My neo-global landbase in Africa, the poinsettais bleeding into gravel, on the main road the ancient overloaded buses belching leaded blue exhaust, the fields wet and hail-smitten, a solitary baby horned owl scowling in a hollow knot of the oak tree down the road. Nature red, tawny and besmirched.
Last night at the library committee meeting, a retired psychologist wanted to talk about gun control. Not a good idea. I just sat and listened. My own feelings are that if you are reactive around issues to do with guns (and who isn’t?), you should keep your mouth shut. If you haven’t shot and killed somebody and seen what gunshot wounds do to a person, it would be better not to talk guns. If you think killing someone with a gun is going to keep you safe from the victim’s vengeful family or gang members, you have not been there for the ongoing repercussions. Don’t bother talking about policy if the other person is talking about culture, entitlement, identity. There is no point in talking about countries like Japan where there is strict gun control and very little violence because South Africa is not Japan. All talk about guns is essentially utopian, to do with a world that doesn’t and may never exist, in which only the disciplined and careful get to use guns, or there are no guns at all. In reality there will be more incidents of criminal serial shooting, more suicides by gunshot, more domestic violence featuring guns — and gun legislation is about as useless as legislation on the war against drugs. There is a spiral of violence that is unstoppable right now. And some of us will go on trying to bring about peace and some of us will go on arguing with other reactive and hostile gun-owners or gun-haters, pointlessly.
The cheerful gap-toothed street cleaner has a new Armsel Striker shotgun. he carries it around with him and shows it to everyone who asks. It looks stolen to me, but who knows? Almost everyone here is armed to the teeth and trigger-happy. There are Berettas in bedside cabinets, semi-assault rifles in the garages, shoppers wear holsters with revolvers and keep pistols in handbags. Rossi, Smith & Wesson, Winchesters. You can buy weapons under the counter almost anywhere, so school children have guns in their backpacks, homeless people keep guns in plastic bags, retired pensioners with failing eyesight own guns. A few of us don’t own guns because, well, because we don’t. But for many people, the right to own a gun is an objective and cherished freedom, until the day you are shot by somebody with a lawfully or unlawfully owned gun. Out here, lawful gun-owners commit crimes with guns, too. The country is a thicket of illegal and legal guns, a violent and increasingly lawless society. And the fatality statistics are appalling, as you might expect.
Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part II:
‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’
Where do we find a safe-enough place if not within? What does it mean to think we deserve to feel safe, that we can only feel safe if there are locks on the doors, a gun under the pillow?
So perhaps guns don’t provide the illusion of safety any longer. The concept of safety is a luxury, something many of us gave up years ago. We live amidst risk and threat and we need to come to terms with that. This is how it is. If we want fullness of life, quality of life, we must learn to live with the readiness to lose our lives at any time, randomly, brutally unnecessarily, as so many others here have done. Nothing privileged or special about any single one of us. And all of us will die at some point, none of us will get to have much choice in how or when we die.
And one of these days we might even risk talking to one another about fear, danger and hatred of the Other, How we feel about murdering someone who might murder us. How we are ready to kill someone who steals fruit from the tree in the back garden or breaks into our house looking for food. How we feel when we see wild animals killed by hunters who are not hungry and for whom such murder is just recreation. The white deer grazing in a forest clearing. The awakened sleeper in a house full of whispers.
From the poet James Fenton:
A log settles in the grate
And what was that?
A cat? A rat?
I hate them both with all my heart.
What business have they being up so late?
And what about that man
On the dark side of the square?
What harm has he
In mind for me?
What dark malevolent plan?
What business has he standing watching there?
The night is on the tiles.
A mood settles on the moon.
It gives the faintest of all watery smiles.
It will be gone soon.
But when the smile is gone
And darkness has its day
The watcher at my window will watch on.
He will not slip away.
The lovers hurry by
The watcher in the square.
They seem so busy in their ecstasy.
Hatred has time to spare.
Hatred knows no land,
No hearth, no wife, no brood,
And time lies heavy on the hater’s hand
And cold as the moon’s mood.
Though I take the forest track
Or ride the mountain trail
I’ll never shake the watcher off my back,
The wizard off my tail.
In the stable lantern’s soot,
In the soft step on the stair,
I shall glimpse the eye, I shall waken to the foot
Of the watcher in the square.
I am not a gun proponent. It is a polarizing thing in this country with the NRA lobbyists having a great deal of political clout. I am in the minority and don’t want to arm myself to the teeth. The right to bear arms had a different meaning years ago when the constitution was formed. I have no answers and like you prefer to keep quiet around those who are adamant about being armed to the teeth.
Syd, I was careful not to make reference to the United States because the situation there is so angry and polarized. Very ugly. Communications can break down in times of social crisis and that is something we all try to prevent.
With so much violence and safety issues a part of your culture, I’m imagining everyone is effected by an underlying stress. Hard on the body and psyche! That poem was chilling…
Yes, Allyson, the society is deeply affected by the violence and crime — that is why we have to learn to talk to one another about this issue. But it is not easy
Oh Mary, this moved me to tears. The insanity of guns, the fear we carry inside that no bullet can quiet, the trying to run away from our ourselves..so eloquent. I have taken to bookmarking certain posts of yours (the one on institutionalization, shame, this one) because when I feel alone I can read your posts for some grounding.
I don’t trust guns (of course, I mean I do not trust people with guns) and will not allow one in my house. Period.
