfect world. Here, good men and bad men have guns. But that cannot be worse than guns in the hands of the crazies and the stupid. Unless he deludes himself, he cannot deny there are too many guns in the hands of people who will point them to the sky come New Year’s eve and then pull the trigger. Why? For kicks. To feel the explosion in his hand and once again to feel the true measure of power. That his bullet might kill a child somewhere close by never enters his head. He is not after all a bad man.
Of these people you do not need many to put the tree-hugger’s fear in your heart. Only a few will do. Makes you dream of a perfect world, perhaps even a gunless society.