Guns

"Shoot a few, knock 'em down, cost you half a buck now,
Guns, guns, guns"--The Guess Who

So, here’s the scene:

It’s late spring/early summer, my parents’ farm. It’s one of those long stretches of fixing machinery and waiting for things to ripen.

I’ve come to a visit to southwest Saskatchewan from wherever I’m living this particular year. This scene has been replayed continuously since the mid-90s.

I discuss books and politics with my mother over breakfast, then get caught up on the latest family news and gossip. I step outside to enjoy the steadily heating morning air and the peace of this place.

Then, my dad and I pile into a half-ton or his Rhino ATV, clinging to our .22 calibre rifles. Boxes of ammo rattle on the seat between us as we tear out into the prairie in search of gophers marauding the frail wheat plants. We spend hours chatting, listening to the wind or the piercing whistles of our soon-to-be victims. The stillness is only broken by these and the reports of our “plinkin,’” and perhaps by the squeals of the dying.

This massacre also brings me a peace. I’m a farm boy enjoying a farm boy’s pastime, and it’s more of a hobby than a job—for we’ll never make a dent on the gopher population this way.

I love it. Mark me as a hypocrite.

I grew up playing Cops and Robbers with my brothers and friends, my action figure of choice was G. I. Joe. Though it horrifies me to see it in my own son, I know that for every little boy, a hockey stick or a twig or a pointed finger and thumb are all eventually turned into a gun by boys who may have never even seen one.

Today, I hate guns.

When Democrat Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people were gunned down in Tucson last month in an “It Can Only Happen There” spree, any Canadian haughtiness was shut right up when Canmore police shot and killed a man a few days later. He’d been making threats and brandishing a mock handgun, and officers claimed they had little choice. It’s not good that it happened, but it drove home for me that it can happen anywhere—all that where needs is guns.

In the wake of the Tucson shooting, CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed a Charles Heller of the Arizona Citizens Defence League, a pro-gun group who believe that gunman Jared Lee Loughner would have been stopped sooner (than the fifteen seconds it took) if more of those present were armed, and had the training to use their weapons. If they were in, “a constant state of code yellow.” This is because having a gun makes you a different type of person, though Heller and I would disagree on what kind.

More guns and more itchy fingers would prevent gun violence? Come the hell on.

When prodded on Arizona’s lax (read: insane) gun laws, which allowed Loughner—a former student who had been brought to the attention of authorities before for his Travis Bickle potential—to purchase a weapon with a 30+ magazine, and which allow teenagers to buy assault rifles at gun shows, Heller remarked that anybody can buy a muscle car too, and a car is much more dangerous than a gun.

Seriously?

Even a shiny, $50,000 penis-extension is, at root, a form of transportation. Yes, the wrong driver can make it dangerous, but a gun is a killing instrument right from the start. It serves no other purpose than to kill.

I’m no hunter—those of you more appalled by guns than I am might question my seasonal vermin-blasting habits, and rightly so—so I don’t get any sporting angle to gun ownership. Many of my friends and family hunt for fun. I don’t like those guns, but I also know that none of these men—and they’re all men—carry a gun with them at all times, or would even turn it on another human being. At least I sure hope not.

I do know that there are some nutty rednecks on both sides of the 49^th who are insistent on keeping their mounds of weaponry free from official hands and eyes because, y’know, if the Nuclear Holocaust ain’t coming, then the Zombie Apocalypse sure as hell is. I recall being an appalled at about seventeen when my MP stood up in parliament and told Chretien’s Liberals that he would openly disobey their gun registry laws. Imagine a Marijuana Party or Neo-Nazi getting elected and saying the same thing.

There’s just something so passionate about gun owners, in their insistence on being free from government imposition, in their defence of accumulating an arsenal, in their hazy purposes for needing it. Freedom, they say, or the U.S. Second Amendment, or perhaps that idiotic “gotta protect yer house” philosophy. Oh sure, home invasion can happen, and then if the odds start stretching and you’re home when it happens, you’ve then got to have the cajones to put a bullet in another human being. Buddy, it’s 2011 and you aren’t in a war—you may, but I don’t have it in me to put a bullet in another human being. Threaten? Frighten? Intimidate? Call those whose job it is to deal with this? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Shoot? Nope. Not even if they damage my daddy’s crops.

Prime Minister Harper’s attempts to undo the gun registry—for reasons he has never made clear, and despite the opposition of law enforcement—has its fans and foes, but I’ll tell you this: if you told me that tomorrow all guns were banned in North America, Dad and I would simply start playing more games of cribbage before checking crops on a sunny morning.

There is no sensible reason for private citizens to own guns, and I’ve never heard a logical attestation to the contrary.