There are some folks who argue that they just love ’em their guns. There are some who make arguments for their ownership, whether sport, defense or, in the case of an authoritarian government, offense. There are some, like me, who aren’t actually gun fans, but as long as the Second Amendment exists, will defend it as part of the bundle of rights protected from government intrusion.
The gun debate makes sense only when we understand that individual gun owners are mostly very kind, friendly people who love their kids and their neighbors but who, despite evidence to the contrary, share a kind of cultural faith that guns are a means to security, safety and freedom. They articulate the problem of gun violence in individual terms; the problem, they argue, is the sin of the individual who pulls the trigger, who commits murder. And of course, that is a grievous sin. However, to cast America’s gun deaths as purely the fault of individuals is to deny a broader cultural idolatry that makes any individual sin far easier to commit.
The last-quoted sentence above has a rational disconnect as American as apple pie. Guns are inanimate objects. They don’t go off firing on their own, whether for good purposes or bad. But non sequitur aside, can it be denied that the availability of guns facilitates their use by bad actors as well as good?
The false gods of power promise to keep us safe and make us strong. That is why we love them. Yet what they deliver is more and more death. This is how idols work. Ironically, our ardent devotion to them, in the end, subverts the goods that we think they protect, including the safety of our children. The concept of idolatry reminds us that things can be good and valuable — like freedom, autonomy and individual rights — and end up harming others if we hold them above all other goods.
There does seem to be a devotion involved that distinguishes guns from other objects, like hammers or knives. Some people tend to accumulate them for no apparent reason other than they love them. Being a collector of things myself, I can appreciate the desire to accumulate objects that interest you. I can further appreciate the desire to share them with others who are similarly fascinated with the collected objects. Are guns any different than, say, tool wristwatches or Georgian sterling silver?
The example of guns, which is largely a politically partisan issue, implicates the ideological right, but idolatry occurs across the entire political spectrum. The left has its own idols as well, which, like those of the right, remain largely unconscious and invisible to its adherents but drive societal dysfunction. It has its own manifestations of disordered worship of power and individual rights. The challenge, for all of us, is that it is easy to spot the idols of our ideological opponents but far more difficult to see our own.
Is the problem that guns are inherently weapons and can, and too often are, be used to take a life, or is the problem that to the left, guns represent a right-wing fetish and facile tool to level blame on the other tribe for criminal conduct perpetrated by individuals whom the left prefers not to blame?
Or are human beings simply inclined by our nature to grasp onto things and then rationalize why we adore them?
Guns take on a sacred quality among devotees. Sometimes this is overt, such as the trend highlighted by The Atlantic last year of Catholic gun enthusiasts posting illustrations of saints holding AR-15s or photos of guns draped in rosaries. Usually, idolatry presents with far more subtlety. Most people would not valorize violence. They would not profess a worship of weapons. But our devout attachment to guns springs from a broad societal adoration of power and of individual rights.
That people feel a need to believe in a higher power to give meaning to our lives has long explained our need to embrace an ideology, for better or worse. Are guns the idols of a religion-like worldview? Some might reply that guns represent the American love of freedom, or individualism, but is that all they represent?
Understanding our hearts as idol factories invites us to the difficult work of honesty and humility. It tells us that people do harm, sometimes without knowing it or without meaning to, which means that we probably do as well. It tells us that we are not driven by pure rationality or unfettered love to the degree we suppose we are. And this humility allows for compassion and charity to others, even our enemies. It tells us that they are not uniquely evil. They are driven by disordered passions and loves just like us.
By analogizing guns to idols, does it make it easier to understand why some people treat guns as sacred or is it a way to denigrate people who love guns as mere religious fanatics praying at the altar of AR-15?
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As someone with extensive experience with firearms, to include multiple varieties of professional training and firing them in active defense of my life, I find myself split several ways.
I absolutely concur that the idolization of them (saints carrying AR15s) is as unhealthy as it is bizarre. Yet, there’s a grain of truth their – a modernization of Jesus overturning the money-changer tables.
