Should Guns Be “Cast Into the Fires of Mount Doom”?
Discussing gun control in Tolkienese
Yes, this post is about gun control.
But I’m putting it in Lord of the Rings language, because that’s the one I speak best.
If we were to take the world of Middle Earth and super-impose it onto our own reality, for many people, guns would be the equivalent of the One Ring: inherently corrupt and corrupting. Upon that premise, the Quest becomes a matter of throwing guns into the proverbial fires of Mount Doom (i.e. eliminating, or at the very least, controlling them). But I suggest that the metaphor I’ve just presented is flawed: in the Middle Earth vernacular, guns represent not the ultimate, consolidated power of the One Ring, but the everyday weapons — swords, bows, axes, etc — carried by the characters who inhabit Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. The weapon itself matters less than who has them and what they’re doing with them. For gun rights apologists (like myself), the proof is in the fact that people who want to kill other people don’t necessarily need guns, any more than Denethor, the mad steward who commits suicide (and attempted homicide) by throwing himself alive onto a burning pyre, needed a sword when he wanted to kill himself and his son Faramir. As for Gollum (a mentally disturbed person if there ever was one), bare hands and teeth were all he needed to kill.
Fortunately, many gun control advocates are acknowledging that there are deeper problems than the existence of guns. Mental health is being given a place in the discussion as well. Disturbed people, it is said, need to have access to treatment to prevent killing sprees. This sounds promising, but the problem with this approach is that it isn’t just mentally ill people who commit mass murder. People who are angry or desperate, or warped idealists who truly believe the world will be better without certain people in it, are the ones who kill. Are those emotions far from any of us? We’ve all felt angry, or desperate, or fed up with certain people — just not enough to overcome our desire to not be killers.
So, if guns aren’t the One Ring of this world, what is? What is the corrupting force that turns people into killers?
The book Following Gandalf by Matthew Dickerson has a helpful analysis of the Ring, as it pertains to Tolkien’s moral compass in his writing. The most important conflict in LOTR is a moral one, relating to the choices that free characters make. Military victory is secondary to whether or not a person remains honest, merciful, loyal, and caring, but in order to truly embody those qualities, a person has to choose them freely for him or herself, not from outward compulsion. Thus the evil, as well as the almost-irresistible lure, of the One Ring is that it gives its wielder the power to control the wills of others.
Over and over, characters throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy fall prey to the Ring’s promise of ultimate power over all living things, only to be deceived by its treachery. Under its temptation, the warrior Borimir imagines thousands of armies flocking to his banner; Galadriel, the Elf-queen of Lothlorien, imagines commanding the love of all beings; Gollum, whose possession of the Ring has turned him into a pathetic, light-hating cave-dweller, dreams of being brought fish, fresh from the Sea, every day. The Black Riders, or Ringwraiths, who hound Frodo and his companions were not always ghostly slaves of Sauron; as Aragorn explains to the hobbits: “Blinded by their greed they took them [magic rings] without question, one by one falling into darkness and now they are slaves to his will.” Sauron’s “will to dominate all life” is echoed in every character’s own ambitions, but in the end, as Gandalf warns the wizard Saruman, who wants to make an alliance with Sauron in the hopes of ultimately defeating him, “There can only be one Lord of the Rings, and he does not share power.” Grasping for the Ring’s power only puts us under its true master’s control.
Unlike Sauron’s ring, in our world we don’t have an equivalent technology that can “bend men’s wills”. The greatest control we can wield over another person is simply ending their existence — i.e. killing them. But that would be your choice; not theirs. You would, in fact, be controlling them; with your gun, or knife, or other weapon.
But violence is not the only way to this. There is a more subtle method: politics — or, as it has sometimes been called, “war by other means”. You can get laws passed that force the public to act within your will. Then your weapon would be the state, the police, the army. But you would still be the one in control. The person or people whose behavior you wished to change would be acting under compulsion, not making a moral choice of their own free will.
No legislation or policy can control the human heart. Indeed, meeting power with power, control with control, is much like Denethor’s insane solution of fighting fire with fire since we’re all going to burn anyway.
