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There are three conversations I had with gun sport competitors a few years ago at a range in West Virginia that I have never been able to shake. In weeks like this one, when we are again mourning the slaughter of school children with a firearm, they churn through my head ceaselessly.
The first was with an official for the event — ex-military and law enforcement — who had traveled the world for shooting competitions. He confided, on background, that maybe having laws restricting the proliferation of semi-automatic rifles would make sense. A person should only be using those for hunting or sport shooting, so why not require a license and some training? Maybe even, he went on, require that they be stored at a range. This approach to owning that type of weapon is more common in other countries.
There’s no reason, he said, for the average American to need an AR-15 at home.
The next conversation that has been skulking through my brain in the days since a gunman entered Robb Elementary School and massacred 19 children and two adults came with a working police officer. Carefully adorned in all the accoutrements needed for the weekend — gun slings, body-worn ammo carriers of all shapes and sizes, Oakley sunglasses — he pulled me aside to say that he was there, in part, because he felt he needed the training. He wanted to be confident on the job when using his firearm, and he didn’t feel that his infrequent range trainings (wherein he’d stand still and shoot at a static target) properly prepared him. Nervous cops, he said, are more likely to shoot quickly (as we’ve witnessed in so many videos of unarmed Black men being killed) They’re also more liable to freeze when being asked to do the unthinkable, such as entering an elementary school where kids have been shot.
Nothing could prepare anyone for that, but this competitor felt that the sport, 3-Gun, better replicated the stress of a real gunfight than some of his other training.
The third conversation I remember, the one reverberating most loudly this week, occurred when I asked one of the people who helped build up this sport whether he feared for his own kids when they were at school.
He gave me the most bewildered look, as if I had asked whether he felt anxiety over the possibility of the moon falling on his house. To him, school shootings happened elsewhere. The town where he lived was full of good people. Good people with guns. And where there are good people with guns, this does not happen.
I bring all of this up now for the same reason I went to report on a shooting sports tour that touted itself as a defense of the 2nd Amendment and a refutation of anyone pushing for gun control in the first place. I earnestly wanted to understand how anyone could imagine the terror inside one of these places (this story was reported after the Emanuel AME shooting in Charleston) and walk away thinking anything other than: We need fewer guns, and fewer people with access to them.
The answer was, and remains, not all that complicated: The people I met hated the idea of gun-control measures because they did not want to be subjected to gun-control measures. The motivation for that is more complicated, though. It’s easy to say that they are merely selfish — that the rush from shooting their AR-15 out in the woods outweighs any collective duty to try to prevent someone else from using that style of weapon to kill.
But this drastically undersells what they believe, and why people actually cling to their guns. They feel that owning guns is essential to America. The right to bear arms made America America, and it keeps America America. As Alexandra Filindra, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago, put it on Twitter: “For very many people, guns are not simply tools. They are potent symbols of good citizenship, membership, and belonging. They are centrally associated with deeply-held beliefs about what makes one a true American.”
A legally armed citizenry, in the minds of the people I spoke with, is the force that ultimately keeps the country’s ruling class honest. Any push to curtail the spread of guns, then, is not seen as mere gun-control but as an infringement on democracy. Sure, we are free to vote. But that right only exists because we are also free to own the tools that would let us fight back if we couldn’t.
Holding the 2nd Amendment in such regard — viewing it as essential — makes it unassailable, and so the conversation stops. You can view this as a rhetorical tactic, and for some (Ted Cruz), it is. But for these real and regular people, the feeling is foundational: America without mostly unfettered access to guns would no longer be America, and America is, of course, exceptional (this is why they do not care that gun-control has controlled gun deaths in other countries).
The thing about American exceptionalism is that once you buy it, you see it everywhere, often writ small, and can assign it any origin you want. This is how you end up with the people of Uvalde saying that it should have never happened here, where the people were “good” and “hard-working.” This is how someone who does not believe in full background checks or gun registries or other relatively minor steps that might make guns harder to get for those intent on violence rests his head at night: He truly feels as though, in his town, with its good and hard-working folks, this would not happen, or it would be stopped.
We know now that this is wrong. The Uvalde City School District has its own police force. It could not stop an 18-year-old from getting into the building. Local officers also apparently responded quickly, but did not immediately stop the shooting (their response is being heavily scrutinized).
Which brings us back to the first two anecdotes I shared. They provide a way for us to talk about gun violence as we press forward.
The first shows that there are reasonable 2nd Amendment supporters who can see that weapons made for war don’t need to be readily available to a kid still years away from legally purchasing a shot of whiskey at a bar — or to any average citizen hoping to use them anywhere other than a range or hunting grounds.
The second shows that many of the proposals for stopping future mass shootings without using gun control are deeply unserious. Most involve placing more good guys with guns near schools, or at least guns in schools for the good guys to grab. This is ludicrous. If police officers with semi-regular training in the use of firearms are not confident, how would teachers or principals ever be? It’s nice to think that a few retired military or law enforcement types could be paid to linger near schools, armed and ready, but it ignores the reality of how these shootings unfold. Chaos is chaotic, especially when wrought by somebody with an AR-15 and no desire to live.
We all want to believe we might be brave and capable — and some of us would be — but hoping, repeatedly, for the exceptional to happen at just the right moment in just the right way when the violence comes is not an answer to that violence. It is simply something a few of us tell ourselves because we want to continue to believe that power is ours.