CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Why I Hate Guns

Sunday, February 27, 2011

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "lotus flower"


I've never been a fan of guns, ever, and I have always found it inexplicable how they are so linked to our culture. It's not that I don't understand them in fiction-- guns add a sense of danger, a sense of immediacy to a story. And obviously I understand them in fantasy-- it's fun when things go boom. But I've never understood them culturally, I've never understood why guns aren't just a thing, a hazardous problem that we have to deal with, but a religion in and of themselves. I get it when someone says "I like guns because they are fun." I don't get it when somebody says "They'll take my guns out of my cold dead hands!" I understand liking something a lot and considering them a part of yourself, for example, I consider music a deep, inherent part of my personality, and I would protest if someone all of the sudden said that they were going to take them away from me. I just don't preemptively threaten violence to another person before anyone has even suggested taking it away. There's a big difference between saying "Hey! You took away my music, asshole! That's not fair!" And saying "I fucking dare someone to come take my music! Come on! Take it!"

The recent horror in Tucson with the deaths of eight people, including the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords has brought the topic of guns back to light here in Arizona, especially since, in the past few years, gun laws have become bizarrely lax. For example, they passed laws since Obama's inauguration saying you can carry guns in bars. Hey, maybe even rational people could tell you that maybe there's no reason to have a gun inside of a bar, that maybe this is a freedom people have no real reason to have.

There's a friendly older gentleman who shops at my store and I see frequently, and the day after the assassination attempt, the topic came up. "You know," he said, "it's just horrible, and of course some people try to blame it on the guns. You can't take away people's guns. If this guy wanted to kill her, he could have driven into her with a car. He would have found some way of killing her."

I've felt the "You can't blame the gun, you have to blame the shooter" argument to always be a dubious one my entire life. I mean, obviously it's an argument that makes sense on its face, but it's always sounded like a technicality to me, sort of like saying that a person who had sex with minors wasn't guilty of rape because he didn't put a gun to their head and force them to do it. We all understand on its face that it seems to make sense, but when you think about it even for a second it is very obviously wrong.

The thing about guns is that no, they don't directly kill anybody. But they sure as hell make things a whole lot easier, don't they? Yes, someone could drive a car into a crowd of people and kill them, but cars certainly give you a lot more warning than standing at a group meeting with a congressman and suddenly, with horrible loud popping noises, people are dead.

I've never understood how people could excuse guns by saying that a gun never killed anybody. It's true that people kill people, but guns were specifically made to kill. They cannot do anything else. They were designed with the specific purpose of killing people more efficiently and with greater numbers than the primitive weapons we had before them, and each gun, every single one was either designed to make killing more efficient, to kill in higher numbers, or to make killing more convenient. This is an unavoidable fact. Sure, you can take a gun and shoot it at something inanimate and not kill anybody, but they didn't invent bullets with hollow tips to make blowing up targets that much more ruthless.

And when I've brought this argument before, I've actually had people make the idiotic question of "Well, if you hate guns because all they do is kill, then do you hate all knives? There are knives that are specifically designed to kill."

This is not true at all. Even your most elaborate knife is made specifically for cutting meat off bones. You might have a pretty big knife in your kitchen to cut a cooked roast out of an oven, but when you want to cut fresh meat off of, say, a deer's leg, or if you need to turn a ribcage into a half rib cage and remove it from the rest of the skeleton, you'll need more than that knife in your drawer.

However, there's a reason you're not allowed to own a grenade or TNT. Explosives don't do anything but blow up. That's all they can do. And you're not allowed to own them. You're not allowed to own a missile. Or, for that matter, napalm, which itself does not blow up at all. There are even states where you can't own brass knuckles, and the reason for it is that they're made specifically to fuck a person's face up. Guns cannot do anything else but kill. And the moment you can carve your Thanksgiving's day turkey with your gun is the day I'll accept otherwise.
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with love from CRS @ 12:51 PM 

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