I also think the country has too many guns, especially in irresponsible and evil hands. That so many gun owners shrug their shoulders at the innumerable tragedies (caused by evil, yes, but exacerbated by the availability of efficient tools of destruction) is stomach churning to me. The average gun owner of any stripe hasn’t stood over a 16-year-old kid with his life leaking from the hole in his head as his mother screams frantically on their front lawn.
Yet, I know why the Second Ammendment was added by people who won their freedom from an oppressive government with guns, and I am fully convinced a major motivation for the Wokies anti-gun ways is their desire to impose unwanted ways of life on people.
I am convinced a reasonable, functional compromise that adheres to the spirit and intent of 2A is achievable, I’m also convinced that the reason it isn’t achieved is that neither side is truly interested in that spirit or intent
I think you last statement is dead on the money (so to speak). And I think it’s true of most of the other inflammatory issues that divide us (immigration, abortion, etc): Neither side wants to fix them, because they are far too valuable to use in stirring up the faithful.
Their value in stirring up the faithful is a side benefit. We don’t know how to fix difficult problems.
America has a high number of illegal guns. Democrats, who want to get rid of guns, have no idea what to do to solve this.
America has a high number of crazy people who commit mass shootings. Republicans, who want people to have guns, have no idea how to solve this.
“Is the problem that guns are inherently weapons and can, and too often are, be used to take a life, or is the problem that to the left, guns represent a right-wing fetish and facile tool to level blame on the other tribe for criminal conduct perpetrated by individuals whom the left prefers not to blame?”
“By analogizing guns to idols, does it make it easier to understand why some people treat guns as sacred or is it a way to denigrate people who love guns as mere religious fanatics praying at the altar of AR-15?”
In those two questions, I think you hit the nail on the head. You never hear people demonize the car or beverage maker when a drunk driver kills people. And guns make people harder to control which what I sometimes think the left really hates.
But what do I know? I’m one of those gun loving idol worshipers.
Anyone with enough knowledge and insight about firearms to distinguish between a pistol and a rifle is a gun nut.
It’s about power. Guns provide an individual with power, a sense of control. In a world where institutions are impossibly large and may not even feign attention to the mass – the people – a gun is a single symbol of personal power and ability to have some control.
Most police officers love their guns, but they don’t want the bad guys to have them. From a constitutional point of view, I could never understand the reason for debate over the Second Amendment. The obvious basis for which comes from the preamble: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” How would the people abolish a lousy government without arms?
“It conveys to us that well-meaning people who desire worthy things can seek them in ways that harm themselves and others, that we can be driven by longings that we may not know, understand or be able to articulate but that determine the shape of our lives and our society.”
The NYT is sounding more based every day.
The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken.
Increasingly, the false gods that promise to keep us safe are politicians and the state. Even in cities that boast the fastest police response times, citizens in trouble can expect to be left to their own devices for several critical minutes (based on 2018 stats from before the defund movement, 5.46 minutes in San Francisco to 9.5 in Ft. Worth, for the ten cities with the fastest response times). This is enough delay to be dead several times over.
Consequently, citizens correctly perceive that they need some means of self-defense in order to be living, and hence, capable of benefiting from police assistance, when the police arrive.
Of course there is the time-honored highland two-hander, the Lochaber axe, and the longbow. These tend to have their limitations when confronting an attacker who has modern firearms. The various gun control regimens attempted in this country, including those of the pre-Heller era, were never successful in eliminating possession of firearms by violent criminals.
The state has shown over many decades that it can’t do the job. Law-abiding citizens who want a fighting chance need to have their own access to firearms. It’s a simple matter of logic, having nothing to do with idolatry.
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Even I got a shotgun during the lockdown, because as much as I dislike guns, I love my family more.
Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
The “worship” comes in large part from the fact that guns are an enumerated right named in the BoR. Hammers and knives and nunchucks are not. So they are seen as symbols of freedom. And the fact that people like the article of this opinion piece – a lot of them – want to take that freedom away just magnifies the so-called worship.
I’m not a gun owner but I think I understand the attitude.
I am not a gun owner, nor a lawyer, but the second amendment does not mention guns nor nun chucks but states, “the right of the people to keep and Bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Well ‘arms’ would include hammers and knives and nunchucks and guns. Paleo is right in spirit but wrong in detail. If a person can ‘arm themselves with’ something physically, it is defined as an arm in the context of the 2nd Amendment. So if someone arms themselves with a lightsaber toy, technically it is an armament. Not stunningly useful, but an armament it is in that context.
