Like most American men of my age, I was raised on TV westerns, cop shows and WWII action movies. Guns were ubiquitous, and their status as a masculine totem of potentness were omnipresent. My dad had guns on the wall of the rec room and so it wasn't just imposed on me by the Magnavox. I naturally owned guns when I became an adult. My brothers- one politically right wing, one left wing both enjoyed guns as gonzo 1970's fun. It didn't seem very controversial: the tin cans and bottles did not complain. That was before the NRA became the third rail of American politics. It was obvious that guns became one of the connections of the evangelical right to the Republican party. The outright purchase of the US public opinion was a bargain when it could optimally exploit an unrealistic passion like gun ownership and it's tenuous relationship to American liberty on the part of a uneasy populace. Guns as metaphor are a narcotic, or more like alcohol. They seem to occupy a part of our minds that entertains us or make us feel safe, some kind of pleasure center, even if that is imagined or hallucinatory. Like an alcoholic we are obsessed by our buzz, even when it is making us sick and will eventually kill us. We make excuses and look the other way at excesses. As the NRA grew in power and more and more heavy firepower was dumped into the US bloodstream we became more unreasonable and started making worse choices. We are now fully inebriated,and incapable of normal behavior, yet we have been given the keys to the bus carrying school kids on the interstate. We have to sober up.I own guns. I guess I am scared and uncomfortable enough to own them. One of the guns I own is an "assault rifle" (actually just a "rifle", but I don't want to engage in that long ultimately religious argument). I really don't know what to do with it. During the Bush administration, I bought it because I actually thought the right was going to clamp down on the left (me) and I would need it. It sounds like a science fiction now. I hot rodded the gun, a clunky Yugoslavian SKS- the cranky grandfather of the AK-47, and have turned it into a much more lethal device, with 20 round magazines and a scope. It was fun- like building a guitar, or making a model railroad. It is most like my customizing my giant automotive appendage, my 1981 Chevy El Camino: a hobby centered around a gas guzzler, ecologic disaster-mobile that is non-the-less a super cool teenaged dream- an irrational love that I can not quit because it helps define me. My affection for my El Camino is immature, and unsustainable but very, very real. Guns are similar and not easily excised. I know most other countries have removed them like an inflamed appendix but, the USA is a perennial teenager. When you own a gun, you feel ultimately "in-control", when in reality you are no more in control than when you didn't have one, and sadly much more prone to making irreversible mistakes in judgement. My SKS is a "just a hobby" but it is in fact a killing machine, designed by the military, and all the cardboard targets I have shot with it doesn't make it a model train. As a decent man my enslavement to my gun is a millstone weight around my neck. I do not feel that the God approves. This is a sad topic of my sleepless nights. I can see myself taking it to the local police precinct and giving it away, thinking of the concert goers in Las Vegas or the kids at the Broward County FL high school. ....But it is so damn cool. And I like the buzz, and I can quit whenever I want, right? And I don't have a problem. Do I?
It is clear to me that there needs to be an equivalent of AA for gun owners.
