"Walk like a man, talk like a man
Walk like a man, my son
No woman's worth crawlin' on the earth
So walk like a man, my son
Oh wee ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-wee-ooh
Walk, walk, walk, walk."
Walk Like a Man, 1963, The Four Seasons
I encountered that song as an adolescent. I understood the emotion behind the lyrics. A guy and girl were breaking up and he didn't mope about it. He was proud, self-reliant. He walked and talked like a man.
The same year I stumbled upon Ralph Waldo Emerson in the school library and read his essay, Self Reliance. I was thrilled by his words. Be an independent, empowered non-conformist. Yes! Emerson was more work than Top-40 music on KBOY and KYJC, the local A.M. radio stations, but there was a confluence in timing. It accompanied that burst of testosterone that happens to boys of 13.
I remember feeling pumped.
A thoughtful reader of this blog sent me a comment on gun culture in America. He is experimenting with breaking out of his ultra-civilized, city-boy life of high-tech business. He goes off on weekends into wild places to hunt with a bow and arrows. He carries a handgun. He is noticed something about that experience.
Packing my revolver in the wild when I am sometimes miles from the nearest road and out of cell range seems prudent, but it does not make me feel "invincible." It's only when I find myself still carrying it (if I have no safe place to store it) when I am near populated areas that I experience that burst of empowerment. I don't understand the psychology or neurobiology of what toting a gun in public does to you, but for me it creates this very strange, inflated sense of importance, power, and invincibility. The closest kind of feeling I can think of is when I got my drivers license and my first car.
I can relate. When I turned 16 I got a drivers license and could drive! I became fully human. I was empowered.
My correspondent observed people at the gun club where he practices shooting.
Something very powerful happens every time I holster my side arm. I am suddenly profoundly aware that I am carrying a lethal weapon. I subconsciously begin to look for potential threats. I thought this was just me, but the thing I notice at the shooting range is that others seem to be getting ready for a kind of urban battlefield. Many of my acquaintances who carry have a nonchalant bravado in their relationships to their firearms. The clubhouse has a poster of Trump's face on a Rambo body, and it's not considered ironic.
He includes a warning for Democrats.
If you have enough voices telling you are entitled to it, and other people want to take it away from you, you've got a fight on your hands. I think its grip is rooted in the feeling of identity and agency. We aren't having a policy debate.
The gun issue looks like a policy debate, but it isn't. I got my 92-year-old father to stop driving--with difficulty. He would have answered polls saying that 92-year-olds with vision and mobility problems must not drive. That was his policy answer. But he, himself, drove well past the time when he should have stopped. It was an identity issue. Losing ability to drive was a watershed event of of dis-empowerment.
I think we have a gun problem in America. They are ubiquitous, so they get used. It is crazy to have mass ownership of guns in the 21st Century, but it persists. Democrats have dug in as the party that wants legislation to limit gun access. They blame the NRA and Republican officeholders for a political system that is increasing gun access, not reducing it--notwithstanding the polls.
The polls deceive. Americans are not rational here, and polls measure what people want for other people, not what they want for themselves or feel in their hearts. A great many people resist having them taken away.
Democrats will understand the gun issue better if they liken it to the effect of trying to take away cars from people who are statistically dangerous drivers, people under the age of 25 or over the age of 75. It would not be easy or popular.
The author touched on a salient and often overlooked point. Americans generally do not like anything to be taken away even if it might be in their self interest to do so. This fundamental truth is why I believe the efforts to ban AR 15's or regulate clip sizes has failed so miserably. The answer I believe is make gun ownership more expensive. Gun owners are liable for all misdeeds caused by their guns unless lost or stolen; homeowner insurance should be increased if there are guns in the home. A household with more than five guns should lose a percentage of public assistance benefits. Finally, the state could impose a caliber tax on the purchase of all guns; the higher the caliber, the higher tax. There are other ways to make gun ownership more expensive but unless the incentives to own guns is shifted, there will always be too many guns and useless debates about "gun policy."
I never thought of guns this way. I am strongly anti-gun, but sure do love my car. I grew up in the city, in Chicago, in a family that did not have a car. I got my license and first car after I was married and moved to the suburbs. It was incredibly empowering, and I still get that feeling every time I get behind the wheel - nearly 50 years later! Thank you for helping me to see this point of view.