In the Meantime

Guns, gun violence, gun laws, guns, guns, guns – it’s all the conversation, and rightfully so, given recent events.

Behind that stands the concept of predator and prey.

What makes children prey?  The fact that they are so small, so unaware of the dangers, so, so very vulnerable.

What makes a predator?  I wish I knew.  The potential list seems endless: societal factors (such as growing up in a war zone or culture of violence), nurture issues (such as growing up in a dangerous home), body chemistry, DNA (is it ancestral?), hormones, television and movie violence (what we see/experience affects us), some of the above, all of the above or none of the above.

The fact is that I really do not know.

I know that when it comes to physical violence, because I am a woman, statistically I fall into the prey rather than predator category.  But that does not make me immune from all the influences of and temptations towards violence.  It just makes it less likely that I’ll be a perpetrator of it than the average male in my culture.

Perhaps one fundamental (and unvoiced) difference between advocates and opponents of gun control laws is worldview: advocates believe violence can be controlled, reduced, eliminated; while opponents believe violence is simply part and parcel of who we (or at least some of us) are.

Can it be that both sides are right?  Or at least that both sides hold some of the truth in their hands?  Can it be that we are both a species bound in its violence and (at least potentially) able to be freed from it?  I think so.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of all, if my thesis is correct, is that those (this is a generalization – please remember that) advocating gun control also believe in evolution, yet by their stance on gun control, argue (at least inferentially) against humanity being held captive to our evolutionary place in time, while those who oppose gun control and largely reject evolution, embrace evolution’s strongest argument: that a species is captive to its ‘destiny’ - that is, that the species’ behavior is dictated by evolutionary necessity, which always contains unintended fall out.

So it is that advocates believe we can escape the dictates of evolution while opponents believe we cannot.

Here’s the thing: if we can’t do better; if we really are captive to a reality in which explosive violence, species upon species, is inevitable, then aren’t the gun advocates right and wouldn’t we all be well-advised to arm ourselves to the teeth, for danger is surely at our doorstep every minute of every day – right?

For myself on this issue, the facts on the inevitability of violence are largely irrelevant, for this simple reason: even if gun advocates are right, I choose to live my life as if they are not.  I perhaps am indulging a luxury: after all, I do not live in a war-torn country (although it could be argued, given the prevalence of violence in our society, that I do).  Regardless, I choose to live my life as I do, gun-free, because it’s more about who I am than who the other person is.

And who I am (or who I wish to be, in any event) is someone who holds life sacred . . . all life . . .even the life that would not hold my life equally sacred.

I don’t know how to prescribe a solution for an entire society.

What I do know is that I get to choose the kind of woman that I will be.

And who I choose to be is someone who is not afraid that she will die by gunfire – not that I won’t, but I merely choose not to have that as one of my fears (now spiders are another thing entirely).

I paraphrase freely, but Thomas Merton wrote that it is the duty of each Christian to embrace their own mortality, the recognition that some day, we will cease to be.  In that embracing, Merton believed, lies the true source of our freedom, for then we are freed to exist totally, only and utterly, in the time that we do have, for God.

There will be a day when I am no more.

My job is to worry about who I am, what I do, in the meantime.

In the meantime, I choose to live gun-free, not because it will make me safer, but because it will make you safer.

I don’t love either one of us that much.

But I want to.