OPINION

Maybe it's time to get a gun

We're outnumbered. There are more firearms than people in this country now. In 2015, the Washington Post guessed there were 357 millions guns and 317 million people.

There's probably more than that, for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms data they relied upon only cover legal guns. Unregistered firearms are just that, phantoms floating across state and national borders. Nobody knows how many.

No serious person is considering confiscating them. The only way you're going to take some people's guns is at gunpoint. And people with guns can point them right back at you.

Even so, most people in this country don't have much to do with guns; only about a third of households in the U.S. have any.

Around here, the percentage is somewhat higher. One study had it at about 57 percent in 2013, which made Arkansas No. 2 in gun ownership rates behind Alaska, at 61 percent. A lot of them are what I'd call casual gun owners, the sort of people who might keep a .22 rifle in a closet or a .38 in the drawer of a bedside table but never think much about them. They don't hunt or go to shooting ranges.

But there are also a lot of Arkansans who duck hunt or deer hunt, who might have a couple of pricey long guns they lock away in safes. You might not have a gun in your house, but your friends and neighbors do. The topic probably doesn't come up often in casual conversation.

On the other hand, there are also people who really like guns. I've known a few of them. I've gone out in the woods with some of them and chopped up targets and small trees with them. I can understand their enthusiasm, for there's something beautiful in a well-made tool; a sense of satisfaction available in the balanced, greasy precision of a good weapon. Add in its lethal potential and the understanding that for hundreds of years real heroes have used similar instruments in noble struggles for worthwhile things all over this blighted planet and yes, it's possible to work up a solemn emotional attachment to a hunk of iron and wood or bakelite.

I don't think we need to worry about these folks, though some of them seem to be overly susceptible to the sales pitches and scare tactics of the National Rifle Association, which after spending a few decades functioning as the marketing arm of the gun and ammo industry has recently branched out into general right-wing paranoid politics. (With Barack Obama out of office and Hillary Clinton defeated, they've had to step up their search for bogeypeople and have started producing their own streaming content, demonizing immigrants, liberals and the "violent left" that wants to punch self-proclaimed Nazis in the throat. )

I don't know anyone who'd argue that the vast majority of gun owners are decent people. They've just made a choice to exercise their right to own a firearm.

They don't have to explain themselves. While there's probably a discussion to be had about what weapons are appropriate for individuals to own (we already restrict fully automatic weapons), while we might be able to require people who own dangerous instruments to carry liability insurance or to stop the sale of high-capacity magazines, unless you're a felon or mentally ill you have a right to own a gun. And you should have that right.

But that right was given you by a group of old-timey white men rebelling against governmental authority, not by God. Just because we invoke God doesn't mean we speak for him. God has always been silent on the issue of gun rights. Nothing in our Constitution is scripture.

Gun rights are pretty much an American idea. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's the best idea, only that it's a product of our culture and history. Other countries do just fine without their citizens enjoying an enshrined right to a killing appliance.

Some people like to suggest that we're not that different from other countries in terms of the number of firearms per capita. They'll say there are a lot of guns in Canada and Switzerland too, but they don't have the sort of problems with mass shooting that we do, so it must be that there's something sick and desperate in our culture that causes our problems.

Some facts: There are a lot of guns in Canada and Switzerland relative to most of the world. But there are more than three times as many guns per capita in the U.S. than in Canada; more than four times as many guns per capita than in Switzerland. There are almost twice as many guns per capita in the U.S. as there are in the second-place country, which is Serbia. (We have about 113 guns per 100 people. Serbia has about 58.)

But these people aren't entirely wrong. There is something sick and desperate in our culture.

And part of that manifests in the toxic, erotic attachment a certain class of gun owners hold for their weapons. These are the folks who revel in gun porn and imagine themselves good guys who would stop the massacres that now occur on a weekly basis in the country. I know that whenever I address the subject--and I've been writing basically the same column about guns in America now for about 30 years--I'm going to hear from them. They're going to tell me about all the times they've prevented crimes by pulling their guns out in public (four times, one correspondent assured me). They insist that folks who mistakenly call AR-15s assault rifles are idiots who ought to have no standing in any debate about how we move forward on this issue.

These are the real gun nuts, and they exist. They're the ones who buy all those cool military-looking non-assault rifles and the bullets to feed them. They're the ones with tactical body armor and bump stocks. They're the ones who fantasize about being good guys. They're the ones who get their feelings hurt and shoot up churches. Who deny the reality of Sandy Hook and Las Vegas. Who insist their rights trump your kid's life.

And they're right. You get the thoughts and prayers; the NRA gets the legislation it wants. It's just business. You can't rely on government to help you, you got to exercise some self-reliance, son.

So get yourself a gun.

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Editorial on 11/12/2017

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