I see so many conservatives, including friends of mine, posting angry tirades that usually add up to something like “Liberals/feminists/Muslims have taken control! We have to take control back!” Conversely, I see plenty of liberal and progressive friends saying things like “Conservatives/straight white males/Christians have been in control for too long! We have to take control instead!” But we should take a lesson from the fate of Borimir, the desperate warrior of the beleaguered city of Gondor, who thought that the Ring was “a gift to the foes of Mordor,” not realizing that the Ring was to be his doom, not Sauron’s. Beyond that, I think we’re confused not only as to what the Ring represents, but as to who Mordor is — we, like the Elves, Dwarves, and Men slinging blame at each other during the Counsel of Elrond, squabble among ourselves, failing to recognize that the power of the Enemy is most clearly seen in the division that still plagues those who oppose him.
This brings out another helpful point from Following Gandalf. In Peter Jackson’s film version, Frodo’s faithful companion Sam provides the “moral of the story” at the end of The Two Towers when he says, “There’s some good in this world...and it’s worth fighting for.” This is true; indeed, that’s what all the Free Peoples are fighting for. But Dickerson points out that in the book, Tolkien goes further than that. There is good in the world, and potential for good in every human (or other sentient) heart. And it’s not just worth fighting for; it’s worth not fighting for. The wise ones of Middle-Earth often make decisions that seem strange or foolish from a pragmatically military standpoint. That’s because military victory isn’t as important to them as moral character. The goodness or potential goodness in a heart is worth sparing the life of someone who would kill you. It’s worth risking death by spider rather than breaking faith with the odious, but somehow pitiable Gollum. It’s worth chasing after a horde of Uruks to rescue your friends, rather than pursuing the Ring or adding military might to Minas Tirith.
So what are we to do instead of fighting all the time? Without the One Ring, we feel impotent against the evil we see in our world. We wonder, like Theoden, King of Rohan, beholding the massive forces of the Enemy pitted against his kingdom, what even our best efforts can do against “such reckless hate”? Without the power to bend men’s wills by force, what can we do? Simply grieve over every tragedy? Keep sending our “thoughts and prayers” over social media? One headline a while ago objected to such language, declaring in large letters, “God isn’t fixing this.” And while it’s true that little sound bites of Christianese don’t really help anyone, the headline inadvertently points toward the solution.
Because the very statement “God isn’t fixing this” prompts a question: how do you define “fixing this”? What are we expecting, or wishing, God to do? Do we want Him to zap the world free of guns? Fix every mental illness in an instant? Smite down evil people as soon as they have evil thoughts? If the latter, then where would He stop? As explored above, all of us have wished to “deal out death and judgment” when we can’t give life to those who deserve it. God’s version of “fixing” things looks very different from ours; as we should expect. His version of victory is a cross. His version of blessing is persecution, poverty, and surprise twist endings. (Or, in Tolkien’s terms, “eucatastrophe.”) More importantly, God is the only one who is really in control.
But didn’t I just say meeting control with control is evil? Or useless? Or insane? Yes — when humans do it. When sinful humans, rife with power-lust, dominate their fellow created wills, it is all of those things. But God is as different — more different, in fact — from us as Tolkien is from Frodo. No one calls Tolkien evil for controlling his own characters; if he didn’t, who would bring them into existence? Who would sustain their world and guide them to the happy ending? Check out the book of Job, chapters 38-41, for a demonstration of how God does the same with His created world. Unlike us, He is not motivated by power-lust; He already holds all power. He is motivated by love for His own creation, and a desire to see it brought to the joyous conclusion that He planned for it. Also unlike us, God can see exactly and completely who deserves what. He knows who deserves death and life, and has the power to give it to them. At the Last Judgment, that’s exactly what He’ll do.
But even more than that, only God has the power to change a human heart. And He doesn’t do it through torture tactics or sheer force. By some mystery, through the Holy Spirit, God is able to turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh, one that loves Him and loves others as we were created to do. He can take someone who thought killing was God’s service (Saul of Tarsus, aka Paul the Apostle) and turn him into an unstoppable force of gospel grace and charity. And this, not by dominating Paul’s own will, but by freeing it from the clutches of the One Ring; the sinful desires that control it. And Paul still remains himself, with all the same zeal he always had, just pointed in a different direction.
There’s so much more to be said on this, but right now, my point is this: I am not going to stop praying. Because God, not corrupted and corruptible mankind, is the only One who can ultimately fix this. Meanwhile, I will not take the Ring to wield it, by weapons or legislation or any other thing. Not “if I found it lying on the road”.
Note: A follow-up post on the NFL protest to come when my life gets a little less crazy!
