I was driving home to R. Hill from band practice, riding north on 95 from Petersburg and had just crossed into Richmond when "wham," all-a-sudden my car decelerated. I can't remember exactly what the sound was like, but it was not a happy sound. Kind-of a mix between a growl and a screech. "Uh-oh."
I'd been told several times that my little red bucket (a chevrolet metro) was leaking oil something fierce and that it need all manner of new gaskets. But, I'd hoped that by refilling the oil each week it might survive another year or two. No such luck.
I pushed it along the shoulder for about half-an-hour, thinking that if I could top the little hill by the paper mill, perhaps I could roll down to Maury street. Yeah I didn't even get close, so I called a tow truck. Turns out some seal had burst and broken the camshaft. It was my last drive in the little red bucket, a great car.
For the next year and a half I navigated life without my own car. Fortunately I was a very very lucky non-car owner: I lived where I worked, someone else (with a car) did all the grocery shopping, I had friends from whom I could occasionally borrow a car, Richmond had a consistent albeit very geographically constrained bus system, and my neighborhood was pedestrian friendly.
Nevertheless, even with all these supports for life without a car, my life changed drastically. I had no idea how much our new-south cities and lives had been designed by and for car-driving adults. I had no idea how much my identity and sense of independent power was contingent on owning a car. I had no idea that, for all practical purposes, in most American cities and towns, car ownership is economic and social citizenship. If you don't have a car you are by default half a citizen, at the most.
On the other hand - and this positivity was made possible by all the privileges listed above - I encountered a new sense of time and place. Honestly it felt more humane, more real somehow. When you're not thinking in terms of driving your car, your days are sized differently. The landscape is more and more alive.
Cars are great, fascinating works of art and engineering. And I love to drive. But, I think owning a car for personal use gives us a feeling of power that at the end of the day is false. It's a "worldly" power, yes, but not a spiritual power.
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That ended up being a long intro! How can I transition now to guns? What I'm trying to say is: in America we collectively think with guns, as pervasively as we think with cars. The analogy doesn't line up perfectly, I know, but I've been trying to think of a way to compare the feelings of gun ownership to other common aspects of American life. Cell phones, maybe?
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For many folks, at the individual level, owning a gun is part of who they are. It's as natural as starting up your car and driving to the grocery store. And the feelings of power, independence, identity, responsibility, and citizenship are similar to car ownership. Is that a fair comparison?
The rational arguments for and against private gun ownership are very important, and I hope the "powers that be" will allow (I'm looking at you Congress with the CDC) honest studies of the variable relationship between gun ownership and personal safety, gun ownership and public health, so on and so forth.
But based on my own experience with family and friends, I think most people who own a gun do so because of the feelings associated with it. Feelings of power-over-fear or strength-against-danger. Feelings of power to project into their daily lives, for better and for worse. Gun ownership is a social posture, like literacy or income or cars. If you own a gun, you know that you have the power of fire and metal, and you carry that knowledge when you're not carrying the gun.
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At the collective level guns are also part of who we are. Historically, of course, you know the vital role ballistic weapons played in the invasion and occupation of the lands we now call the United States of America. They have been central to hunting and rural life. They have been the basic technology in our wars and battles, most of our oppressive endeavors and some of our liberative ones.
If you're a citizen, even if you don't privately own a gun, you own guns. In fact if we counted up the number state-owned guns, and divided by the number of citizens, how many guns would each person own? I'm thinking at least a dozen, but that's a wild guess based on wild guesses from google. Ballistic weapons are the backbone of our national defense, our law enforcement strategies, our sense of ordering-power, right? Do we have any idea what life would be like without guns?
I'd like to find out. How do we get there from here!? I know that turning our swords into plowshares is not practical or safe or in our nation's best interest, but I agree with Walter Wink's interpretation of the "kingdom of God." It's a kingdom of power and weakness, destruction and regeneration, but it's not a kingdom of "domination," built by humans with horses and chariots. How do we trust God and not violent power? How? Help us Lord.
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