This Is Your Rifle

I did not watch "60 Minutes" last night, but I did see the promotion for the program's continued attack on gun ownership via Sandy Hook.  The left simply cannot believe that it is not going to get its way.

One of the current internet conventions in vogue is that guns are phallic substitutes.  This is based on Freudian thinking (also possibly popular culture depiction, e.g., Palahniuk), and Freud is hardly the pinnacle of modern psychological research.  Freud was a pioneer in psychology and psychiatry.  His sex-centered theories were a valuable starting point but are invalid, for the most part.  I'm not saying that sexually frustrated people don't act out using firearms.  Rapists act out their frustrations and twisted urges on a fairly regular basis.  No one, outside of a few feminists, is suggesting that all males be turned into eunuchs -- not yet anyway.  (If I were looking for something that was a phallic symbol, I think I would look at swords and spears.  Sword-and-sheath jokes go back, I'm sure, well before Aristophanes, and a bit of ceremonial spear-play is depicted in the opening scenes of Zulu, to the embarrassment of Witt's daughter.)  Most of us can tell the difference between a firearm and an appendage.  With regard to guns, these speculations are without a scientific basis of any sort but are presented in the typical everybody-intelligent-believes fashion that characterizes left-wing thinking.

Another argument relates to suicides.  Firearms are widely used in suicides, and I cannot disagree that they are a convenient and deadly means of ending one's own life.  The rationale goes that if people had less access to firearms, they would be less likely to commit suicide.  There may even be some validity to the point that if a person could not access a firearm, they would not kill themselves at all.

Here's the problem:  no one is proposing laws to eliminate all firearms.  The debate is about actions and configurations, magazine capacities, and background checks on individual sales.  People who commit suicide are almost invariably people who would pass a background check with flying colors.  The main part of the current gun-control push, to ban certain types of firearms and to limit magazine capacity is so totally unrelated to suicide as to be missed by those who present the case.  The style or type of firearm available would have no influence on suicide statistics.  Hunter Thompson, I believe, used a 1911 (invented more than 100 years ago -- hence the name) with a magazine that holds seven rounds.  He could have done just as well with a single-shot.  Hemingway blew the top of his head off with a double-barrel shotgun -- a firearm that can be acquired even in places as hoplophobic as England.  Old fashioned revolvers are as deadly and often much more so than modern semi-autos.  Robert E. Howard used a .380 auto which, with the anemic ammunition available in 1936, guaranteed an immediate end to consciousness but left his heart beating for eight hours.  

As I have said before, I grieve with the parents of the children murdered senselessly at Sandy Hook, with the loved ones of those who died in the movie theater in Aurora, of the those left behind by the Tucson shooting.  But if you want to stop this sort of thing, you might want to look at the causes rather than at the tools used.  That's what a firearm is -- a tool.  Not a phallic symbol.  Not a substitute for something else.  It is a tool that can be employed by a human will.  Whether an AK-47 or hatchet or a knife or a golf club is used for good or evil depends entirely on the person using it.