Nobody Needs An AR-15 (or a Sig Sauer MCX)
What? Of course we do. Here are the reasons why:
1) Mass murder.
The most obvious and practical reason for owning these weapons (and the optional 100 round magazine) is if one wants to kill a large group of innocent people quickly and efficiently, with the most casualties. Despite this obvious fact, the weapon is still available to the public, mainly to serve the other needs outlined below.
2) Insecure men.
I get it. Some have been the victims of violent crime, and are grateful for our Second Amendment to get much needed comfort and safety. I cannot fault those for wanting to protect themselves, but in any such case won’t a handgun suffice?
Of course that’s justification for only a small percentage of (male) gun owners. So why do so many other men own assault weapons? Is it because they are hunting or protecting their families? For the most part no, although I do hear AR15s are great for hunting wild pig. The most common reason stated for owning a gun is for protection. Yet protection is an act of defense, and the words “assault weapon” don’t sound very defensive to me. Why is that?
The term, ‘assault weapon’, is a bit inaccurate. The AR or Sauer are semi-automatic civilian versions of fully automatic military ‘assault rifles’. ‘Assault weapon’ is a term used by liberals like me to make the weapons sound more dangerous than they are. Except we don’t really have to do that because of their repeated use in horrific mass murders.
Over 3million AR-15s have been sold, mainly due to the fact that they look and feels like a machine-gun. Sauers and other such rifles have a similar look and feel, made to emulate military style weapons so that it’s easier for adult boys to play make-believe with them. Anyone can easily slip into some weird delusion that they are holding a military assault rifle and killing their enemies.
This rifle imbues its owner with a false sense of what they consider to be power. But power is the ability to create, not to destroy. What the gun really imbues is forcefulness, the destructive aspect of existence. That is what this weapon provides — an excessive level of force. Many men choose to own this weapon as a way to feel more powerful, but all they are doing is (1) furthering false and outdated notions of masculinity, and (2) masking their own fears.
One need only look as far as this AR15 forum thread on “the death of masculinity”, to see the problem. Many men in this country define there masculinity by stoicism, gun ownership, or the ability to kick somebody’s ass. Real masculinity is being vulnerable with male friends, and experiencing true brotherhood on that level of complete openness. Vulnerability is the true mark of power and courage, it is the willingness to be completely exposed before another person.
Anyone can hide behind weapons, whether these are firearms or their own illusions of self. Those who are willing to let down their guard and their false projections of stoic manliness to share their fear and pain, are all too often mocked by their male peers. This mockery is also a defense mechanism that results from their deep-seated fears that their own tender, flawed humanity may be revealed. And unfortunately, in this culture of fear, it’s far more acceptable to call another man a pussy than to give him a hug.
As a more recent example of this, see the mysoginistic meme below:
Many men choose to identify with the Alpha Male image of masculinity which is strength, resolve, and physical prowess. But given statistics about obesity in this country and anecdotal evidence (i.e. images of overweight dudes touting their riflles), gun ownership seems to be the quick fix. The way for one to prove he is indeed “a real man”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Is this the culture of masculinity we want to perpetuate? Emasculating the voice of opposition as a way of silencing it? That strategy is certainly working for Donald Trump who is essentially running for president on a platform of mocking others. Because what can can be more threatening to a man than being seen as weak and effeminate?
A brief note about women: Certainly women own and use weapons as well, and some would like to believe that those numbers are on the rise.
My guess is that nothing turns on a gun-lovin’ man more than a sexual fantasy involving a gun-lovin’ woman.
While there are plenty of women who own guns too, here are some solid facts and figures confirming data which indicates “that women remain on the outskirts of the gun-ownership culture in the United States, and that this male-dominated culture is increasingly self-sequestered — geographically and culturally — within its own hothouse fantasies of guns and girls.”
Sorry fellas.
3) Restoring perceived power.
Another contributing factor in gun ownership is the feeling of powerlessness. Power struggles often play out at work, where people spend most of their waking hours around bosses who see their employees as ‘less than’ or expendable.
So many of us feel disempowered at our jobs. We feel unsafe at work and can’t say what we really think to our power-drunk bosses. For evidence of this, just look at memes online about work, the pervasive ‘us and them’ mentality of employees vs bosses.
