Guns

Lone Ranger and Tonto

   I can understand the fascination with guns. When I was a kid I myself was fascinated by guns. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Paladin and Wyatt Earp all used guns effectively and glamourously. Silver bullets and the Buntline Special were cool. The Rifleman was cool. And no-one ever got killed.
   So I got my friends and our machine guns and pistols and we would race around the house or deep into the woods and we would shoot each other over and over and we never killed anyone either. No blood, apart from maybe scraped knees, and no death.
   This was fine but I'm not sure what it taught us, if anything. Not that we were out to be taught anything, we were just kids, having fun.
   When I say there was "no death" I'm not including the incident with the pellet gun. A friend if mine had a pellet gun and one day we were shooting it out of his second floor bedroom window. There was a sparrow on a wire, probably about 20 feet away. I truly only meant to scare him from the wire, with the pellet gun. Instead, I killed him. Like a target in a carnival sideshow, it flipped over, hung upside down by its feet for about five seconds and then dropped to the ground, dead.
   I was horrified.
   I have never in my life intended to harm, let alone kill, any kind of animal. Having then accidentally killed a small bird, this feeling in me was even more intensely imprinted, to this very day.

   This is the reality of guns.
   A few days ago, a man with a gun killed another man in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. He opened fire in a food court and not only killed his intended victim but wounded many other  bystanders in the process. One thirteen year old boy ended up in critical condition with a head wound.
   The reality of guns was foisted upon those innocent and  unsuspecting people that day, people whose only purpose in being there at that time and place was to shop and then chow down for more shopping.
   Who knows what the toll was on those people? I imagine anyone who suffered a physical injury will recover, in time. What might take much longer to heal is the psychological and emotional trauma of not only the injured that day but likely anyone who was in the vicinity and saw the violence or experienced the panic which ensued. The incident will give us all lingering doubts as to where the safe places are.
   I know that in our house there exists somewhat of a cavalier attitude around guns. Guns and things associated with them are considered cool. Guns have been used to kill animals. On our T.V., shows that take guns and make them into even bigger and better guns are among the most popular. There was no shock or disgust displayed when a newspaper article about the Eaton Centre killing was read, in fact there was almost tacit approval of the gunman's shooting ability.
   All this because there is no true understanding of the depth and nature and effect of this kind of violence, likely because it has never hit close to home. The same way it is difficult to understand the effect of a beating unless you have been beaten yourself.

   A gun or a rifle enables you to enter a cause and effect relationship with an enemy from a distance. Before guns it was arrows. Before arrows, various forms of armed combat existed which required the participants to actually touch each other, to look into each other's eyes during battle. This was distasteful so now we have guns. Not to mention missiles, rocket launchers, bombs and mines. Things that will kill your enemy without you needing to actually be there and see the result or perhaps even find out that he is actually stronger than you are. It is almost a cowardly way to kill.

   Yes, I am pretty tired of guns. I'm tired of constantly seeing them pulled out on T.V. and in movies. I've been watching them for so many years now I know exactly how to hold them and exactly what kind of burn marks they leave if you kill a person at point blank. I know about bullet trajectories and SWAT team tactics and how to "clear" a building and on and on. If somehow or other I were a T.V. or movie producer, I would ban them with no reservations. And, in my wildest fantasies, if I could teach deer, ducks, geese, bears and moose how to shoot back I would do so, in a heartbeat.