Several weeks back I was working. It was a busy day at the children’s consignment store that has employed me since age 14. I recall watching a five-year-old pull a toy gun off the toy shelf, point it directly at his sister, pull the pretend trigger and shout “You’re dead now.” I was somewhat appalled. A 5-year-old could easily recognize what a gun was and understand that it can take life, perhaps without realizing what it really means to take a life. And therein lies a problem: We have made killing “fun” through toys that represent weaponry.
We have made killing a “sport” through video games that perpetuate violent acts against innocent people. We have simultaneously removed any respect for life, making blood a commodity to be spilled over the Constitution that protects our right to bear arms. A commodity in our pursuit to control. We have stopped coming to terms with the idea of what it means to actually take a life, making life as disposable as anything else in our lives.
I come from a gun family. You could say we own guns, simply because we can. Now that I’ve left for college my dad has stopped using the stereotypical “I have more than enough guns to clean all night,” on potential boyfriends. In my house, guns were an exercise of our right to own them. They were an assurance that we were safe and they were occasionally used to hunt animals. Though protection was the primary purpose, my parents kept all weaponry locked or well out of reach. Guns were not toys, guns were not to be pointed at people.
Both of my parents were raised in fairly conservative settings. Thus the ownership of weaponry. But as a result of their loose political influence, my siblings and I appear all over the political spectrum; I often identify as liberal for the list of reasons you would expect. To say the least I’m a pacifist driving around with a “coexist” bumper sticker, who spent her whole weekend volunteering at Denver PrideFest. I believe that the right to bear arms is an important one, but that it is not necessary for anyone to own military grade weaponry except our military.
Back to the point: Somewhere between Nerf guns, the excessive amounts of Call of Duty and shooting cans in the middle of a field, perhaps even those of us raised to regard guns as tools, implements of protection, we lost our way. We meandered off the "Don't point this at people" path onto the path that says "You can point this at people who aren't like you" path. We lost our way in a cultural landscape obsessed with domination through violence.
America. Home of the violent. In my eyes, America can best be described as the machismo male at the gym, flexing his large muscles in the mirror and smiling at himself with pleasure. Occasionally, he has to adjust himself, he reaches for his crotch to remind himself, and everyone standing nearby, that it’s still there. God forbid we forget he’s a man. Everyone else at the gym is rolling their eyes or staring with envy at the veins on his arms. This macho man goes home and beats his wife, inciting violence in order to maintain power and dominance. He’s in control but, at the fear of losing control, lashes out at anything subversive.
America, land of the free, is home to a particular breed of chauvinist, one who cannot stand the idea that they aren’t superior to other countries or cultures. A people who cannot stand the idea that they are not superior to other people, even if those people inhabit the same city block. We are more than people -- because the Earth is full of those -- we’re Americans. (After all, who wouldn't be proud of a social structure that prioritizes the needs of straight white people while everyone else follows suit in a social struggle.) We are superior to others because we run on a hedonic treadmill of consumerism, hand our five-year-olds iPads because parenting is hard, and eat ourselves to death.
This concept of superiority leaks out of the public sphere into our personal lives, contaminating our interactions with one another. Or does it bleed from the personal to the public? Either way, this exchange of fear and obsessive compulsion to dominate have created some sick idea that some humans are lesser than others. Whether we like it or not, our fellow humans, those who practice religions alternative to what we consider to be normative in a land with “freedom” of religion (is it really free when socio-political influences reinforce Judeo-Christian ideals and demonize everything else?), those who eat rations of nutrient-absent rice because that’s all that can be procured in remote parts of Africa, those who carry guns and those who do not, are all human. But somehow we’ve forsaken the thought that life ever had value at all, that is until life is lost. In some cases, until many lives have been lost. And then we jump back on the superiority treadmill, sprinting with weights on our ankles.
Our nation’s political drive to dominate and maintain power translates into a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy of violence -- with guns or without. Our culture perpetuates the notion that control is everything. That we can control who people love, we can control what women do with their bodies, we can control what people say, we can control where people go, we can control who immigrates and in an indirect way control what jobs they get and how much money they make (through what’s called bias, my friends), control who owns guns and how big those guns are.
We lose sight of the humanness, of others in our pursuit to control them. We lose ourselves in bipartisan attempts to control what that party’s interests are. We whimsically follow our party into oblivion because they provide a partisan promise that for the next four years they will control the American people the way their following wants them to. In our lost search to find superiority and the morals we supposedly have, we remove loss of life from the equation, inciting our own personal partisan truths on others because for a split second, no one could control anything.
It’s time we stop running around like five-year-olds by the toy shelf. It boils down to doing harm, taking control, and providing the general public with enough firepower to take on an entire militia. The nation with the bigger guns always wins, until those same guns turn around and kill innocent people, on our own soil (never mind the innocent people on everyone else's soil). We need to reevaluate what it means to be gun owners and the responsibility we have to our fellow human beings because people craving control kill innocent people. It's not about guns anymore, it's about the people.
