If I Had a Gun I Might Shoot You

If I had a gun, I might shoot you. 

Don’t worry, I don’t. I turned in my 20 gauge skeet gun to be destroyed ten years ago. I thought too many guns were a societal problem. I wanted to do my part by getting rid of mine.

Since then, with the flood of guns, practically encouraged by the Supreme Court, I’ve once or twice thought I might be the last unarmed person around. My self-preservation instinct runs pretty hot, so I’ve wondered if I’m being naive. Maybe I should be carrying.

I haven’t been in a fight ever. I got punched once when I was a mouthy teen, by the son of a waitress I was bitching about. (Never saw it coming; deserved it.) Every time fight or flight has been activated by my base brain, I have chosen some form of flight. Mainly because I don’t want to fight. Also, plenty of guys are bigger and stronger than I. It would be beyond stupid to take a swing at them.

But what if I could, in the blind rage that sometimes comes over us, reach into my waistband and pull out a gun? A gun is a great leveler. How big the dude is doesn’t matter.

I say “blind rage,” because that’s an easy way to think of escalation to violence. There must be something wrong with someone who gets in a blind rage, right? Well, maybe there is if we’re talking truly black-out rage, but there are plenty of states of anger on the way to that that are plenty dangerous.

Our amygdala goes into overdrive when we are threatened. It floods the zone with a bias for action over reflection. That’s how we survive. The choice of what action to take in that situation is based on an instant assessment of risk. Fleeing is almost always less risky, but men (I, at least) have a strong impulse to stand our ground. I don’t know where that comes from. It doesn’t strike me as particularly evolutionarily adaptive, but it it there nevertheless. States like Florida have even made it a legal right. 

I’m not likely to stand my ground if I know I’m going to get pounded to a pulp. But, if I had a gun…

I think you get my point.

We’re going the wrong way to arm ourselves. We are falling victim to our biology. It’s like not carrying condoms. We’re going to have sex, so we should be prepared. We’re going to get mad, sometimes very mad. The way to be prepared for that eventuality, though, is not to carry a gun. It’s just the opposite.