I don't get too heated about gun issues and don't feel a special need to defend the second amendment in as pure a form as possible.
It seems to me that while the first amendment is under attack in a million little ways everyday across this thrill kill crazy land (from the overzealous school librarian to the cop who insists you remove your anti-Bush t-shirt before the Prez's motorcade arrives) the second faces a very focused – and not unreasonable – set of challenges and modifications.
Waiting periods? Background checks? Registration and licensing? All seem pretty sensible to me. Consider for a moment that the Patriot Act is more concerned with 'suspicious activity' – including speech in various forms – than weapons possession and you have an idea of why more “liberals” are concerned with the first as opposed to the second amendment.
Of course there are cultural issues, as some have pointed out. There are people who oppose any gun ownership, believing that American style ultra violence will dissolve into the ground like ice on an August day if only the weapons disappear. And there's also class chauvinism; gun owners are viewed, by some folks, as 'nuts' who're eager to pull the trigger. The militia movement (and those videos of bikini babes squeezing the trigger on semi-autos) provides fright enhancing poster material for this stereotype.
I've heard the argument that we need to maintain weapons to protect ourselves from government abuses (as the Constitution essentially says) and it certainly sounds okay in theory. The problem is, in a contest between a “well ordered militia” and the 82nd Airborne division, the militia is likely to find itself reduced, in fairly short order, to a fine, red mist of decaying biological material spread over the ground. Or, if it's lucky and the US Air Force comes a calling to convince the wayward of their error, carbonized chunks of matter smoking on the blackened earth.
And all of this is possible without resorting to tactical nukes.
So keeping a weapon in the house just in case Washington goes completely off-kilter may help you sleep a little better (maybe) but is more or less useless.
This leaves, on the list of true uses for guns, activities like hunting, sport shooting and the politically charged topic of self defense – not against the Pentagon and its uber-kill-tech, but against the aggressively unfriendly.
And here is where the real trouble starts.
...
Years ago, I took a cross country road trip with a good friend. He's considerably older than me – a Vietnam vet, serious computer hardware savant, car enthusiast, lady killer and gun owner (though not necessarily in that order).
“Listen,” he said over the phone “I'm going to rent a big ass BMW, black, with smoked windows, fat tires and whatever the hell else those crazy Germans stuff in the thing. I'm driving to Los Angeles. Wanna come?”
I was between jobs, unmarried, kidless and looking for something to do. He had a real estate business that allowed him to do almost anything he damn well pleased.
I was in.
“But you gotta bring your laptop and we're going to get you a gun.” Well, this was new – the gun part, not the laptop which was like another part of my body.
I wasn't a gun person – though I'd fired an AR-15 at a summer camp one year – and really didn't know what to think of this. He of course, was not only used to guns but very comfortable around them. He was a country boy and grew up around firearms for practical reasons and then, in the military, sharpened his skills in hot situations one of which was the Tet offensive.
He didn't think twice about carrying a gun on a long trip – just in case.
But I didn't see the need and asked him why he did.
“Most people are alright, but a few are truly wrong and must be dealt with harshly. We'll be traveling a long way; the odds of meeting the truly wrong go up. Nice to be prepared.”
I wanted to argue the point further but felt like a jackass. Here was a man who used to drop into a jungle clearing (cleared via the use of defoliants and napalm) with a trailer of electronic listening gear, do his black ops thing in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks and then, when the assignment was through, hop on a get-away chopper while remotely setting off thermite charges so the trailer would melt into the ground like it was made of rich, creamery butter.
That was, as he called it “my summer vacation for the years 1967 through 1969.” Later, after returning home, he renounced the war and disappeared for a year or so, living simply. He had a gun then too.
So it seemed foolish to question his wisdom (he was my elder after all). I got a gun, a Glock. I learned to shoot it and became comfortable with having a weapon nearby. I wasn't obsessed with the weapon, but its presence did add a strange sort of weight to the day. My on-again, off again girlfriend of the time was simultaneously repelled by and attracted to this new element of my personality – the guy who's not afraid of guns. One of the many complexities of that relationship.
...
We went on our trip, my friend and me. The ride was smooth and air conditioned, the handling tight and responsive. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to take turns driving this machine. And, like he said, most people were friendly and helpful. The guns (he had a .357) could sleep undisturbed, their services unneeded.
Except in South Carolina.
We made a stop in S. Carolina to visit an old friend of my bud – a fellow vet. On the way to the house we stopped at a gas station. While he gassed the car a truck pulled up, filled with a group of men. It was a hot Saturday night, clearly they didn't have dates or anything to do.
So naturally, messing with the guys in the tricked out beemer from out-of-state became the evening's project.
The driver pulled the truck close to our car. He wasn't getting any gas. He glared at my bud who was filling the tank. All the guys in the truck were silently staring at us for long minutes.
Finally, the driver leaned out and said “what the fuck are you doin here?”
My friend, who's not easily shaken, shrugged his shoulders and said “it's a gas station, I'm getting gas. That's what you do at a gas station. What the fuck are YOU doing?”
The driver snarled. His hand slipped from the top of the steering wheel and moved downward, out of sight. My friend looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I knew what he meant – this guy's reaching for his piece, get ready. I quickly loaded a clip into the Glock and released the safety. I was strangely calm, as if some other portion of my brain – the fight part of the flight or fight instinct perhaps – had decisively activated.
“Listen,” my friend said, with an odd sort of quiet authority “here's what's going to happen. You're going to shoot me and I'm going to go down, maybe for good. And then my friend there is going to spray your truck and end you real quick cause he's ruthless like that. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can keep on moving and we can keep on moving and everything can be fucking a-ok. It's your choice.”
As they say, time seemed to stand still, as if we'd left normal space and slipped into this zone where only threat balanced by threat existed.
And then the cops, called by the gas station attendant, pulled up. The truck drove off into the night, my friend finished pumping gas, we chatted with the cops for a little while and sped off.
Later, with S. Carolina many miles behind us and Vegas in our sights I asked my friend if he meant it, back at the gas station, when he'd said I was “ruthless like that.” Did he really think I'd calmly, with grim precision “end” those guys?
He paused for a long time and quietly drove the car down the interstate. “Yeah” he said.
“Yeah. Don't misunderstand me, I'd trust you with my life, hell, even the life of my kids. You're a beautiful person. But I learned years ago to tell the difference between someone who'd freak out and someone who'd just do the job and get a drink afterward. If that idiot had shot me, you'd have smoked him.”
After that, I got rid of the gun.
.d.