In the month of June 2016 a few things happened. In Orlando there was a horrific mass shooting that killed 49 people and injured 53. In Washington D.C. Democrats staged a sit-in to protest the House’s refusal to budge on passing gun control legislation. In Cleveland family privately celebrated the 14th birthday of Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer in November 2014. And in Connecticut my two-year-old son had his first encounter with a water pistol. We were at a family gathering and some older boys had brought them out to play with in the pool. My son was avidly watching them fill the reservoirs, pump the little guns and fire long streams of water at each other. He then tried to unsuccessfully use one himself. A friend who was watching remarked, “The NRA would be so proud!” This kind of experience can present a moral dilemma for some parents. How do we watch acts of unthinkable gun violence play out in real life, while at the same time smile indulgently, or even halfheartedly, at our children playing with toy guns?
I have heard and read the reinvigorated calls for gun control, and I respect them. Something needs to be done in this country about gun violence. However, I don’t agree with the mainstream feelings about how. If we truly think about new paradigm, outside-the-box solutions, what can we come up with?
When I examine the cultural underpinnings of this issue, a few things surface. First is the dichotomy between guns as part of play, whether that be water pistols, paintball or video games; and the uses that these real tools were designed for. Weapons are an essential part of human history. They are a characteristic of our ecological niche as a tool-making species. Unlike species whose weaponry is built into their bodies in the form of shells, claws, horns, venom or jaws, ours must be constructed for the most part. So we developed spears, arrows, traps, shields, knives, and other tools in order to procure our food and protect ourselves. We also evolved as band societies, providing security for both needs in the form of a cooperative, close-knit group. It was necessary for children to learn these critical survival skills in order to flourish in adulthood, and as children learn through play, toy weapons made sense. The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood mentions earlier accounts of Inuit children and toy use, which consisted of miniature household implements, carved animals, and toy harpoons, bows, and slings. In this context it is obvious why the children (typically boys) are playing with toy weapons. But in our culture? How many of our children are being presented with toy weapons as preparation for adulthood, for procuring food and providing defense? How many will transition from toy guns to real guns, and how many parents would approve of this transition? Some, I’m sure. There are many proud parents of soldiers, and many families who hunt and want to share these skills with their children. What about everyone else? This demonstrates a vast disconnect between the purpose of the play and the role of the weapon, and results in adults whose only experience with weaponry is in its role as a toy, a state that I think is dangerous.
A second disconnect that our society has is with the concept of death. We spend most of our time in denial of it, from the deaths of the plants and animals that we eat to the deaths of our loved ones, to our own eventual experience. We sacrifice immense amounts of quality of life to stave it off. We run from it, and our burial practices reflect that: cold, isolated, inorganic plots, forever separated from the earth by barriers of concrete and metal. We communicate this: Humans are such a toxic and destructive force that we cannot even allow our dead to touch the soil for fear that we might contaminate it. What a horrifying mental model! Because of our own dysfunctional relationship with death, we are inept at teaching our children about it. It’s no wonder. Teaching a child about things like genocide, factory farms, habitat destruction, and mass shootings while never having developed a comfortable relationship with death ourselves is a recipe for disaster, and it brings up uncomfortable truths about our way of life that don’t align with the values we want to instill in our children. If this country successfully bans guns, does that mean we can continue to pretend that death doesn’t exist because – sigh of relief – we won’t have any more mass shootings to explain to our kids? How do we shift to a holistic relationship with mortality, and how do we address the still-present issue of the weapon as perpetual toy? I don’t think that a gun ban will respond to either of these issues, but they need to be addressed if we are to improve our overall social and emotional health.
