Guns Are a Symptom

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The United States of America is now without any sacred places. Churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues are not sacred. Worshippers have been shot to death in Iowa, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, New York, Ohio, Georgia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Schools are not sacred. Children have been shot at 27 schools so far in 2022. Hospitals are not sacred. This year and last, in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, patients and staff at hospitals and clinics have been targeted. There is no sanctuary.

                The vulnerable spaces are not only physical. They are also conceptual. They are areas of ideas and practice where democracy’s shared beliefs used to be protected by moral barriers—bulwarks that are now eroding. High levels of authority and influence openly corrupt the reverence for honest elections, the deference to the rule of law, the integrity of facts and truth. The society reels under a shroud of menace. There is a sense of disorder, instability.

                No wonder Americans rush to buy guns whenever a mass shooting makes the country recoil. People have grown afraid of one another. A great retreat from common ground is underway, a pulling back into individual sovereignty, where the gun is a tool and a talisman. Far from the fields and forests of the responsible hunter or the shooting range of the careful sportsman, the gunman who harbors fear or hatred buys a firearm to kill human beings, as many as fast as possible. Whether to defend his home and family, or to take revenge, or to serve a demented cause, he wields his weapon in a wilderness of distrust.  

                And so the gun is a symptom of a breakdown in America. The symptom could be treated, obviously; guns could be restricted in availability and capability. That is a task readily accomplished if citizens elected people who valued human life over political life. But even if that miracle occurred, the underlying society would not be healed sufficiently to obviate the gun as an object of desire.

 

                Gunowners do not make up some homogeneous tribe bent on mayhem. And guns in the hands of kids can be instruments of learning, part of growing up. That’s how it was for me as a nine-year-old. A farmer friend, Joe Vanek, up the hill from my aunt’s country acreage in Connecticut, taught me how to clean, carry, load, and shoot a .22 rifle with strict respect for safety. The first time I fired it, at a tin can, I was awed by the power, not thrilled. The crack of the shot, the kick against my shoulder, the clanging murder of the can were humbling. I got a little wiser in that moment.

                Years later, when I was 23, my mother wrote me this recollection: “The day Joe said a very small boy was ready to go out alone with his gun, I hung over the split rail fence and watched with trepidation a sturdy youngster carrying a gun which seemed to me larger than he, trudge miles across the field all by himself. 'Now watch,' Joe said, as that small boy came to the fence. 'He’ll shove the gun under first, just as I taught him, and then climb over and pick up the gun on the other side. He’s ready.' And you were and I never would have stopped your going. I just had a moment being—what? a mother? a woman?”

                But more years later, a small boy in Baltimore, where I was researching a book on poverty, told me that he carried a handgun to school every morning because his neighborhood was so dangerous. He stashed it in a secret place outside the building, then picked it up on the way home.

                American society has always struggled in crosscurrents of individual versus collective benefit. It is a healthy contest at its best, for neither the personal nor the community can thrive without honoring the other. The tension is seen in abortion laws that have neither prohibited absolutely nor permitted limitlessly, a balance about to be swept away by a Supreme Court ruling for what right-wing justices regard as the greater good against the preferences of individual women.

Imbalance, though, is treacherous. Soviet Communism placed the collective above all else, drowning individual rights and personal ambitions under a reign of moral judgment and persecution.

The United States seems poised to tilt precariously in the opposite direction in most areas other than abortion rights. By submerging the common good under a flood of personal preferences—some disguised as religious, some as constitutional, all as noble resistance to authority—sanction is given to harming others. The right to discriminate against gay couples, the right to be unvaccinated and unmasked, the right to ignore lawful subpoenas, the right to storm the Capitol and defile the democratic sacrament of a peaceful transfer of power—sacred no longer—are elevations of parochial interests at broader expense.

Americans immersed in violent video games and virulent Fox News fantasies might be forgiven for confusion about where reality and unreality begin and end. Some, failing in relationships and schooling and careers, might take up the gun as a substitute for virility. Some, feeling powerless, might brandish the weapon as their solution.

But solutions to the society’s ailments can be found only in reality. The gun is a symptom, and a fantasy.