Fear and Aspiration: on Gun Desire

I bought a gun when I was 22 years old. I didn’t particularly want a gun. But the thing with guns—as with many consumer products—is that whether or not you want one has not been entirely your choice to make.

It was 2004 and I had moved in too soon with a man I, by all accounts on paper and off, should never have been dating in the first place. Daniel (not his name) was a recent transplant from a poor town across the country. I was single for the first time since I was in high school. We found each other when we both needed someone, and that’s how these things start sometimes.

His life in his home town was what some might idiomatically call “hard.” He’d been to jail twice. He had a bullet wound to show me; he let me touch it. This kind of “hard” seemed to neutralize the naivety within myself that was growing tiresome at age 22.

Daniel and I moved into a suburban apartment 15 miles outside of Baltimore. It was the kind of apartment complex with a tree in its name, where every wall and furnishing is ecru, and the pool is open every summer but they don’t do much to maintain the tennis courts. This complex concerned Daniel deeply. He had seen questionable characters in the parking lot late at night. I realized later this simply meant “black people,” but at the time I figured someone like Daniel knew a crime when he saw one.

“You should get a gun to protect yourself.”

The reason he phrased it like this was that, as a convict, he couldn’t buy one; only I could. The underlying implication was that he didn’t need protecting; I did. Buried even deeper was the idea that I would never conclude on my own that a gun was what I needed, and that he needed to lead me to this important decision. I acquiesced, but the reasons I did are more complicated than they appeared on the surface. I began to believe that if he felt we needed a gun for protection, he must have been frightened, and if I could do my part to offer some solace I would. I loved him. I also believed that if a person had been shot by a gun, he had a pass to want one around.

It was also correct that I would never conclude on my own that a gun was something I needed. But suddenly this seed of desire was planted. While it would have felt powerful to say no to my boyfriend, no to the culture that said I needed protecting, no to fear, it actually felt much more powerful to say yes: I am going to buy a gun. I didn't immediately understand why, but I didn't question it because it is a perfectly normal thing for a gun to make a person feel powerful. 

   

Daniel did the research (by which I mean he visited gun stores and looked at guns and held guns and talked to gun-sellers about guns) and found the “perfect” used handgun that would fit our needs and our budget—a Glock .40. I played the part of the gun-shopping Independent Woman as I autonomously picked the gun out of the case and asked to see it. Daniel lurked across the room in a not-at-all suspicious manner.

“This gun is too big for a girl like you,” the gun-seller told me.

I took a breath and thought about the Desert Eagle scene from Snatch, how there were much bigger guns I could want. I said, “It’s the one I want.”

We took it out back and I shot it into a hill. It was the first time I’d ever fired a gun. My arm hurt for the next week because I locked my elbow when I shouldn’t have. He told me not to knock my elbow, and I did anyway. Independent Woman.  

Inside, I watched a training video and signed all sorts of paperwork that told me what I was doing—buying a firearm on behalf of a convict—was clearly illegal. I’m doing this for me, I told myself. I told everyone. I told myself.

Once I had the gun home, I almost never touched it. I shot it a sum total of about 40 times, at Daniel’s behest. But Daniel always had it out: to clean it, to show our guests, just to have it nearby. Once, it was laying on the couch and my cat cuddled up to it. It was funny, so I took a snapshot and posted it on Flickr. That picture later ended up in the satirical pamphlet, “How to Talk to Your Cats About Gun Safety.” Funny things, cats. Guns.

I talked about it though. I liked to tell people I owned a gun because it shook up their image of me. I’d always leaned punk and I liked anything that shook up people’s image of me. I liked to wear my Doc Martens and tell people I was President of the National Honor Society. I liked to vote Democrat and own a gun. Owning a gun was never about the gun. It was about the idea of the gun as a marker of status and identity. It wasn’t the power of being able to shoot someone; it was the power of being able to say “you don’t know me.”

Spoiler alert: Daniel and I broke up within the year. We split the cats and the furniture; I kept the gun, due to laws and stuff. But I was less interested in having it around than ever. I was moving to the actual city of Baltimore and, ironically, having a gun with me felt more dangerous than not having one. I got a gunlock from a free giveaway at Dick’s Sporting Goods, locked the gun, and left it at my parents’ house. I haven’t even seen the keys for the lock in almost a decade.

My father wants me to sell it. He works on an Army post and knows a lot of potential buyers. One of my best friends says Glocks are hot right now and I could make good money if I sell it, and besides—“It’s too much gun for you.” Locked up like it is, uncleaned and unshot for years, it’s a 100% useless tool and I don’t want it anyway. It makes all the sense in the world to trade it for $400. But I guess the reason I don’t want to sell it is that people want me to sell it. It’s a weird inverse of the same reason I wanted to buy it—because people didn’t expect it of me.

Ideologically, I am an outspoken proponent of gun control. In the wake of the UCSB shooting, my guts are turned inside out and I basically can’t stop thinking about how to approach the issues that so badly need to be discussed—but not in the way they have been. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most potent lesson I’ve learned from owning a gun has nothing to do with the physical capabilities of the gun itself, and everything to do with how guns get tangled up with your identity. This is why guns are different from knives and cars and other things that can (and do) kill people. Even the etymology of “arm” comes from the Latin prefix ar-, meaning “to fit together.”

This is the conversation that we’re just now starting to have. Journalist Adam Weinstein recently tweeted, “Elliot Rodger forces us to ask not whether America makes it too *easy* to wield a gun, but too *desirable*.” Richard Martinez, the father of one of the victims, recently said, “I am angered by how they [the NRA] have worked to normalize this.” The NRA and groups like them have worked to not only create a climate wherein guns are accessible; they have worked to manufacture a desire for guns that is as unconsidered and insatiable as a biological appetite. They buttress this appetite with questionable jurisprudence turned into sound bites, and the result is a terrifyingly polarized conversation that has people losing their minds.

The reality of my situation was not that I bought a gun because I was an Independent Woman. Rather, I can trace back the transference of desire for a gun like a chain of custody, or like a virus. How that desire manifests in each individual is itself individual—whether, as with me, as an act of subtle rebellion that grew uncomfortable, or as with Rodger, as the means to reach the Alpha status he’d coveted. Fear and aspiration have been the most successful and most insidious tactics of marketing and advertising for ages. They are intrinsic to identity. What are you afraid of, and who do you want to be? Fear and aspiration are also what drive gun desire.

I believe it’s irresponsible (and not to mention unproductive) to make this most recent issue into a discussion about gun control OR mental health OR misogyny. The topic an individual and groups grabs hold of is as wrapped up in their identity as gun ownership itself is wrapped up in the gun owner's identity. Our reactions are a barium swallow that makes a part of us glow to reveal what’s really going on inside. 

The first incremental step in being able to have the conversation that will move us toward a solution is to recognize the effects fear and aspiration have on our idea of self. Then we have to try to override our personal biases to the best of our ability. Only then can we start to understand the culture we have created, which is the same culture we have to transcend, individually and collectively.

We have to be able to lose ourselves before we will be able to stop losing one another.