Reply #57: You sound like a responsible gun owner.

[Beam Me Up]

In some circles that subject line is an oxymoron. My opinions (perhaps as usual) is complicated.

First, I grew up in rural America in the 1950s and 60s. Being a boy in southern Indiana meant owning a BB gun or pellet gun at a fairly early age. I think the legal age for owning a firearm is 16. Going 'squirrel hunting' (or whatever) was part of growing up.

Being sort of from another planet, I, of course, felt somewhat differently about the whole thing (as I did about most everything in the society I grew up in, much to my misfortune). My dad insisted I learn to shoot but I did not like guns. I'll say something typically me: "I've been killed by them too many times to 'like' them." Since you have a Budha avatar, I assume you'll at least not think I'm insane for saying it. I've felt this way all of my life.

But there is more. For one thing, my dad, who had hunted for food for his family when he was a boy as there were nine kids and they had very little money (born in 1903), had more of a 'tool of necessity' attitude toward his guns. He did not collect them but had a practical 22 and a shot gun which he used to hunt small game (no hand guns). He was a pretty good shot. SO, while target practicing with my father one day I was not surprised when he said, "Son, why don't you go over and stand on that stump, put the tin can on yer head and let me see if I can shoot it off."

There was a question about precisely what the subject of my father's sentence was, for me, since we weren't exactly on the best of terms. I did not like my father. He frightened me, as a matter of fact. It wouldn't be until I was an adult that I could see clearly that the man had some serious emotional problems. At the time, it was just raw emotion. I both feared and hated him--and yet I also loved him, too, because he was my father. SO, with this suggestion, I just trotted right over to the stump and put the tin can on my head and stood VERY VERY still. Sure enough, PING! I can still remember the sensation of that 22 shot whizzing just an inch or so above my skull. I don't remember how old I was but I think around 12, 13, something like that.

I didn't know for sure my dad WOULD shoot the tin can off my head, even though I felt confident that if he did, he wouldn't miss by accident. It felt something like a game of 'chicken' -- lets see if the boy trusts me enough to do this -- or something like that. Talk about a 'catalyzing' moment: It was a right of passage. At least he didn't kill me. It was at that moment I realized that my father was not to be trusted--probably the very opposite effect he'd intended.

My father was full of repressed rage and I inherited some of that. I remember in my early 20s becoming OUTRAGED by someone for some reason, I can no longer remember who or why. What I do remember vividly, however, is feeling that I sincerely wanted to KILL the MoFo. Such mentation was not unusual for me. I'd wanted to kill my father, too, and fantasized doing it, long before this William Tell episode. I'd even wanted to kill myself at times. Now I wanted to kill THIS son of a bitch and I plotted out how I'd do it, and it involved a gun. (Remind me to tell you about the on-going fantasy of joining the air force, hijacking a fighter jet and crashing it into the little town I grew up in and killing all the creepy people who lived there, including my own family sometime. It's a real 'hoot'.)

Fortunately for me, I did not own a gun. Fortunately, unlike my father, I was ultimately able to escape the confines of a dysfunctional family system and narrow-minded rural society and come to terms with a LOT of issues that were driving that rage.

I agree. It isn't guns that kill people. It is people that kill people. But that is what worries me. When do we begin to take responsibility for the pain and suffering that is not only everywhere around us, but within us as well? I'm not going to preach to you--and I hope you don't read what I'm saying that way.

You own a gun, no big deal. What concerns me, really, are weapons of mass destruction in the hands of people who have lost touch with any sense of morality--and at times seem to be out of touch with their own humanity. I'm appalled by such people whatever their affiliation or agenda.

None of us can say what they would or would not do in what was experienced as a life or death situation. If my life was in immediate danger from someone with a gun, what would I do?

Well, you see, here's the really weird thing: I believe ALL OUR LIVES ARE IN IMANANT DANGER. There are mad-men running the show and their hands are bloody. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans--just a few recent examples. Tomorrow it could be me, or you, or any one of hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Our lives are literally in their hands.

So, what do we do?

We do what we are doing, I guess. We try and wake people up. We take up arms as we need to to protect ourselves. We try to make the system work rather than resort to civil war. We try and keep our eyes on the many 'balls' that are in play. Right now, it is in the Bush administration's court.

:nuke: