Guns

Making it legal to possess weapons that are either automatic (or can be made so) is absurd to the point of laughability, if it were not so tragic.  How can anyone defend the use of an automatic weapon for hunting?  How many bullets are needed to kill a deer?  And 30-shot magazines?  Are people actually shooting down entire herds?  But the guns are not root causes of the problem, although they make it easier to do more damage.

Why do we not give people the right to own other kinds of weapons capable of large-scale destruction?  Hand-grenades?  Flame-throwers?  Bazookas? (Although I have to admit that many times when driving on the highway I would love to have a roof-mounted bazooka.) 

There are only two reasons for defending the power for civilians to own automatic weapons:  to provide us the power to defend ourselves against a totalitarian government, e.g. to rebel, and to have the emotional satisfaction of owning a powerful weapon, which of course is most satisfying to the least powerful.  It is, in fact, the least empowered people, such as adolescents or adolescent-minded adults, who want the automatic weapons.

However, I think there is a deeper and more basic cause, and it is a cause that can't be addressed with simplistic solutions.  We are, as a nation, fascinated by guns and are in love with violence, in particular fantasies of "revenge" and "fighting back".  We are apparently terrified of being powerless, and concomitantly we are in love with the idea of personally having the power to hurt those who might hurt us.  We love movies and television about people who are victimized fighting back and victimizing others.

We have to be "ready" all the time.  We don't need the guns, but we want them desperately because of our fear of powerlessness.  Our culture is largely about violence.  Look at our tv shows, our books and comic books, our movies.  What percentage of them are violent?  As a nation, we won't give up our fantasies about having weapons of mass destruction, even if we kill each other to exercise the fantasy.

Children learn solutions to problems by watching adults.  What they see is that we kill people who cause problems for us.  They see other solutions as well, but the most dramatically satisfying and frequently observed are those in which we use weapons to blow apart our opponents.  Our movies, books and televisions have always relied on violence as a dramatic solution, but over the past 20 years or so the violence depicted is increasingly gory and detailed.  So violence becomes a solution, and one which they increasingly have the power to evoke.  This is especially convincing to them when they watch their parents treat each other with violence.  How do you deal with a frustrating person?  You kill them, and as many of them as possible.

I don't see any easy way to deal with this issue.  No law that can be passed (and we probably won't even do that) will solve the problem.  I have to admit reluctantly that I enjoy the same movies and the same television series.  I also note that after all the bad guys are killed, nobody seems to care.  The bodies disappear somewhere.  Nobody suffers.  Nobody mourns the loss of the dead.  The "heroes" of the shows don't regret the killings, apparently.  Death is basically trivialized.

Why would we think our kids would have any more respect for life and death than the heroes we give them to model themselves after?