The Problems of Guns and Violence

I used to be a competitive rifle shooter for my University in England. I have several Oxford ‘Blues’ as a result, and was the captain of several teams. We'd shoot at paper targets, nothing else. And that’s why I feel I can say something about guns now.

A newsletter I received today stated that since Obama came to power gun shops have been unable to stock enough ammunition to meet the demand. It seems that gun owners are so afraid the Obama administration will take away their right to own weapons that they’ve bought up as much ammo as they can carry.

Now that makes no sense. If the government were about to ban cars, for example, would you go out and blow the housekeeping money on spare tires to hoard?

Which brings us to the point. Gun ownership is for many people not about logic. As we saw with Phil Spector, quite a lot of people own guns who shouldn’t, and some of them have fantasies about them that are not healthy. The bottom line seems to be that guns become the focus for a huge number of neuroses for many people, and added to that is the strange feeling that seems to come across some people that I can only describe as the ‘if you’ve got a gun you’ve got to use it’ urge. I speak from experience of many years around guns and gun owners, some of whom are my friends. We’ve talked about this unhealthy tendency in gun owners, even when they’re law-abiding, decent, and sane.

And perhaps this is where the gun ownership debate runs into trouble. We’re not talking about these objects that go bang. We’re not talking about what the Constitution says. We’re using both of these facts to try and talk about something more visceral, even when the discussion gets masked as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ and ‘history’. That’s where things get bogged down, of course, because on the other side people talk about ’safety’ and ‘law’ in similarly clouded ways.

We need a better discussion. Perhaps our love of guns is a type of addiction, like alcohol or tobacco. I’ve lost friends to both substances, and yet I don’t want to ban them - which makes no sense, either. What I’d like to do is prevent the people who become dangerous around any of these things - guns, alcohol, or tobacco - from wreaking havoc and killing themselves or others.

If we are to have peace in our world we'll have to wrestle with such difficult and murky problems at some stage. We have to bring people towards the lightness of non-violence, of course, but it may be necessary to understand the dark of the destructive urge as well. We cannot pretend it isn't there. It's in all of us to some extent. The Hindu pantheon shows us Kali, for example, who is a powerful god of death and destruction - and also of re-birth - and she is a reminder that we can't turn our backs on the chaotic part of ourselves without shutting out the very core of our energy.

Perhaps it's time we embraced gun owners, too, by asking them what we can do to help them feel safer without weaponry, and by facing our own fears of what the world may bring to us. It would be a step, if only a small one, towards reducing the warfare on the mean streets of our cites, for example. And if we are to eradicate war with a capital W, then we have to start somewhere.