A soliloquy on Guns, Gun Control, and Cold Dead Hands.
It started with a sign in a shop window in a little hamlet in the mountains near where I live. I had stopped to pick up several cups of coffee for my friends back at the cabin we were renovating. The shop was a general store, a relic of an earlier time before specialization. One section carried basic groceries and supplies – bread, milk, cold cut, soap and toilet paper. Another was set aside as a small restaurant serving breakfast and lunch. A third carried camping and fishing supplies. The fourth sold guns and ammunition.
Written in white shoe polish on one picture window was the message: “Obama will take your guns away; stock up now.” “Get your ammo while you still can.”
The message in the second window linked the newly-elected president to Nazism, echoing the message of a series of blogs circulating on the internet. The words made me uncomfortable. It was more than just that I didn’t agree with the sentiments they expressed. It was the tone of the message; a warning, a call to arms – literally.
I was suddenly afraid that the people in this area might think of me as an enemy, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. I wished them no harm; indeed, I didn’t even know them. But in my heart of hearts, I disagreed with them about the wisdom of universal gun ownership.
Charlton Heston’s widely quoted statement warning the government, and anyone else who promoted gun control, unconsciously held within it its own counter-argument – guns are deadly. “I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands,” he warned. At that extreme, one might have to kill him in order to get his gun – or be killed in the attempt. This was – and is - not my idea of a good civic engagement.
Nervously, I went in to get the coffee. The waitress with the faded blond hair and tobacco-roughened voice welcomed me warmly; a 30-something counterman with a gentle smile and a wiry young stock boy both nodded in greeting. Who were these people? Why did they hate the brand new president who seemed to me to be trying to create a more peaceful world? Why did they feel so strongly about owning guns and ammunition?
To me, the evils of guns seemed so obvious: the young honor student shot to death on a Chicago street; the old woman gunned down in an urban tenement hallway, the little girl shot through the window of her bedroom. These were all-too-frequent indicators of gun ownership gone wild. The greater danger, it seemed to me, was the proliferation of guns and ammo, not their regulation.
I reminded myself that in this area I was the outsider. Clearly, my new neighbors had a different view. To them the Second Amendment was a major, if not the major, guarantee of their freedom, and they intended to defend it. To paraphrase Dorothy, I wasn’t in suburbia any more. My dislike of firearms was decidedly the minority view here. I had better tread softly, or at least keep my thoughts to myself.
But it was more than just the politics. Somewhere in this there was a very important cultural dissonance, and it suddenly seemed important to me to understand it. Why did it matter so much – on both sides of the issue? People of good will clearly held widely divergent opinions, and were willing to go public with them.
For one thing, the geography is different. As the merchandise in the gun shop attested, the people of the area were hunters and their hunting was more than merely sport. They were rural folk whose livelihoods were largely seasonal. Their hunting is more than merely sport; it was a portion of their daily work. They rely on game to provide them with meat to get them through the long winters when outdoor work dries up and seasonal work has left with the summer people.
In the city, at least until very recently, work is annual. One has a job and does it weekly, monthly, and yearly. Meat in the city is available all year long – provided one has the job and the income it provides. Taking a gun out to hunt in the city would yield a very different and largely inedible breed of animal.
The space here is different too. Suburban homes require some form of greenery to shield one family from the eyes of my neighbors, here, people were often miles from their neighbors and even more miles from the public services that city folk take for granted. Police, fire, ambulance, and road plowing, even garbage disposal, were miles away, if available at all. A power outage can render them totally isolated and vulnerable. Hungry bears or malevolent intruders are dangers to be warded off single-handedly. A gun was beginning to look far less ominous; the opposition to gun control, more logical.
On the other hand, the folk wisdom of isolated rural areas is no more universally valid than that of the city dwellers who live with the horrors of drive-by shootings, or for that matter, anyone who has dealt with the results of youngsters playing with their fathers’ “unloaded” guns.
Accidental shootings are not restricted to urban areas. Hunting season often gives rise to cases like that of a little girl shot by a hunter through the walls of her mobile home. Her family grieved her no less seriously because they too owned guns. Where can we find the right balance? Is it even possible?
And then there is the rhetoric of anger and hate. Despite my new understanding of the need for guns in rural areas, I still found the Hitler allusions on the shop window not only unpleasant, but frightening. People, especially those who lives demand more self-sufficiency, are more readily aroused when their way of life is - or appears to be – under threat.
Images from old movies, in which the ‘villagers’ march on the castle carrying torches and pikes, flitted through my mind. A media that repeatedly tells us that we are under siege from some mammoth government powers can only intensify this tendency. Similarly, a spiral of silence on the opposition side intensifies when a large number of gun-wielding countrymen hold a position and hold it loudly, and no one dares to offer an alternative opinion.
The people in that little store wished me no harm, and, no doubt if they were to meet him, would wish President Obama no harm. Yet their windows reminded me that my ideas were more than a little alien in this environment.
I longed for a dialogue with them. I wanted a personal understanding free from Internet slogans and radio sound bites, from the ranting on the right and the carping on the left. I wanted to hear all their thoughts about guns, and I wanted them to listen to mine. I wanted a conversation in which we could open each other’s eyes to the problems we face, rather than blind us to each other’s humanity. But I was afraid to begin the discussion.
Perhaps we can someday reach a time when there are more than two sides to the issue, and when the third side is the voice of reason.
“Why do you want to own a gun?” “Because in the dead of winter, when food is hard to come by, I can feed my family.”
“Why do you fear guns?” “Because in the dead of night, the sound of gunfire in the streets reminds me that even in their beds, my children can be murdered by someone they have never met.”
“I am afraid of hunger.” “I am afraid of gangs.”
“I want my children to be fed.” “I want my children to be safe.”
“I want peace.” “I want freedom.”
Are we really so very different? Surely there is still room in America for a conversation in which the hunter and the commuter can share their values and come to a mutual understanding about the meaning of the second amendment and the role of guns in modern America.
