Why Americans love guns

In the Old Testament, Moloch was a symbol of idolatry, the god to whom Canaanites, Phoenicians and other societies sacrificed children in fiery rituals. In Leviticus (18:21), Moses is instructed by God to forbid this practice for the Israelites.

Moloch's name was invoked recently, with appropriate gravitas, in an indictment of American gun culture written by Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books. (Read it here.)

"Ever since then," Wills writes, "worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture."

Wills attacks today's Molochs: "gun worshippers," including the National Rifle Association, and their skewed reasoning for keeping weapons and making them readily available. But in passing he also remarks, "The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned."

In the rest of his essay Wills drops the point about guns as technological objects and explores politics. But for me it's worth thinking about guns as the actual things they are, and how they fit into many Americans' personal, psychic, social and historical identity.

Big people's toys

I mean, guns (particularly handguns) as hand-held objects are the perfect American machines and commodity. They are precisely designed, highly functional, industrially manufactured, mechanically simple, metallic, polished, gadgety, easily identifiable, effortless to operate, concealable, accessorizable, potentially dangerous, toy-like, phallic, fetishizable, historically and mythically Americanized, and both legally and illegally purchasable.

Guns— like cars before the age of computerized engines— have few moving parts and are as mechanically comprehensible as ballpoint pens or cigarette lighters. As smallish sensory things, they resonate with the feel of childhood control.

Like baseballs and baseball gloves or the furniture in dollhouses (or, once, yo-yos, tops and jewelry boxes), guns require repetitive use of palms, fingers, wrists and modest strength to control and manipulate. As a child, you feel bigger, stronger, dominant, capable and part of a team (with adults on it) when your toy is like what big people use.

Pianists, by contrast

This is a feeling that, arguably, never goes away, both because of the personal, psychological memory that's attached to ownership of "small things" and because of the interrelationship between the use of the hands, motor skills, and emotion.

Seriously. Think of musicians, especially pianists. The nerves in the hand and fingertips are extraordinarily sensitive and occupy large sections of the brain. Studies have shown that early training in piano playing creates changes in blood flow and brain activity. Even passable pianists"“ not to mention trumpeters and violinists"“ connect what they play with emotion as they learn.

Extensive practice using a weapon produces the same effect. Shooters "feel good" after target practice. The most passionate claim usually cited by gun advocates is Charlton Heston's declaration about holding onto his rifle until it was pried from his "cold dead hands."

Emotional charge

By its very essence, holding and firing a gun— unlike holding a TV remote or screwdriver"“ has an emotional charge. Even if it's a toy. And most children are made aware that gun use involves others and their reactions. Nearly everyone has been around when a child points a gun at his Grandmother. And then learns not to.

For an adult, use, ownership of a gun is always fraught with social and legal dimensions. Hunters and proud gun owners flaunt their understandings of what guns are, their history in American culture and their own sense of responsibility. Those who own a gun "to protect their family," or for fun or sport, harbor obvious feelings about their weapons.

Clearly, guns also appeal to the rage-prone adolescent mind and to unformulated needs for elemental power, control and group identification. As for "criminals"— well, they certainly know all about guns and what it means to use and show them to create fear.

Male potency

To return to Wills's allusion to idolatry, it's also worth noting that although we live in a culture of disposable commodities, certain objects seem to retain the quality of totems or fetishes, especially when they're hand-held. Our cell phones, iPods and ever-shrinking iPads and Kindles are the latest examples.

Guns, not unlike swords and knives in other times and cultures, have been staples of male paraphernalia (and you don't have to be Freud to figure out what a gun-in-a-holster represents). That weapons worn or owned outside of military equipage retain their association with the military is another factor to consider. That guns can kill human beings surrounds them with a potency that, in spite of our sense of reason and laws, our deeper selves doubtless acknowledge.

Now that cars are far beyond a hobby for most, and now that laptops and other hand operated technologies— from gas station pumps to the push screens on microwaves— require no more than pressing a button or a screen icon, the gun reigns as a singularly compact, portable American non-computerized machine.

Owning a gun, by the way, is also always a sure conversation starter.

No tech support

Above all"“ and unlike most 21st-Century technology— guns do what they're designed to do. They shoot bullets. When you reload them, they shoot more. No visiting websites, no calls to tech support people, no new fixes downloaded on your computer overnight without your permission.

It's unfortunate that we live in a society oriented toward violence, where the image of the gun as a solution to one's problems is taken seriously. But we should bear in mind the significant manner in which objects and machines and technology affect human behavior. The allure, the mystique, and the forms of symbolic identification associated with objects like guns should not be overlooked.

As I write, I just heard that the NRA has issued a statement blaming Hollywood and the media for distorting the image of the gun. Of course no one can be killed by an image. Personal objects hold far more power over us than their representation in movies or on the Internet. Just try calling someone you love with a picture of an iPhone.♦


To read another commentary on guns by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read responses, click here.