During the last six years, after The Good Men Project published GUNS ‘R US (part one), I’ve stayed alert to American’s relationships with guns – including mine. “Life in the Shooting Empire,” is part two, including my recent experience at the gun range with a pistol and continuing thoughts on guns in America.
My perspective on guns formed over time. Since age 10, I’ve only had one shotgun, but in my ‘60’s I finally bought my first and only pistol, a 9mm Remington with a laser sight. I drove to an Arizona gun store where it took five minutes. I had mixed feelings about it, but because I was teaching a yoga class – mostly gratis – and my employer offered to pay for a concealed carry class held at the business, I signed up. It was the only firearms training I’ve had since I took my hunter safety class at 12.
Having once taught a sociology class to college students, I learned that my sociological imagination is exercised when I look at my place in a group or society from a perspective outside the dominant and easily accepted norms and expectations. The sociologist in me didn’t teach me how to fit in but how to blend in, listen, and observe.
This skill has guided my explorations to places like Hawaii, where I recognized my intrusion on another culture and at the same time embraced kava and free diving. In Wisconsin, I learned how to drive my Harley Davidson and learned to fit in at biker bars, and now I’m a gun owner in Arizona where people take pride in an identity as gun country. As a gun owner I blend in and keep my gun opinions to myself in order to figure out their mindsets. Mostly, they think I’m one of them, and I’ve found it easy to get them talking about guns.
I put on my sociological imagination and on a Saturday morning, walk into my conceal carry class. It’s taught by an instructor from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and I notice that I’m one of twenty white men. I dressed for class by putting on my motorcycle boots, a baseball hat with Grand Canyon – neutral enough – written on the front, and a plaid shirt. Joining a short line, I grabbed a coffee and sat in a chair facing the podium.
The instructor introduces himself and segues into his material by saying, “Arizona has more concealed carry permits than any other state. There are liberal gun laws here.” It was the first and last time I heard the word liberal used in a positive sense.
The NRA guy made it clear he was proud of Arizona. He talked about gun laws and turning to schools, mentions 1984 when Congress ratified legislation mandating that guns would not be allowed in schools or within 100 feet of any school property. The NRA instructor in front of me scoffed at that notion, “If they don’t see it, they won’t even know. I learned that he takes his gun to school – to pick up his kids – and adds, “It’s a God-given right.”
In class, I’m surrounded by the politics of hard right conservatives; they seem mad at California because they don’t like their gun laws, and they insult the Golden State for other reasons that are unclear. I hear militancy and self-assurance, even righteousness about their beliefs. When someone across the room says, “Carrying a gun is our God-given right,” I saw heads bobbing up and down. Guns and God; its apple pie and ice cream to the men in this room and for much of Arizona territory.
Sitting through the conceal carry class, I thought it was a poor presentation of gun laws and veiled attempts by the instructor to bring all of us into the gun-carrying ranks of the NRA. He collected $50 from us and took our fingerprints for the FBI background check. After everyone was fingerprinted, he said:
You’ll get your conceal carry card in the mail anytime up to two months from the day you send in $60 with this class completion certificate, and your fingerprint card. And for another $15, you can join the NRA and get all the benefits of membership; and since I’m a teacher for them, I can get you an even better deal for a longer time.
Aside from a subscription to American Rifleman, one of the NRA’s outreach communication magazines that have been published since 1923, and an NRA window-sticker, I wondered what extra benefits he was talking about.
With Americans becoming more aggravated by deadly public shootings, the NRA is facing new challenges. In 2019, Wayne LaPierre, former President of the NRA, came under fire for misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on executive trips, lavish clothing, lifestyle expenses, and personal political lobbying. LaPierre fall was swift and he was asked to resign from his job with the NRA, and did so in April, 2019, replaced by the NRA’s 67,th and first woman president, Carolyn D. Meadows who joins a list of former US Presidents, actors, attorneys, CEO’s, businessmen, and military personnel.
According to an Associated Press story in January, 2021 the NRA has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, and wants to reincorporate in Texas rather than New York. The NRA cites the “toxic political environment of New York,” as the reason, but it cannot dissolve from New York without consent from New York authorities governing laws for nonprofits. The American Rifleman is feeling the stress as we all are.
Truth is, I have no interest in the NRA. I’m a liberal. I used to say that I’m left of Jesse Jackson. I share something with the Rev. Jackson too; we’re both alumni of The Chicago Theological Seminary, and I remember one of my professors talking about what it was like to have Jesse in class and what he thought was special about him.
If my Arizona gun-loving classmates, 20 white males, would have known this, I’m sure they would have hated me. But like a sheep that is dumb before the sheer, I keep my mouth shut, for I hoped to learn what brought them to the class. My curiosity took me there, and my sociological imagination had me searching for the deeper meaning in the phrase I kept hearing about the “gun as a God given right.”
I wasn’t there to disagree, only to listen. With little fanfare and great speed, I surprised myself with a simple thought about owning a pistol. From that single thought it was a seamless process to buying one in a gun store and just as easily attending a class and receiving a gun-carrying permit that is valid in almost all 50 states with certain restrictions.
The whole process was simple: I didn’t have to fire the gun or show that I could fire it; I plopped down my money at the store, plopped down my body on a chair during a class, and now I can legally walk down the street with a pistol on my side.
Wait, what? Really? Yes, really!
I suspected my classmates had clear reasons for their presence; mine were ambiguous at best and fraught with my own moral conflicts over gun ownership. It feels weird to know I can walk around in public with a pistol on my belt, It feels weird having it in my home, and it felt weird attending a conceal carry class. I lament that I supported, even in an ancillary way, the NRA.
