American Power

I had a conversation with my father a number of years back after purchasing a handgun, ostensibly for personal protection. He told me about being on guard duty when he was a sailor during World War II and feeling a great sense of power when he strapped on the .45 caliber sidearm. He said it changed his whole personality and gave him the illusion of being strong and safe.

I thought about that for the longest time and began to understand what he had experienced in a broader context.

Human beings are not inherently strong creatures. To survive in the wild against predators and competitors, and even the environment, man had to multiply his power through the skilled use of material and objects available to him. Those who developed the necessary skills survived and those who did not either perished or were dependent on those who had.

But the greatest power was enjoyed by those who mastered the skills of fire creation and management.

With the power of fire, he could produce metals to create tools and weapons that gave skilled users even greater control of their environment and human competitors. Applying fire to other elements produced effects that multiplied human power even further and those with the ability to control that power developed an immense sense of personal power.

With such power at man’s disposal it could be directed, at man’s pleasure, towards constructive or destructive purposes.

Explosives - put within reach of any person wealthy or clever enough to obtain them - allowed the destructive release of power by anyone with evil intentions. When man discovered how to release the monstrous power of the atom on his fellow man his actions became collectively less impulsive simply out of the need for self- preservation. No longer could there be unbounded warfare between nations as man’s desire for domination, power and control had clashed with its primal instinct for survival.

This self-imposed discipline forced humans to advance the power of weapons of less-than-mass destruction: bigger and more massive bombs delivered more precisely, guns that fire more bullets in shorter amounts of time, and pilot-less planes with deadly weaponry controlled by operators thousands of miles away.

Americans could now vicariously strap on instruments of destructive power and, through ubiquitous video, feel like part of the action. And if the reality of actual mayhem was not satisfying enough, 21^st century man (and woman) could boot up a simulated battle game so gruesome and detailed that the player could experience an intoxicatingly rapturous sense of power and triumph.

But the greater society’s technological advances, the more numerous were those who felt hopelessly removed from involvement in the manifestations of those advances leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and questioning their very purpose in life.

A gun is the basic switch that provides the impotent the ability to express destructive power in a final desperate attempt to attach significance to their lives. The greater the feeling of powerlessness in a society out of reach the greater the need for the comfort of the power-restoring gun.

We like to defend our fondness of guns with the platitude “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but do not acknowledge that a person who has a gun in hand is mentally not the same person as one who does not. They are living in a different reality.