When I was very young, my dad owned a gun. It wasn’t much of a gun, a single-shot twenty-two. Occasionally, late in the afternoon, he’d go down to the trash dump and shoot rats. When I got older—say, four or five—I owned cap pistols (also single-shot) and later a lever-action air rifle.

We played cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers, getting our instruction two days a week at the Princess Theatre and acting it out the rest of the week.

I would imagine most of the families I knew in Benson owned some sort of gun—a rifle, shotgun, or maybe both—and I imagine that most of them used them for hunting or taking care of varmints. The guns were just one of their tools.

And they would no more have gone into town with a gun on their hip than with a Phillips screwdriver. They knew that they would have looked silly.

My point is that I have no problem with people owning guns. However, I do have a real problem with the glorification of guns, the creation of what some people are trying to sell us as a “gun culture.”

Before some of my gun-toting friends pipe up with the Second Amendment, I would like to remind them that for most of our lives, the Second Amendment had nothing to do with their right to put a Glock on their hip and go to the mall. It wasn’t until DC v. Heller in 2008 that the court held that that the Second Amendment granted an individual right to own and bear arms. Even that opinion said that the right did not extend to all weapons.

The decision prior to that was about Jack Miller’s taking a sawed-off shotgun across state lines. In that case (1939), the Court ruled that: “[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a [sawed-off] shotgun . . . has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” 

But, as with a lot of Supreme Court decisions, the legalities have little to do with our everyday life. People in these United States have owned guns since the nation was founded. However, except for cops and robbers, it did not dictate their identity. People did not place ads in the paper with pictures of their assault rifles.

They knew they would have looked silly.

It appears that we have some sort of perfect storm that causes the minority of our population that owns firearms to have a disproportionate impact on our culture. In no particular order, I think the components of the storm are as follows:

In the Heller decision the “strict constitutionalist” Anthony Scalia wrote an opinion that not only overturned a couple of centuries of case law, but reduced the prefatory clause in the Second Amendment to an “annotation.” (However, a part of his ruling that doesn’t get mentioned as often is the part that says “the Second Amendment right is not a right to keep and carry any weapon in any manner and for any purpose.”) With the Heller ruling, the court confirmed Heller’s right to own a handgun and keep it in his home.

The second thing is the Internet. Once upon a time, if you wanted put your opinion before hundreds or thousands of people, it took some effort. Sometimes it even took some thought. That didn’t mean that all opinions were for the public good. Father Coughlin, for instance, fouled up the airwaves for an hour every week from WJR and later from his own radio link-up. He combined religion, anti-Semitism, and a fondness for fascist governments. He found a lot of people who agreed with him.

However, in an age where information flow was limited, Coughlin was an exception. Now, anybody who owns a computer and an internet connection can reach as many people as he did. So we get Facebook posts where people are bragging about their guns and daring “bad guys” to come get them. They are fantasizing about stopping bad guys with their good-guy guns. And we get posts like the Christmas card I saw last week that had a picture of a large family smiling for the camera, each one of them, even the five-year-old, armed. Their version of Peace and Good Will. If I had a nickel for every picture of a large firearm I’ve seen on the Internet, I could probably buy a legislator.

Finally, our penchant for declaring anyone other than us to be “bad guys.” This isn’t new. We rounded up the Japanese during World War II, ignoring the German-American Bund who wanted us to enter the war on the side of the Axis Powers. We’ve hated a lot of people in our history. However, because of item 2 above, we can spread that hate much more efficiently.

Add it up: people who claim that the Supreme Court (specifically DC v. Heller) gives them the right to carry a gun anywhere they want, a constant carnival of opinion (informed and otherwise) that glorifies guns, and what seems to be an insatiable need to declare whole groups of people to be “bad guys.” What could possibly go wrong there?

I don’t want your guns. I don’t want somebody to come get your guns. But I don’t want you sitting at the table next to me in the restaurant with a pistol on your hip or an AK-47 propped against the table. You may have been granted that right by the legislature of the State of Georgia, but it doesn’t make me feel any safer. Especially since the legislature, maintaining a constancy of intelligence, also says you can’t check to see if the gun toter has a permit or is just your average, everyday serial killer.