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The Loaded Decision of Buying a Gun
What is the perfect weapon for a break in shared reality?
Once again, I was thinking about buying a gun to cope with the possibility of having to protect my family from the armed white supremacist militias of which my state has plenty. But the morning I was headed to the gun show, it occurred to me that I’m a depressive sort with a fair amount of obsessive thinking and that if I had a gun in my house there’s a possibility I would start to think about blowing my own brains out. Before I even had the gun I found myself thinking obsessively about where the gun would theoretically be stored in my house, and I was already imagining how easy it would be, how little time it would take, to load it up and end this whole thing. It’s not that I would want to forever, it’s that with a gun you only need to want to long enough to do it, and by then, of course it would be too late. If future generations find themselves wondering what it meant to live in America in 2021, I think it’s somewhere in there.
I told several close friends about my rekindled interest in owning a firearm, all women and all of a generalized lefty-peacenik variety, expecting them to be horrified. But all of them responded the same way. “Yeah. Makes sense.” My ex-wife and the mother of my children was one of the first people I told, since we share a family and have known each other for the better part of three decades. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it, too…” she said after a pause, “but the thing about guns is, it’s impossible to have one without fantasizing about using it.”
This is the catch-22. You have one because other people have one. Other people have one because you have one. And everyone is fantasizing about using it. We sink the ship together and kill each other on our way down. In this way we create our own reality and it’s a terrible one. I read somewhere that most empires last around 250 years. This one, then, would be right on schedule. And to be sure, this moment does have a certain “Well, guess this is it” to it doesn’t it? At any rate, I recently bought a pack of cigarettes, my first in a while, which is effectively a slow gun that you can enjoy along with a cup of tea in the afternoon sunlight.
