We have all heard or read the certitude and hate filled attacks against those who happen to have a different position on “guns” — against those who would dare to suggest a more sane, more common sense gun policy in our country.
It is thus refreshing to read a reasonable, non-judgmental, thoughtful article by a man who loves guns, who has been a lifelong gun owner, who grew up with guns and hunting as part of his heritage and culture, a man who believes in the Second Amendment – but who also has some concerns, even fear.
It is written in the New York Times Magazine by David Joy, an author who lives in the mountains of North Carolina.
Joy is a man who can’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t around guns or when he was not within reach of a firearm.
He is a man who carries concealed weapons (he has a concealed-carry license) even when grocery shopping.
But Joy is also a man to whom the idea of “owning a rifle designed for engaging human targets out to 600 meters” was just never interesting.
A man who loves to hunt but not with an AR-15.
A man who believes that there are guns he feels justified in owning and guns he feels belong on the battlefield.
A man who doesn’t buy into the bravado that the “only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun…”
Finally, Joy is a gun owner who doesn’t believe that “politicians are going to ban ordinary guns or overturn the Second Amendment,” but who understands their reasoning because he gets what’s at stake and knows that changes must come, “changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.”
However, Joy also has “an unrelenting fear about what could be lost”:
…a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
Finally, Joy has his own very personal fears as a person who has had a gun put to his head – a couple of times.
Which brings Joy to “the factor that no one wants to address,” fear:
…fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another. There’s no simple solution like pulling fear off the shelf. It’s an intangible thing. I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it. I’m sure that part of why I carry is having a pistol put to my head when I was 14. I’m sure that part of it is having hidden behind walls while shots were fired. Maybe it’s a combination of those two things coupled with headlines and hysteria, the growing presence of mass shootings in American culture.
Please read David Joy’s entire article, “Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become,” here. You won’t regret it.
CODA: This post is dedicated to Emma González and the impressive young people who are leading an inspiring movement against gun violence.
Graphic via DonkeyHotey/Flickr
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.