Finally, this country is facing an epidemic collapse of community. The cooperative, close-knit group is dead, literally killed by guns in the case of the Native American genocide. Even in a more recent context, it is no longer commonplace to know your neighbors and be interdependent with them, to trust them with your kids and to have a strong social and economic fabric where children are able to autonomously explore within an acceptable comfort zone, where adults do not feel isolated and exhausted under the burden of singlehandedly providing all of their childrens’ economic and social needs, where children are not raised on television and the internet and video games because their parents are exhausted, where struggling members are supported by the group and given the help they need, not left hung out to dry and morph into angry, alienated individuals. Whether they have access to guns or not does not address the fact that they are unseen by a community, invisible until they explode with catastrophic consequences.
Let’s talk for a moment about non-white communities, the military and the police. In the band societal structures in which humans evolved, defense was provided for and by members of the immediate community. These were people who knew each other personally and who each had a vested interest in maintaining the safety of the group, because it was their group. Even when the Second Amendment was written, it was in the context of a standing militia of local residents and not a global superpower military. The scope of the defense was much, much smaller. There were no nuclear arms races or corporate interests and profits. In our current American culture, in contrast to this, most of us do not provide our own defense. Instead we outsource this need to others (as we do with our food procurement), often people we don’t know, often people of color or poor people who have more limited employment options and access to education, and for whom the military can provide both. In essence we are putting their bodies in harm’s way instead of our own, and as such do not have to consider the impact of worldwide imperialist military campaigns as intimately as they do. Many of us might personally know veterans, but they are only defending our immediate communities in the abstract sense. Their actual jobs are far removed from us.
The police are a smaller scale, community-based force, and there’s a better chance that we know some of them personally. However, as we have seen manifest in now countless incidents, police are not always defending their own communities, but are instead hired professionals who might feel animosity toward the communities they have been contracted to protect. I have not seen anyone state that a national firearm ban should extend to police, but if the power of a community to defend itself is stripped (and in many communities of color it essentially already has been by way of the “terrorist” or “thug” labels) while those who despise it retain it, I don’t believe that protection is being achieved.
What does true self-defense look like? How do we successfully protect our communities without an imbalance of power? I’m sure there are many ways to approach this, but I don’t think that pretending that we don’t need to defend ourselves is realistic. I’m also not okay with people living in terror of the very force that is entrusted to protect them, or with letting other unknown people’s sons and daughters die for us in unnecessary international wars for reasons of corporate or political profiteering. That’s a really tough conversation to have with your kid.
What does this mean for me as a parent? For now, I am going to make sure my son learns how to identify and use a firearm as well as a bow. This is in part because I never want him to approach a real weapon as though it were a toy. No matter how strict a ban is enacted, I do not believe guns will ever be eradicated during his childhood, and I want to ensure that he knows what to do if he should encounter one. It is also because I want him to develop empathy; to understand, respect and embrace the concept of death; to come face to face with the inescapable necessity of taking another’s life as food in order to perpetuate your own. I want him to take personal responsibility for that life and not outsource it to others, and to express gratitude for the life that he took. This can be accomplished in other ways, such as raising and slaughtering animals, and I want to teach him this as well, but guns are a part of our current entertainment culture and rather than sheltering him from that fact, I want him to fully understand their impact and not relate to them solely as toys for the rest of his life. I can’t hide all the water pistols and war games in the world from him. What I can do is give him the appropriate context, training, and respect, and in this way guide him through the transition into adulthood. Most of all, I want him to grow up in a supportive and nurturing community where he will be mentored and not feel isolated or unable to communicate his emotions in any way except through violent action.
I am in no way expressing my support for the proliferation of firearms or for their unfettered access. I am not pro-gun, in fact I wish they had never been invented. I also do not expect anyone who has lost a friend or family member – particularly a child – to gun violence to ever be in favor of guns in any form or situation. Were I in their position I would likely have the same views. However, I feel it is the responsibility of the rest of us to consider the big-picture context on the history, roles, and use and abuse of firearms as we articulate our viewpoints and advocate for change going forward.
That’s my researched and considered take on the gun issue as I understand it right now. My opinions are not static, and I welcome others’ ideas and perspectives.
regenerative parenting 