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I’m grateful that my father never owned a gun

I’m grateful that my father never owned a gun

Last updated on: October 5, 2015 at 3:29 pm by Morgan Guyton

I’m grateful that my father never owned a gun 2015-10-05T15:29:08-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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“Sig Sauer P226,” WickedVT, Flickr C.C.

In the aftermath of the latest tragic school shooting in Oregon, the Internet is pulsating with a war of memes between the two sides of the gun debate. One of the ways that pro-gun Christians have claimed the higher spiritual ground is to say, “We don’t have a gun problem in our culture; we have a heart problem.” It seems more accurate to say our culture has a heart problem with guns. As a pastor, I don’t feel very qualified to speak to the legal regulatory side of the gun debate. Each side lives in a parallel universe of facts and statistics that have been manipulated into talking points. I favor one side, like most people do. But it seems more fruitful to talk about my own heart problem with guns. The fact is I’m not sure if I would be here today if my father had owned a gun and I had gained access to it.

In middle school, I had two favorite songs that helped me cope with the bullying that I faced: Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” Jeremy is a song about a kid named Jeremy who’s getting bullied in school until one day he shows up with a gun and takes everybody out. The lyrics begin: “At home drawing pictures of mountaintops with him on top, flaming yellow sun, arms raised in a V, the dead lay in pools of maroon below.” As the song builds to a climax, Eddie Vedder sings over and over again, “Jeremy spoke in class today.” In the music video, Jeremy “speaks” with his gun. I wonder whether the Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris played “Jeremy” in their walkmens on repeat with their eyes closed like I did when they were starting to fantasize about the awful deed they would do.

I remember drawing pictures like Jeremy drew. I remember how much rage I felt toward the kids who were teasing me and how I would fantasize about getting them back. I remember rapping with NWA’s Ice Cube: “AK-47 is my tool; don’t make me act a mother-f***ing fool,” and holding my imaginary AK in my hand, squeezing off the rounds that I heard in the recording. It never amounted to anything more than a private fantasy. I had always been a shy, rule-following kid. So I probably wouldn’t have done anything even if I had the tools to do something. But every time I hear about a school shooting, I always remember my fantasies and thank God that he protected me from any means of acting upon them.

The more serious situation in which a gun would have been fatal was when I attempted suicide my third year in college. I only had access to pills. So after I took them, I was able to call 911 and get to a hospital. I actually didn’t do any research on which pills would do me in. It was just an impulsive response to a panic attack during exam week. The nurse told me that I would have given myself a really bad stomach ulcer at worst with the number of Advils I took. But what if I’d had access to a gun? What if I’d grown up in a home where becoming a man means you get your own gun when you turn 12? What if I’d had the ability to make a permanent, impulsive decision to end my life because of a term paper I couldn’t write?

Throughout my life, I’ve felt a lot of shame about my lack of proficiency with guns. My grandpa owned guns. He taught me how to shoot a 22. We went out on his ranch maybe two or three times to shoot soda cans growing up. So I’m not completely a gun virgin. But I have definitely felt like I was deficient as a man because of my lack of gun knowledge. I somehow got indoctrinated with the idea that real men own guns just like real men can fix cars, tie fishing lures, hit 90 mile an hour fastballs, and do a lot of other “blue-collar” things that I don’t know how to do because I’ve always been a nerdy kid. My inadequacy about my manhood is a major wound that shapes my identity. It’s caused me to hate other men irrationally but also to discover legitimate critiques of the patriarchal culture that all men have been oppressed by.

I wonder how many of the mass shooters have been shaped by similar inadequacies about their manhood. When I’ve read their manifestos, they’ve seemed eerily similar to the bitter jealousy I’ve felt toward the popular jocks who always get all the girls and are on a trajectory to basically win at everything their entire lives. There are plenty of people with mental illness and degrees of autism who are completely nonviolent. It seems like there’s a cocktail of interconnected causes that makes someone a mass shooter. Two essential ingredients seem to be 1) the idea that manhood is expressed through shooting a gun and 2) the access to guns through which an unmanly-feeling boy can assert his manhood. From my vantage point, that’s the heart problem in our culture right there.

When I first became a father, one of the things I fought with my wife about was getting a gun. I told her and myself that I was genuinely concerned about our safety, which was true, but also deep down, I wanted a burglar to come through our door so that I could shoot him and finally become a man. Perhaps I’m the only man who has ever had these kinds of thoughts. In any case, my wife won the argument, and I’m glad that she did, because I have two sons and I’m not entirely confident that each of them will grow up to be the well-adjusted, popular, athletic, perpetually successful man that I never was myself. I fear that they may go through tough seasons in their lives where any kind of access to guns would be very dangerous for them, whether the issue is bullying or depression.

So maybe I’m not a real man. But I love my sons. And I don’t trust them any more than I trust myself with a gun. When they become adults, they can make their own decisions. This isn’t to judge anybody else. I love and respect many men who love their guns. Just don’t worship them. And don’t shame men like me who don’t have one.

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