A zealot’s song is neither pretty nor fine. It is a sustained shriek into the teeth of the winds of change which seeks to challenge and interrupt an evolving chain of reasoned logic. It is a one note howl of defiance and rage; it is the song of a bully.
Once upon a time in America, we knew how to deal with bullies. We learned the lesson the hard way on our playgrounds and on the battlefields of World Wars I and II and Korea; we gathered all the courage we could find within our quaking souls, and faced up to the bullies as best we could. There is only one way to do it, after all, no matter the bully’s size: you must spit in his or her eye and invite their wrath. The weaker ones will run if you do, but the bigger ones will fight back using the dirtiest, most unethical, most brutal tactics they are capable of imagining. The fight will have no rules, and no tactics or holds will be barred. But there is no other alternative for those who wish to stop a bully than to make the attempt.
The NRA is the epitome of such a one-note bully. According to them, the only way to stop someone with a gun is by using another gun. Given their illogic, it appears that peace and equilibrium will only be achieved when we are all armed to the fullest. No matter that such behavior, when engaged in by nation states, has too often led to all-out war; no matter that the notion of two gunfighters fighting for supremacy in the dusty street of a western American cow-town is nothing more than a myth, and not an iconic image of personal courage and honor. Their goal is to turn back the clock to a time of a collective fantasy in which they might discover how many notches can be carved in the handgrips of their respective Colt 45s.
In order for the NRA to be happiest – in order for them to be able to carve the most notches – all of us, whether or not we live in their delusional world, must be armed so that the maximum number of gunfights can be fought. It is not enough for them to fight among themselves in a single corral; they demand that the rest of us follow suit and arm ourselves so that the battles can be fought in any street in America, whether it be paved or dusty, urban or rural, deserted or jam-packed with humanity. They can only imagine personal triumph by means of domination; they lack the imagination, the logic, the words, and the perception necessary for honest debate. They are deaf to reason and devoid of empathy.
Not all gun owners used to be this way. In the small, isolated town where I was raised, there were once responsible gun owners. In high school, I worked in the sporting goods department of a local store – a kind of store which no longer exists in America; a store dedicated to fulfilling all of the needs that farming families might have, from sheet steel and iron pipe and the tools to use them, to furniture and household goods that might soothe the aches of their toils. My boss was the son of the owner and a dedicated sportsman. We sold guns, the type of guns a hunter or a farmer would need. We sold rifles and pistols, both in adult and juvenile versions – but never an assault rifle, never a fully automatic weapon. Johnny, my boss, had a firm set of rules: if he knew you and was aware that you already knew how to use a weapon responsibly, you could take delivery of your desired weapon without delay; if he didn’t know you or if he believed you hadn’t the requisite training to use the weapon safely and responsibly, its delivery had to wait until you’d completed his free evening course in gun safety (he was a licensed trainer); and, if you were patently irresponsible and likely to use the weapon for evil, he would refuse to sell it to you no matter how much you offered to pay or how loudly you yelled.
Johnny didn’t do these things because of any law; he did them because they were the right thing to do in his estimation. He didn’t value guns for their ability to stop another person in a dusty street; he valued guns and bows because he loved to hunt – and hunting for him was primarily a way to enjoy the outdoors in the company of others, since companionship in the form of good stories told around a campfire (and perhaps food, but never trophies) was his true goal. I can understand the place of guns in this ideology; they make a sort of sense to me despite the fact that it is not a way of life that I prefer or would enjoy. Within the confines of this ethos, I have no problem with another’s ownership and use of a gun – but only if the user is trained in the way that Johnny demanded, only if the user is responsible, only if the user makes safety his or her primary goal. This was how gun use was generally understood in the 1950s.
Johnny didn’t own guns because of a fear of others. He wouldn’t have understood the concept. He would have considered the use of a gun against another human being to be murder. He kept his guns locked up; he kept his guns unloaded; he taught us never to point a weapon at another person, even when you thought it unloaded for the simple reason that you might be mistaken in your belief. If he had a beef with you, he would argue it out face to face – no weapons in hand. He was a fearless man. He disliked bullies; he always spit in their eye whenever they came around.
The post-Charlton Heston NRA is the biggest and ugliest of bullies, always ready, and ever inclined, to fight. They are long past singing into the teeth of the wind; they would rather piss into it instead, no matter the personal consequences. But we already know their tactics, we’ve already heard their song. We have memorized it by now, because it never varies by as much as a single note. Their song is a sustained shriek of insanity, the howl of individual madness. It is not a grace note to the collective symphony of shared American life: at its minimum, it is a profound dissonance and ugly discordance; at its worst, it is the cry of an evil banshee. Whichever way you hear it, it is long past time for the rest of us to shut it up, to spit in the eye of this gang of ignorant bullies.
In fairness to the reader, I should disclose that I own nothing more than an air rifle, which I use to scare coyotes away from our houseful of cats or to keep the deer away from Helen’s roses. Its BBs might sting – if I could hit anything other than the side of our barn. It is most effective in my hands because of the sound it makes when being fired or that made by the resulting pellet if it manages to hit somewhere in the general vicinity of the animal involved. If I were ever to hit an animal – be it coyote or deer or whatever – I would feel dreadful. I could never take any pride in such a success; the life of a hunter is not for me, even if I am able to comprehend the lure of its ethos.
Yesterday, a Facebook friend who still lives in my home town posted a picture of a page of the local newspaper – a single page which contained (a) two articles about the recent mass murders in the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta and the effects of such attacks in the African-American community, and (b) a paid advertisement for a “conceal carry permit class” containing a graphic image of a pistol. Undoubtedly, the copy editor was, at least, insensitive as hell; more likely in my estimation, he or she was simply howling the one note song of the NRA. If my suspicion is true, his or her logic was somewhere on a scale between: “If I place the ad here, more people might read it and learn how to defend themselves against mass murderers” to the more likely: “That will show the bastards; no one can take my guns from me.” Whatever the reason, the ad placement was an insult to the memories of those murdered and offensive to the sensibilities of civilized society.
The fact that I can imagine this small town copy editor having either notion suggests that it is time for the rest of us to gather our courage and act in unison. After all, all we have to lose is the irresponsible sale of guns to people who, while using them, are far more likely to hurt themselves, their children, or other innocent persons than they are to prevail in a dusty street. So join the fight, and get ready by limbering up those salivary glands.
