Some people are addicted to food. Some people are addicted to sex. Some people are addicted to drugs and cigarettes. And some people are addicted to guns – and their addiction is killing us.
Most gun owners that I know of are not addicted to guns and don’t want to be. Their use and ownership of guns is grounded in our heritage as a free and independent people. They hunt, shoot skeet, belong to gun ranges, and protect their livestock. They are concerned for their personal safety and the safety of those they love. They are our family, friends, and neighbors with a healthy interest in, and healthy use of, guns. This is how Americans have used guns throughout our history. This is an extremely important point that needs to be understood and acknowledged by gun control advocates if there is to be any hope in achieving a consensus in our national gun discussion.
And then there are the gun addicts, nearly always men who exist in some sort of warped fantasy world of private militias and private arsenals, full of imagined threats and misplaced anger, doomsday survivalists and socially disconnected individuals. Gun addicts are obsessed with guns and the destructive power that they promise.
Many addictions are signs of mental illness, and an addiction to guns is no different. Gun addicts are nuts.
Here is a brief list of some typical characteristics of gun nuts:
- They own many, many, many weapons, usually assault-type rifles and semi-automatic handguns capable of extreme human carnage in very little time.
- They build their own weapons, usually assault-type rifles, and do so repeatedly, often building multiples of the same weapon for no discernable reason.
- They modify their weapons with military-style scopes, bump stocks, extended magazines, grenade launchers, special ammunition, and other accessories intended to magnify human killing power.
- They avoid registering their weapons whenever possible, taking advantage of loopholes in our laws involving gun shows, private sales, out-of-state and mail-order purchases.
- They constantly talk about the Second Amendment as if it was the eleventh commandment – “Thou shalt be armed”.
- They harbor such a distrust of governmental authority that they profess a willingness to engage in a violent confrontation in order to keep their weapons.
- They believe that more and more weapons carried by themselves and others will somehow protect us from gun violence.
- They believe that carry permits, either open or concealed, should be universally honored across state lines without restriction or limitation.
- They blame crazy people for all the mass shootings, but don’t recognize crazy in the mirror.
Thank God that gun nuts make up a small minority of gun owners. The problem is that – unlike people who are nuts about cats for instance, or orchids, or being a strict vegan, the type of people who can bore you half to death talking about their passion – gun nuts can actually kill you with their obsession, and do so with a frightening and increasing frequency.
These are truly unbalanced, socially irresponsible people. Some hide it well, some not so well. Among other things, they can be self-absorbed, paranoid, insecure, delusional, and lonely. What they have in common is that each is only one bad day away from becoming front page news. They all have a trigger, and who knows what will ultimately pull it. And they live all around us.
These mass murders by gun nuts are horrible and terrifying. The fact that we are being expected to accept these tragedies as the price we have to pay to preserve our freedom as Americans is a disgusting perversion of patriotism, not to mention a stark example of the worst aspects of corporate greed at the expense of an entire society.
This is why we need to continue to be vigilant when it comes to our family and friends and neighbors. This is why we need to continue to respect and acknowledge gun owners who are not obsessed with the power of guns to maim and kill. This is why we need to continue to advocate for gun controls that will make us all safer.
Of course we need full registration of all privately-owned guns. Of course we need to have much more control over gun shows, private sales, out-of-state and mail-order purchases. Of course we need limits on ammunition purchases and magazine capacities. Of course our local police departments should know who the gun nuts are who live in our neighborhoods. Of course we need a nationwide gun policy that doesn’t stop at the state line. Of course we need a ban on private ownership of assault-type rifles whose sole purpose is to kill as many people as efficiently as possible.
The gun owners among us who are not gun nuts need to become much more active in order to preserve their legitimate Second Amendment right. Renouncing membership in the NRA would be a welcome first step towards reducing the NRA’s ability to intimidate our politicians and to frame our national discussion about guns by wrapping assault-type rifles in the American flag.
The personal affirmation of knowing that you could slaughter 30 people in 30 seconds if you were to choose to do so is a troubling form of inner peace, to say the least. We are not going to be invaded by another country or enslaved by our own government. There will be no zombie apocalypse. None of these thoughts are those of a well-balanced person.
Which leads to another possibility. Progressive psychology recognizes that there can be injury to, or malformation of the brain that affects behavior. Every gun nut should have their brain CAT scanned to see if there is a pattern of injury or other anomaly that can explain and therefore predict their behavior. One never knows.
Rather than spending so much time after the fact trying to understand why gun nuts did what they did, and figuring out whether we should blame the parents, teachers, friends, or police – we should be proactively addressing every possible means of eliminating these tragic events.
The United States of America is not being well-represented or well-guided by the gun nuts among us. Owning an assault-type rifle should not be a litmus test of our patriotism. We should not be protecting our gun nuts as if their self-proclaimed right to bear a weapon of mass murder transcends the right of the rest of us to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in this case the focus being on life.