I learned in class that if I ever did shoot another human, I’d be in a tangled mess of legal hurt. The only time one may use a gun on a person is if someone breaks into your house. Then if you shoot them, you are protected by what’s known as the Castle Doctrine, giving homeowners the right to protect home, life, and property.
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Guns remain a vexed object now more than ever in our divided political and social climate. The idea of gun restrictions are not welcome by gun owners – something about a God-given right, I guess.
But through the years while watching and listening to debates on guns in America, my sociological imagination taught me to peer into the beliefs behind the words. The narratives over guns are never just about guns, but are strong opinions laden with emotion and fear. Gun discussions are spiced with an attempt to use data and wax analytical about how guns save lives.
God-talk is the same way; yet in its salvation language the data is known as The Bible. With Biblical authority, a veiled threat often exists and is made heavy by the notions of eternal salvation or damnation – something I could have talked about with Jesse Jackson for days back when I was in the theological game.
Someone I know carries a small gun to work every day. He said to me, “It’s good if others know I have a gun. It’s called the halo effect.” I believe he was saying that a gun is a deterrent, but I’d never heard it said that way. We call that a euphemism, changing the meaning of something to make it sound good. Like the War Department changing its name to the benevolent sounding Department of Defense.
My conceal carry instructor is what I call the true believer, even a zealot. You’d never know by looking at him; a 40-ish, black-haired and sharp-edged glasses kind of guy, a thin nervous man reminding me of Buddy Holly, or a high school chemistry teacher boiling with joyful intensity like his Bunsen burner during a classroom demonstration. The NRA guy’s theology and sociology overflow with intensity and spill out on the desk. ”Gun ownership predates the Constitution and other man-made laws. It’s a God-given right,” he repeats.
Two months after my conceal carry class, my permit arrived and I drove to the outdoor gun range for the first time. I was met there by a stern-faced man behind the control window who said I had to pay and then added, “You have to watch a short video on safety before going to the shooting range.” I did, and the shooting world seemed admirably arranged. I finished the video and Mr. Sternface opened locked doors letting me into the active shooter range.
A little self-conscious, I checked out the other shooters. Some were firing automatic weapons that roared like machine guns. I’d used shotguns in my life, and grew up hunting pheasants and grouse, but this seemed different. I sensed anxiety – other than my own – but I may have been projecting; the sound and fire of the gun range both compromised and animated my imagination.
Three people in official-looking uniforms, guns strapped to their belts, were working. I glanced at them, and noticed that at every moment one of them was watching me. I wondered if in the past, something had happened and that’s why they had to supervise every shooter. To me, it felt like a predator sizing up prey. I felt guilty, even though I had done nothing. Guns are dangerous, even at the range, and maybe that’s why I felt uneasy surrounded by hawks and hawksters, maybe even police and thieves.
Once, when hunting with my brother in South Dakota, he walked too far ahead of me and not far enough to the side when his dog flushed a pheasant from the edge of field. I raised my shotgun and fired without realizing exactly his position. Pellets from my shotgun whizzed past his left ear, fairly close. Later, after I asked, he said “Yea, I could feel wind from the shot.” I apologized; that trip was the last time I hunted and I have no plans for another.
Sometimes, hunting is dangerous before getting into the field. At the cabin where I had shot the squirrel with my brothers’ gun (part I) one of the men insisted on carrying his old 30.30 Winchester lever-action rifle. More than once while loading or unloading, he accidentally fired into the ground or sent a bullet whizzing past the car door, scaring to death everyone in the hunting party. In spite of dangers, guns exert a strong appeal.
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According to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution, there are 400 million guns in the US for a population of 330 million; this is not counting black market or hand-made guns. And if you watch television crime shows, there must be a million more guns at the bottoms of rivers and lakes. Such programs depict guilty shooters throwing weapons about as far as anyone can throw a pistol from the shore. Let’s just call them what they are: crime guns.
This year alone, according to the independent Gun Violence Archive, more than 41,500 people (including suicide) have died of gun violence in the US, making us look like savages to the rest of the world.
After writing this, I was walking near a water canal in Phoenix’s east valley and I did something unusual. Stopping, I peered over the edge and looked into the water. Sure enough, a pistol was at the bottom of the canal.
Our dysfunctional government does nothing about this violence, and while they pretend to work, they fail to solve problems, continue to tax but do not adequately represent, and by their ineptness, disenfranchise the people who’ve elected them. Maybe this is why #shutdowngovernment, #security, and #corruptduopoly are trending, and we seem to be moving perilously close to a revolution.
I’m not concerned about a revolution; I am concerned that there are 400 million guns, millions of anarchists, and angry gun owners willing to aim at other people and pull the trigger. Security is trending for a reason, and as the word sparks the fear of insecurity a run on ammunition seems to take place. Nearly every day, I pass the gun store where I bought my pistol and I notice that its open and there are always customers.
In a way, I get it; many of us are emotionally triggered these days. But I fear some will respond to threats of insecurity with the gun’s deadly trigger. Our culture is in peril, and while our big crises’ are the pandemic, potential economic collapse, racial injustice, and an environment that is fighting back, the gun crisis is ongoing but not trending.
In the grip of many problems, ‘guns r us’ is not a good look or a good slogan; I get the idea of guns for defense, in a way, but guns for anything other than self-defense reflects humanities’ sad failures and illustrates the fall of a once productive empire buying up bullets and happily shooting its way into the bitter end.
Read Part One here.
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