My wife and I have been re-watching the old drama series, Numbers. For those of you who don't know, it the series was about two brothers, one an FBI agent and the other a mathematician who uses his math to help the FBI solve crimes. In an episode we recently watched, the mathematician was having problems analyzing the pattern of a serial "sniper" and decided that he needed to learn how to shoot a rifle so he could have better insight into how the "sniper" thought. The older brother that was the FBI agent was reluctant at first, but finally gave his brother a short lesson with the admonition to never tell their liberal father.
I was reminded of that episode when last week I read a self-therapy piece at the Boston Globe entitled "Living with a gun" by Ieva Jusionyte. Jusionyte is an anthropologist teaching at Brown University who has written a book about gun smuggling into Latin America but doesn't actually know anything about firearms. Except that she fears and, therefore, hates them.
You pick this up immediately in her opening paragraph:
I never wanted a gun. There are days when I forget I have it, locked up in a smart safe under a pile of clothes in a dresser. I still take it out to the range about once a month, but I spend more time looking at its disassembled parts on the cleaning table — the harmless viscera of the killing machine — than aiming it at the target. At home, if I pick it up, I just hold its slick black body in my hand, fingers wrapped around the grip. It doesn’t feel as heavy as I thought a gun would be — 20 ounces. The weight of a Bible. Or, perhaps, of two human hearts. I put it back in the safe, cover the safe with jeans. But I can’t hide the unease I feel — or is it shame? — about living with a gun in America.
So if she is so fearful of firearms and thinks of them the same way as the spilled guts of a dead animal, why did she buy one? She says:
I decided six years ago to write a book about guns. I wanted to follow the weapons south, from Arizona and Texas to cities and towns in Mexico, in order to better understand the role that American firearms play in violence on both sides of the border. I knew I would be hanging out with people who bought, sold, smuggled, and carried those guns. But how could I do that if I was afraid of the object of my research?
The problem was that she is obviously a very fearful person by nature (she recounts the long lasting fear she had from an incident 20 years prior when someone tried to break into her apartment) and, she further relates, particularly dislikes American gun culture and blames the U.S. for gun violence in Latin America.
But in the past few years, I have felt a different kind of fear. Although I didn’t want to admit it, a seed of dread began to germinate somewhere deep inside me. Its source: all that was happening in the United States — racial violence, domestic terrorism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, a backlash against women’s rights. I knew a gun would not protect me from all the hate in our society. But the thing about fear is that it is often irrational.
Yeah, she pretty much proves that point. But, she continues, "I wanted to know firsthand what it meant to live with a gun in America, to feel the discomfort of such a possession, to see what it did to me."
Living in Massachusetts, there was a lengthy and onerous process for her to purchase a firearm, including mandatory training, obtaining letters of reference, explaining why she wanted a firearm, background checks, and more. Yet she complained that there was no express question when purchasing one whether she intended to take her own life. Liberal rabbits will never be happy no matter how many fences you erect on the edge of the cliff.
Of course, like most hoplophobes, she is unable to distinguish between suicides and criminal violence:
I kept my gun a secret, afraid of telling my friends and colleagues about it, unsure of how they might react. Too many Americans live with the physical and psychological scars of gun violence. Just a few weeks ago, I learned that a colleague’s father committed suicide with a gun. A few days before that, another friend had told me about losing his dad the same way. I sat there, across the table from my colleague, my fork hovering over a plate of curry, looking at her and looking down and not knowing what to say. As I write this, one of the students at the university where I teach, an undergraduate who grew up in Palestine and was visiting family in Vermont for Thanksgiving when he and his two friends were shot, is recovering in the hospital, paralyzed by the bullet that lodged in his spine. Too often when I turn on the radio, there is news of yet another shooting. And another, and another.
She is also not sure whether she has the self-control to not misuse the gun. Even though she has it locked away and rarely takes it out, she "remain[s] conflicted about being a gun owner in a society that is highly unequal and defined by systemic racism, where a gun’s capacity to both threaten and protect makes polarization worse," and anguishes that she is "also worried that I could be making things worse. After all, guns are a powerful and contested symbol of all that is right and wrong about America."
For all of her education, she is as superstitious and irrational as the most primitive savage contemplating a fetish or some other object of black magic.
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