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Our betrayal
Something has always tugged at me whenever I hear the adage “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”. No doubt, this is the cat-cry of NRA members, people fearful to relinquish control of their weapons under circumstance of their grasp going cold and dead. What bothers me the most is the bit of logic I see behind it. I, myself, do not own a gun, though through my upbringing I know how to use and maintain them just fine. Also through my upbringing, I know enough to shoot only when you intend to kill something and to only intend to kill when it’s absolutely necessary – a concept that seems to escape a rather stupid bulk of the nation in which I reside. But is culture truly to blame? Or is it only natural to use a tool as you see fit?
As I have grown older and traveled, it has, to say the least, dawned upon me that man is at best an animal and at worst… an animal. It seems to me that, to speak of nature, one must understand the very nature behind consumption; absorption. The most natural cycle of things is an inescapable proclivity to preserving one’s life through processing the life of another. Bacteria at their most basic level will merge to create a larger mass, capable and willing to process lesser bacteria – gang violence at its best. A pride of lions will sleep about the warmth and tactile comfort of one another, purring as the great and noble beasts we suppose them to be, but were it not for the limb-from-limb rending of an antelope, they would not exist to be so revered. That very same antelope gnaws and rends the leaves of a nearby bush [before it is processed by lions, of course], “killing” whatever cells comprised its victim in something we so callously dismiss as mere herbivorous-ness. 200 million red blood cells live and die in your body each day only to be reborn again – do we mourn their passing? What separates one life from another? I’m simply not convinced that self-imagined rights of “morality” amongst human beings result in anything different: death, processing, reproductive refinery – this is what is true, this is what is evident.
We, as apes, scavenged for whatever protein-meal we could find, later figuring through might we could outsmart prey through group tactics and that with proper oral developments could better rend flesh, no longer having to gather berries or guano, or whatever the fuck we used to eat to survive. Nature gave us the tools and nature told us to use them – those who refused or simply could not correlate this died, their genes ended, their contribution forfeit. The absorption of other creatures gave rise to developments in cognitive abilities – groupings became clans, clans became societies, cities sprang up and then came American Idol. Did we go wrong somewhere? How did peace and tranquility become the new standard for civilized lifestyles when the very nature behind consumer culture is that of consumption? Our tools are our minds – our ability to recognize an efficient course of action and hone the very instincts we find both pleasure and dominance in; Sex for numbers; entertainment and fertility training as leisurely exercises in our propensity for sentience – among this, weaponry to control the wilderness outside of our territory.
Weapons – tools as means to an end – an extension of willpower, or something more? The same apes we suppose we once were use sticks to gather ants from the inside of a log; an otter bashes an urchin with a rock in order to reach that gooey, digestible inside – you get the point. Rules of conventional warfare indicate that your gun or your sword or your stick are merely extensions of your will: you wish to kill something, the tool is only of use so far as its ability to achieve the bidding of this will. In this sense, the will to murder is the only corrupt thing in this dynamic, the gun being an aid in an act that the individual could supposedly reach by other tools. But wait – is that really true? Entire orders of the ancient world were founded upon the mastery of weapons and the control of their use as a tool for organization and societal imposition – the might of this order lending itself to control and assimilation of mentalities counter to its tenets, in short: consumption all over again. Might, as nature would have it, made right, whether the weapon was a sword or sex or secrets or philosophy – the willpower is the same throughout all walks of life, the weapon lending itself as a tool for change.
But has anything really changed?
Guns are a breach in the physical dominion of nature’s right. They are more than extension of will as they represent even a threat counter to individual will – they are as flinching a device as the twitchy, childlike finger which grasps a trigger and points the barrel at somebody located hundreds of yards away. They require only minimal coordination and almost no expertise to end the life of another. Nature grants little might in their utility, nor does empathy lend itself to the control of such a machine, at least not at the moment it matters. They are a betrayal, if there ever was one, as they represent change without consumption, without derivation. In essence, guns are evolution because they represent a new dawn in the cognitive nature of mankind’s progressive will to cull himself on a massive and accelerated scale remiss of the physical capabilities that genetics hinge upon. And in the end, nothing is truly gained - merely tribal squabbling elevated to destructive proportions, an imperative only necessary as the invention, as it would be.
Am I saying that guns are evil in the traditional sense? No. Should they be taken away from everyone in an effort to regress humans back to some peaceful state? Hah. All I am saying is they are far more than tools to an end – they are irresponsibility incarnate. They are chaos at its most influential state, and their accelerated destructive capabilities in the hands of anyone who has a will to use them against another human being is fear enough to arm oneself the same, the cycle of bloodshed continued, our individuality giving rise merely to the boundaries by which our relative mortality and contribution can stand up to a hollow point.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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