I’m not a veteran. I was and am anti-war, going back to my anti-war work starting shortly after the (Gulf of) Tonkin Resolution in Congress in early 1964.
I have had a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (the same model allegedly used to kill President John Kennedy) pointed at my right ear; a Smith & Wesson revolver pointed at my heart; and another revolver (model unknown) pressed against my spine. The first occurred in Indianapolis by a mental-case ex-Marine in the summer of 1965; the second and third occurred in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1980 as part of successful robberies.
I know what it’s like to have weapons of death trained on me, all at close quarters. That informs my judgment.
As for your article, it raises a number of valid points about the how of gun safety. And, yes, the idea that a bunch of drunken good-ol’-boys from Texas or Idaho or the swamps of Louisiana or the forests of Maine are going to rush in to protect us from a sudden, governmental suppression of our rights and a suspension of the Constitution is just so much hooey.
It’s true that our police and sheriffs and veterans may actually be the ones better trained and equipped to fight governmental suppression….EXCEPT that many of them will have a knee-jerk reaction to the loss of their jobs and threats to their family security, and so they will swallow their last ounce of human decency and make the decision “I’m sorry, but I have a duty to protect my wife and kids. I’ll just have to kill you/your group if I’m going to protect my family….” That’s part of the larger moral bankruptcy afflicting our society today.
What your article did not address — and I’ve never, ever gotten a satisfactory answer to this question in the 50+ years I’ve raised it — is why we need guns. Why do we need to hunt? Yes, 100,000 years ago, or more, pre-humans/early humans were hunter-gatherers, and as part of our species’ identity, that’s what we did. We needed protein to help form larger brains and build muscle, and we claimed that we needed guns to hunt. But our aggressive instincts were based on the unrestrained impulses from our reptilian brain, the amygdalae that governed territoriality, “us” versus “them” fears (including xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry and misogyny), and guns have been used for the purpose of expressing fatal aggression for hundreds of years, in ever-increasing ranges of danger.
If a person has the weird psychological quirk of “needing” to hunt, he (and, in a few cases, she) needs to ask “why do I have this desire? What is it about the use of a firearm in killing a boar, or a deer, or a duck, or a bear that is so important to me?”
If you want to test your courage and ability to hunt, use a cross-bow to go after an 1,800 pound, 12-feet tall Kodiak bear, a 1,600 pound bison, a 1,500 pound bull moose, or a 1,000 pound wild boar. That’ll be a test of your aggressive instincts.
You raised a very good point about the psychology of people suffering from depression: multiple reasons, including lack of coping skills to address challenging life circumstances, were among them. I think that if we truly value our veterans, we would provide for massive increases in the amount and quality of help we give to them. They worked for it, they sacrificed for it, and they need it.
But let’s also look into the psychology underlying our aggressive instincts and impulsive behavior. That would make the most sense, to me.