I should add, I have been violently hit by a man, who would probably have shot me if he had a gun available. Thus my stance against guns in the house. Your situation of living in constant danger might have me thinking differently.
Lou, I have lived through wars and civil unrest and anarchy — not what I would have wished for, but I can talk from personal experience about what happens after a shooting, what lack of gun control means, what is dystopian in my society. I’m so glad you heard me
Lou I was working for the Cape Town attorney -general as a researcher in 1987 when a flood of illegal firearms entered South Africa from Mozambique and Angola. The death rates soared because guns are more lethal than knives or knobkerries or blunt instruments.
I am adamantly anti-gun. No gun will protect me in my home. It may deter or harm the intruder but I can be assured that his ghetto family or gang banger friends will be looking to even the score. Aside from the fact that I could never shoot someone, its just a vicious cycle.
This is what we call the spiral of violence Kristin — very often if you are an untrained marksman/person and you shoot somebody in self-defence, that person will live for a while with brain or spinal injuries, then die. And he or she has a family, has brothers, has a gang or criminal friends, has others who will want revenge. And if it becomes known that you have a gun in your home, intruders will look for that.
I don’t own a gun, but I’m not anti-gun. I don’t think banning guns will make us safer and I don’t think arming ourselves to the teeth will make us safer. I think violence is a social and cultural issue. How do we change a society? It takes generations. This is why I rarely talk about the gun issue, and never with a zealot from either side. I read your blog every morning and I am smitten with your writing. Thanks.
Hi Michael — you know, I’m not sure what it means to be ‘not anti-gun’ I understand self-defence even though in practice it is much more complicated than the term suggests. But there is only one thing you can do with a gun and that is to kill someone. If people think it is PK to kill animals for sport or recreation, they might consider that gun use as valid. Out here we have very skilled sharp shooters who cull wild animals in too great numbers (buck, elephant, lions) and there are people who depend on hunting game in order to provide food for their families. But we also have poachers (rhinos) and we have safari tourists who like to come out and ineptly shoot wild animals.
It doesn’t always take generations although it might. After the genocide in Rwanda ended, many came forward ( thousands) and handed in guns at a depot. They were sick to the core of war and murder. The same feeling was present in Britain after WWI and the trenches, a hatred of killing. The British as a rule don’t carry personal firearms. But in other societies, it will take decades or centuries before people can even talk to one another, let alone put down the guns.
I see both sides of this issue, which you know is rare for me.
Just for me, this one person-I have never lived in a house that burned down but I would never dream of going without fire insurance. I have never been attacked in my sleep by an intruder but I don’t go to sleep without a handgun on the night stand. My guess is that I will never lose everything I own in a fire or have to shoot someone in the middle of the night. I am prepared for both.
In Texas (oh you know how it is), everyone that I know who owns guns in
abundance have no worries about criminals. We’re just always on the look out for either a US or Mexican Government trying to take our Texas away from us. Although that may be as likely as my house burning down or an attack in my sleep…..never the less….we are prepared.
Of course I don’t live in Africa with those experiences. I can only speak to my own experiences.
I’ve never known anyone who wanted to move to Japan, but that could be because I don’t travel in the same circles as them.
Everyone I know wants to move to the Texas Hill Country on a couple dozen acres with their guns, dogs, fishing poles and flip flops.
Pam, you and I have a great deal in common. I grew up with a gun-safe in the dining room and I was taught to fire an RN rifle at the age of six. That was just the norm, all the burly cheerful men with guns and shooting ranges every Saturday, hunting expeditions along the Zambezi with rifles in a long case under tarpaulin. My mother had lived in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency and slept with a revolver under her pillow every night. Southern Rhodesia was known as the Wild West of Africa, a proud and brave place, not letting Britain dictate to us. As children we learned to be careful around guns, check that bullets had been emptied out before putting guns away, not to think of guns as toys. The only time I saw my mother’s brother scared was when he wounded a leopard and she turned on us and began chasing the landrover across the veld, she dropped dead eventually of blood loss. We had guns to protect us from Communists or black guerillas but nobody expected war until it came. That was when we found we were not prepared at all because we hadn’t thought beyond the shooting. Guns were a symbol of preparedness, they were a ‘deterrent’, they were always just there. My mother’s family were Rhodesian pioneers who had ridden into Lobengula’s territory armed with Mausers and elephant guns. This was our country and we had won it, no hordes were going to take it away and drive the whites off the farms. That was how we thought back then. In reality, there was a brutal civil war followed by tyranny and the white population left en masse.
We do need to talk to one another’s experiences because the commonality in human experience is greater than the differences. Deep down we each love the place we think of as home, as our own. If we are forced to flee into exile or emigrate, cross borders in order to survive, the loss is terrible and we may find ourselves unwelcome. And here in South Africa we have intense xenophobia as foreign refugees and asylum seekers come in from other countries and take jobs, drive locals out of residential areas. There are gun battles in many settlements and the violence spills over onto highways and farms. I hope your Texas doesn’t come to that. And I hope Texas stays safe and keeps talking to the US government. Where I come from, when we stop talking we tend to reach for guns.
I appreciate your thoughtful writing on this topic which is beyond controversial in Colorado at the moment. I don’t own a gun because I don’t want one. I would rather be shot dead than shoot someone. But I do hope my neighbors have guns.