A way for people to take the issue of guns in our society seriously is to discuss them thoroughly, to realize that they didn’t just appear on earth for our enjoyment or as a bolster to our sagging esteem. Guns have been around merely a fraction of our human history but in that time we have given them a persona and revered them as a much needed commodity even though the power they wield is only accessed through our own human fears and wants.
When the first rudimentary forms of firearms appeared on earth they were used to hurl projectiles through walls at close range and now several hundred years later we can and pinpoint and destroy targets from miles away with a hail of projectiles or a single devastating thump. This science of releasing expanding gas in a confined space has gradually been morphed for use as personal killing devices ranging in sizes from vehicle mounted to dinky palm sized pistols that are easily concealed and used to kill in a more personal one-on-one fashion. The bottom line for our killing machines is that their purpose is for use is in destruction. A gun of any size only has two intended uses, to kill (destroy) or threaten death. We do use them in other fashion for enjoyment and work such as target shooting and occasionally as catapults. But these are merely morphs of the technology and cannot be claimed as a purpose since if the intended user turns their back with negligence, those of nefarious intent can use a target gun or line gun to kill or threaten.
Guns aren’t an inherently bad thing even though their purpose is negative in nature, they have actually helped our society by playing a key role in human advancement. In the 1400's we started to use them to gather food and to defend against death and enslavement. This in turn helped to increase our populations and since then, with every use of guns we have been defining the line between righteous and nefarious use.
One of the destructive attributes that is seldom discussed in relation to guns is the effect they’ve had in the dumbing down of our society. This technology has made our lives easier and with that comes complacency and entitlement. In 1776 America was born and we separated ourselves from our oppressors with guns. This set in motion an ideal in the American way of life that guns are a necessary tool to thwart oppression and since then, our numbers have increased immensely until we are experiencing the same crowded house syndrome within America that we struggled against all those many years ago. The problem now is that we have nowhere else to expand our numbers, no new colonies to inhabit, no way to escape our oppressors either with or without guns. At a certain time after the industrial revolution the scales tipped and the purposes for guns skewed to being more negative than positive. No longer actually needing to use them for food gathering we started to use them primarily for threat and killing each other as our populations strove to separate ourselves by different angles of thought. These different angles of thought have now become our oppressors spurned on and nurtured by class through other of our American freedoms, greed and power.
There is no cogent argument that can defend against reasons of maintaining human life but through fuzzy interpretation of our founding documents our guns are still here. We “entitled” their use those many years ago when we were 3 million people struggling for freedom from oppression and now we are ironically 320 million people struggling to be free from ourselves… with guns. We are our own enemies now, we don’t need others to blame. We oppress others and maintain these oppressions with the threat of guns.
We have reaped freedom for others and then sown our own freedom by those lessons to reap our own crop until now Americans kill an average of One Hundred Nine other Americans per day with our freedom.
LL/ Mac/