I’ll admit that buying the biggest gun you can find and shooting up sheets of paper with numbers on them is preferable to beating one’s wife and kids. That is unfortunately how many choose to regain their power, but nothing quite restores the perception of one’s own power like the ability to kill others.
4) The news basically told me to.
“Tonight at 11, a shooting in a neighborhood that looks a lot like yours! Why you should be very, very afraid… after the movie.”
Sound familiar?
We can’t possibly process all of the evils that the nightly news swears are coming to get us — the false claims that violent crime is more prevalent than it really is. This too makes us feel disempowered.
Why does the news make us afraid? So we’ll watch and share the fear with others on social media. For the networks broadcasting these messages, that translates into more fear-stricken viewership and increased advertising dollars. But people have to do something with the build up of irrational fear in their psychological and emotional bodies. All too often, the quickest fix is to buy a gun. (Or you can just do what I did and get rid of the fucking television.)
5) The Military Industrial Complex
America can’t deal with the fear of a threat on foreign soil, let alone in this country. We are still terrorized by the attacks that occurred on September 11th that ripple through our national nervous system. This fear is also irrational. Thanks to the largest military in the world (and growing!), these attacks are highly unlikely. We are all far, far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident, than by terrorists.
Our leaders know that if people have a positive relationship with guns and the military, weapons manufacturers will continue to donate handsomely to their re-election campaigns. That’s why the military feeds our fear and lust for violence with placements of weapons in movies like Transformers (one long ad for the Army), and countless video games that glorify violence. If we grow up shooting people every night on a big screen with graphics that come close to simulating reality, of course we all will eventually need the coolest weapon we can find.
We are a nation afraid, and weapons are our security blankets. That’s why some people own so many, more than they could possibly ever use in the quite rare instance of a home invasion. Even though all logic and data indicates that we are more likely to be shot by a toddler than to prevent a violent crime, we keep our security blankets perpetually locked and loaded.
We are a nation afraid, which is why even in the face of the horrific truth that children are slaughtered yearly, we don’t care. Even in the face of evidence that tighter gun control, any gun control, will make us a safer nation, we cannot stomach that. Because if we do, it may force us to give up our weapons and take a long hard look at our own insecurities.
We do this all day, every day. We point our fingers at the behaviors of others, projecting the shit we can’t handle about ourselves onto them. Guns let us point a barrel instead of a finger, amplifying our perceived power until that drowns out the truth — we are all going to die one day and there is nothing we can do about that. We need assault rifles because we are too afraid to let them go, and as long as that persists we will never be safe from ourselves.
Ask yourself this question, and be truly honest with yourself — when you hear the news about a mass shooting how much time do you spend imagining the life-shattering experience of the father who learns that his daughter’s body has been ripped to pieces by the rapid ravaging of bullets? How much time did you take to feel into the death and the tragedy in Orlando before giving in to the fear that it might happen to you, or worse that they might take your guns away?
It is my assumption that people who cling to their guns and 2nd amendment rights identify more with the perpetrators than the victims and survivors. This is evidenced by the fact that sales of assault weapons and the stocks of the manufacturers skyrocket after a massacre, a time that should be spent grieving.
The Bottom Line
If you hold your 2nd Amendment rights as sacred as I hold my 1st, you probably have all kinds of evidence to support why making these types of guns illegal won’t solve anything. You may even share statistics that “assault weapons” account for less than 1% of all gun murders in the United States or that pistols with standard clips make up 86% of the guns used in crimes in this country. That’s not the point.
The point is that we have an unhealthy relationship with our own fears and insecurities, and a seriously unhealthy relationship with weapons (there are 350 million of them out there).
An AR-15 or Sig Sauer is just a rifle. What makes it exceptional for mass murder is that it can handle a huge volume of bullets without reloading. And what make it so desirable is that it emulates a machine gun. It is a totem that allows people to act out their violent and power-hungry illusions. By banning it and other weapons like it, we will inevitably direct people away from their horrific daydreams and maybe, just maybe they will face their fears and insecurities in healthier ways.
I would give up nearly ANYTHING, if I thought that it would have the chance of saving innocent lives — especially the lives of children. Why do so many cling to their weapons? Because to give them up is to give up their flawed perceptions of reality. That is what the Second Amendment has come to protect.