THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF GUN CULTURE

I was driving down a lonely, remote road when I saw a young man dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans walking alone with a backpack and a guitar case. It was hot out, and I worried that he would not make it to the nearest outpost. I stopped and picked him up to find out that he was an Italian traveling in the backcountry trimming weed. He loved the Grateful Dead and wanted to experience the hippie lifestyle of California. But in his rural travels, he was faced with something he didn't understand. He asked me what was with Americans and guns. How come people were so obsessed with their gun collections?

I didn't know how to answer him because my mind started racing back in time and I realized that the root of our gun culture comes from the very founding of the United States. Unlike Italy, which was formed before the invention of guns (although swords were quite popular and most of Europe was deforested to smelt metal for wars), The United States was formed during the time of guns.

In those days, because many of the people immigrating to this new land were refugees that had experienced persecution and had no arms to defend themselves, the founding fathers felt it was important that the populace was armed in order to avoid an armed government dominating powerless people. But today we are drunk with power and the gun manufacturers are raking in the dough. It is difficult to undo this consciousness. It is ingrained.

The problem is guns have become more and more powerful and there have been no limits set to what is too much. It is like making a military tank available for civilians to drive around to the store. Of course, there are always people that want Humvees. But these guns are meant to kill people - used to slaughter children and civilians in stores and schools. These are not hunting rifles. It's another subject to talk about how many billions of birds have been shot by guns. Birds don't vote, nor have any say in our society so they just go extinct - end of story. Humans, however, can vote and have a say, so the struggle continues to limit the guns in our society.

Ironically, we had a war on terrorism and we were so afraid of the Islamic-right wing. We saw them as crazy - bombing churches and markets, and crashing planes full of people into buildings yet the United States has shown to be even crazier than a jihad as we shoot our schoolchildren, churchgoers, and shoppers in supermarkets.

I do not see an end to this. Even if we make it harder to buy guns there are still so many guns scattered through suburbia, that domestic shootings are part of life in America. We have created a hotbed and now we are laying in it. I would think that people would come to their senses as soon as these horrors of gun violence happen within their communities. But after the Trump years, in which we have seen countless horrendous acts of stupidity - yet people still following him, this crashes our faith in the sensibilities of humanity.

The real crux of the problem is not going to be gun laws but who controls the government. If the CRAZIES -Capitalist Republican Anarchist Zealots Insensitive to Everyone while carrying Shotguns -get their hands on the government to dismantle it and then skew all the voting to keep themselves in power, the journey back to a sane democracy will be fraught with danger because peaceful protest will be targets for the CRAZIES bumpkin militia.

 It will be gut-wrenching to see how far gun terrorism will go, but from the latest Tennessee circus – it looks like it’s going to be a long, long walk to safety.