The article mentioned is one of the pleasantest faux balanced and wiser-than-thee patronizing anti-second amendment screeds I have read in some time. Having carried firearms at the behest of one level or another of government almost my entire adult life, having given and received instruction in the use, care, and keeping of same, now in my twilight years building and repairing them professionally, and having twilight years to enjoy because of the judicious application of gunfire under the color of law, my respect is reserved for those who come at me head on rather than spouting gushing gauzy bullshit like the article above.
And, yes, this is my happy face.
Mine or hers?
Hers. Hence the “article cited above” description.
I thought as much, until I saw “gauzy bullshit like the article above.”
My bad. I temporarily forgot that I was wandering into a den of lawyers for whom precision of speech and the written word are sacrosanct. No doubt the “dumb old cop” defense is insufficient.
Ouch. Harsh.
And it’s a “brief” of lawyers, I believe, not a mob. Maybe a “billing” of lawyers?
As to our host’s question, I’d say “it depends.” For some – many – on both sides of the debate a firearm is an idol. A fetish. Something imbued with supernatural abilities for good or evil.
For the more sensible ones, it’s just a tool, fer cryin’ out loud.
I’m not sure the matter is ever going to be “settled,” though I do raise an eyebrow at how the hoplopaths will need to use guns to disarm the hoplophiles, whereas the hoplophiles couldn’t care less that the hoplopaths choose to be unarmed.
To dub guns religious idols and imbue them with evil spirits removes human agency and thus the social leaders responsibility. Successive mayors of Chicago have routinely blamed the inanimate tools used by gangs to commit murders while never actually attacking the gangs using those guns.
Also in our largely Christian based society idolatry is a sin and destroying idols is perceived as virtuous so this manipulates that urge, like the Tumblr meme of the atheist using a Bible quote in the expectation that a religious reader would fall for it.
I would also note the equally popular meme that the more the government wants to ban guns the more they are needed to defend against oppression. .
I will also slap at the Times writer’s usual disingenuous claims about murder rates and gun ownership. Murders have been declining for decades and the recent uptick has more to do with Covid lock downs and BLM riots which were the responsibility of the politicians seeking to ban guns than rational citizens buying guns to defend themselves.
Last week here in Florida, we had an elderly woman killed by an alligator as she tried to rescue her dog. There were bystanders who videoed the event, but none of them pulled out a weapon to defend her. One would think, from all the hysteria about gun worshipers in Florida that at least one of them would be carrying.
Full disclosure: I don’t own a firearm. Unless you count a bb gun and a flare pistol as a firearm, which I don’t think is the case in the US. I once had a guy in a boat store in the UK go nuts when I asked for some flare cartridges.
“Are guns any different than, say, tool wristwatches or Georgian sterling silver?”
Nobody is going to point a wristwatch at you and tell you to hand over the gun. Likewise, you aren’t going to keep a wristwatch under your pillow in case someone breaks in and tries to steal your gun collection.
More importantly, tyrants aren’t going to send people with wristwatches to take you to a re-education camp,, and your wristwatch collection isn’t going to deter them. That is why would-be tyrants are not fear-mongering about the dangers of unrestricted wristwatch ownership.
You can have my Patek Philippe when you unstrap it from my cold, dead wrist.
The Times has it backwards. While there are certainly a few gun fetishists out there, they are a small minority among gun owners and supporters of gun rights.
What they should be asking themselves is whether guns have become a taboo. Is there any other way of explaining overwrought, melodramatic performances like Gersh Kuntzman’s account of firing an AR-15? Or the bizarre illogic of berating the rod & gun club out in the sticks for a massacre of one inner city gang by another? I can choose not to own a gun, and it won’t earn me a single sidelong glance from my gun-owning acquaintances. How many in the NYT newsroom could openly admit to owning a gun without incurring suspicion and judgement?
Lol; re-education camps. I always knew that The Walking Dead and other dystopian nonsense would find traction amongst the eager Tinfoil Hat Afficionados.