Guns for Peace?

Some of our best moments in life are when we catch up with our long lost friends over a coffee, a phone call or even over FB chat. We share all our varied experiences from that lost time with each other with great excitement- where we traveled, what we saw, whom we met, etc. But only some experiences are as interesting yet disturbing as the one I recently had. I caught up with an old friend over Skype who has been based in the US for about 7 years. Settled in New York with an exceptionally good job and apartment, it was nice to see him so happy about living the ‘American dream’, until he mentioned his recent visit to a gun show. Something about the very idea of a “gun show” made me twitch in my seat and it left me increasingly unsettled as he continued talking about it with a vigor that I was absolutely struggling to grasp and process.

The Gun control issue in the US is one that has seen heavy participation, debate and political see-saws in the last few years. Popular and eminent news channels, journals, blogs, newspapers and TV shows have covered this theme to no end and each time I heard or read the two opposing views towards the issue, I couldn’t help be amused by the astounding irony embedded in these arguments, mostly coming from the pro-gun ownership camp. Take for example this argument- “Legal Gun Ownership is required to protect family and property against those that use illegal Guns”. The very basis of this argument rests on the fact that there are several Americans who own illegal guns. While this may be a perfectly logical reason to support gun ownership, it fails to question the very motivation behind the want and/or need to actually own a gun. A large population of the US roots for gun ownership out of their need for protection- from the government, from illegal gun owners, from criminals, or anyone with half the spine to actually act on their evil intentions. And let’s make no mistake, the biggest anchor to the pro gun ownership counsel is the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. It reads "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Complete objectivity has provided this camp with a variety of further such reasoning to support their cause. For instance, evil doesn’t lie in the gun itself, but in the doer and his motives. Otherwise knives and matchsticks are no different to guns and should be seen as equally harmful ‘weapons’. Interesting. Could we take the help of other events in world history to agree with this reasoning? The Rwandan genocide involved slaughtering with spears and knives, the ISIS and Taliban have adopted the same weapons for inflicting unspeakable horrors. Riots in various parts of the world stemming from civil disobedience and protests have used other such mundane items for destruction such as hockey sticks, glass bottles or even plain simple stones. Granted that the social demographics and political landscape of such events have been completely different in these countries to that of the US today, but it still goes to prove that destruction, hate and madness, all really exist at an intentional level more than anything else. If the intention is strong enough, it doesn’t matter what tool is available to the human hand. The output is going to be inevitably horrendous. 

That said, the peculiarity of mass shootings in the US cannot be ignored and it warrants political action. Incidents of children accidently shooting each other by mistaking the gun for a toy are reason enough to bring the social proliferation of guns under examination. Social institutions like family and schools are under serious threat and reports of teachers in Utah, Idaho and other parts of the US being given ‘free gun training’ have made my stomach turn each time. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would have to think a 100 times before sending my kid to a neighbor’s house to play or worse still, conduct background checks on my neighbors before socializing with them. As a teacher myself, I can’t even fathom a learning environment in which guns co-exist with children, especially when anything even remotely sharp or fire-inducing is watched out for in the interest of children’s safety. What guarantee can a teacher give to the parents that a weapon provided for defending the children and herself will not be misused by her itself in some weak moment? Especially when psychological studies behind the need for owning firearms have revealed evidence suggesting that gun ownership correlates with tendencies towards anger and impulsivity. Is it not a risk to assume that a teacher’s manifestation of anger, frustration and impulsivity cannot be in the form of firing a gun?

Over time, a host of other reasons have presented themselves for the support of gun-ownership such as recreational hobbies like hunting or guns being status symbols. The fact that people own a variety of high-end guns besides just the basic sort needed for protection, goes to show that gun ownership has surpassed the need for protection alone. A lucrative industry has been built around guns, employing double the amount of people than General Motors, which Obama called “a pillar of our economy” in 2009. This is a complex socio-political issue that the US must resolve at a policy level, the proceedings of which are going to be far too interesting given the upcoming elections of this year. They will play a big role in the fate of this dilemma. The bottom line is that the US needs to dig deep into its social psyche and the factors that shaped it, so as to understand the human motivations behind this very disconcerting phenomenon and nip it in the bud. Because clearly, scapegoating mental illnesses and political posturing hasn’t been helping the situation in any way. I wonder if the ‘audacity of hope’ will be audacious enough to bring about such a massive social transformation of American society. Only time can tell.