You might be right, but you still aren't getting the guns

            I don’t own a gun.

            I am 43 years old and have lived in the South all my life.  Eleven years in Tennessee, 32 in Texas.  Growing up we had one gun in our house, an old carbine that belonged to my great-grandfather as legend had it.  Everyone once in a while my dad would go out and shoot it, reporting back to us that the bullets would go through trees.  I never saw him fire it, but Dad’s the most honest guy I know.

            I don’t have guns for a simple reason.  I have no reason to own one.  Crime is down significantly from the time when I was a child and I live in a low-crime area.  I have children in the house and as anyone with any curiosity knows, a gun in the house is six times more likely to injure a friend or family member than a bad guy.  I don’t hunt.  I prefer to stalk my meat in the aisles of my local H-E-B. 

            Most importantly, I believe I am free of the insecurity and machismo that seem to prerequisites for most people I know who own weapons.  The gun culture that has always pervaded the South and seems to be spreading across the nation comes from fear.  In the old days it was fear of the Indians (a realistic one) or fear of the slave uprising (a logical one, if not that realistic).  It has evolved into fear of The Other, to use a fancy literary term.

            When Hurricane Rita hit my hometown my father returned home almost before the storm had blown out.  He lives on five acres in a development about 10 miles out of Beaumont.  Beaumont had no power.  Streetlights weren’t working, power was out, gas stations couldn’t pump gas.  Our subdivision was worse. Heavily wooded trees made getting in or out problematic.  Dad had cut his way, having to walk the last quarter-mile to our house and use the tractor and chainsaw to get back.

            I was there on assignment and I tried to get him to come back with me.  Despite the fact that he was wobbling around on knees that needed replacing 20 years before and despite that fact that there was no way to call for help if he got hurt or sick he stayed.  Stayed there with the pistol he had inherited from my grandfather and, of course, Grandad’s old carbine.

            There was no looting going on in town and you can rest assured no one was going to waste precious gasoline to try to loot Bevil Oaks.  But he was staying and he wasn’t giving up his gun.  He was scared someone was going to take his stuff, so he was staying to fight them off, cowboy style.

            That’s the thing that gun owners forget.  They assume the bad guy will come calling, setting up a time to meet in the middle of the street, preferably High Noon, then the fastest will win.  It never enters their mind that the bad guys are likely to act out of self-interest when flouting the norm of decent society.  They never think their enemy might sneak up behind them, point the gun without so much as humming a Journey tune a moment before the screen suddenly goes black.

            The horrible news from Colorado has already brought out the gun control people, arguing that guns should be banned, an argument that is infantile and pointless.  It’s the right policy.  Guns do far, far more harm than good in this country.  One needs only look at a SWAT team outfitted like the Marines as they serve a warrant.  This militarization of the police is justified because they have to assume everyone has a gone, and they do.  No one is going to go hungry if all the guns are banned and a lot fewer people will be killed.

            Don’t listen to the fear mongers who want to tell you that guns are needed to defend us against muggers, rapists, druggies and other assorted misfits. And really don’t listen to the morons who tell you that we need guns to defend ourselves against a tyrannical government.  You really think you are going to bring down the tank, the RPG and that drone sneaking up behind you with the deer rifle?  There are a thousand reasons people will give to justify clinging to their guns. My favorite is heritage.  Well, I've got a family heritage with guns too and it's nothing to brag about.  

            There are no good arguments to allow this country to have such a lax gun policy.  But to all my liberal friends, especially those who aren’t from these parts, it doesn’t matter.  You are not going to get the guns.  The fear that creates the gun culture runs too deep and is too irrational.  We are having a run on guns because we elected a president who has never, not once, not a hint, not a single time made the slightest move toward gun control.

            You can bloviate all you want, but banning guns will be about as effective as banning marijuana.  You can talk a good game.  You can even throw a bunch of black people in jail. But the people who really own the guns aren’t giving them up.  They aren’t giving up the rifle their granddaddy used to show them how to hunt. They aren’t giving up the pistol Ma-Maw kept under her pillow. That gun is in their blood.

            You can get all fired up for a month or six months or a year or even until the next shooting. But you don’t care as much about getting the guns as my friends and family do about keeping them.  So you’ll keeping on yelling and you’ll keep on losing and the NRA will keep on raising a shit load of cash of your words.  And reasonable people who keep their guns locked in safes with the ammo locked in a separate safe, people like my dad who might be amenable to things such as registration, a ban on cop-killer bullets, better training an stricter laws against felons and lunatics wielding weapons, those people will feel the only options are all or nothing AND THEY WILL NOT GIVE UP THEIR GUNS.

            So you can ignore the fact that the salient point in Aurora, as it was in Columbine as it was in Oslo was some crazy motherfucker running around free because the treatment needed isn’t available and keep yelling about the guns.  You can continue to focus on the irrelevant and unchangeable or you can look hard and try to solve problems that are solvable.

It’s in my blood and I wouldn’t give up the family guns if I ended up in possession of them. I’d lock them away in a storage facility far from home, but I’ll be Goddamned if some Yankee liberal know-it-all son of a bitch is going to take my family’s guns.