If you were born after 1980, you grew up with the ubiquity of bottled water as a normal thing. I remember waking up one day back in the late 80s to the sudden realization that everyone seemed to be carrying a bottle of water with them everywhere they went. It seemed to me like this happened practically overnight. When I was growing up, we drank tap water or got a drink out of the garden hose. I felt like something big had happened and I hadn’t gotten the memo.
The introduction of cell phones was another big thing that surprised me. For most of my life, we made phone calls from a phone that was attached to a wall or sitting on a table (but still connected to a wall). If you were on the road and needed to make a phone call, you had to find a pay phone and hoped you had some pocket change with you. Ironically, car phones had already been around for nearly 100 years, but only the wealthy could afford them in “the old days”.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Nokia introduced a cell phone that was affordable to the middle class. I remember getting my first one when my partners and I decided to invest in them for our company. There were five of us – four partners and one employee. Once again, I woke up one day a few short years later to find that nearly every man, woman, and child on the planet, even tiny little children, owned and carried a smart phone – essentially a very small, very powerful computer.
What does this have to do with weaponization? That term, 'weaponization', just as suddenly began appearing in social media, kitchen conversations, and political rallies. The thing that stood out in my mind was that this broad application of the term clearly had nothing to do with actual weapons in the classical sense. The context of these linguistic misnomers, for that is what they are, did not refer to guns or knives or bombs or anything that possessed the inherent capability to inflict physical harm.
The term, weaponization, had suddenly come to refer to the use of policies, procedures, and the due process of law to inflict 'unjust' harm on a specific individual or group. When I first noticed this unusual application of the word, I admit that I didn’t give it much thought. “Verbal hot air,” I thought. But as the rhetoric about weaponizing everything from language to the dollar to the justice system, became more ubiquitous, I realized this might be another one of those seismic shifts in our culture. I read an article yesterday claiming that China was being accused of weaponizing lucrative tourism. Huh?
Once I began to more closely investigate this alleged weaponization of everything, however, it became clear that this was, technically speaking, bullshit – a political reaction by individuals or groups who are undergoing the well-deserved fruits of their poor behavior or disregard for the law. Either that or it’s someone lacking the adequate sufficiency of vocabulary to make a salient point. I found this discovery to be a great relief since the actual ongoing weaponization of American seems to be something that genuinely concerns many people.
A weapon, you see, is a thing used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage. Weapons are things like a club, a knife, an arrow, a handgun, a long gun, a machine gun, a bomb, a canon (or worse). If we single out privately-owned guns, data shows that the United States is already the only country in the world with more civilian-owned firearms than people. There are approximately 120 privately-owned guns per 100 people in the United States.
That statistic, in and of itself, is not necessarily an issue. As I think we all know, the second amendment assures the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Of course, over the last 233 years since that article of the original Bill of Rights was ratified, a few significant things have changed, including advances in weapon technology and ammunition, a population that is 130 time larger than in 1791, the more complex social circumstances in which we now live, and our position in the pecking order of nations. But discussing guns in our country is a slippery slope.
I am a gun owner. Paula and I have three handguns, two for personal protection and an old single-action .45 revolver passed down from my father. When we lived on our ranch in California, we also kept a shotgun and a rifle which we used to keep varmints out of our vineyards and from killing our newborn calves. Guns can be very useful.
My father was a lifelong member of the NRA and an avid gun enthusiast. He hunted and competed in trap shooting and black power contests. He also entered fast-draw competitions out in the Southwest. He was an armament specialist during WWII, working on the gun turret systems of B-17 bombers. After the war, he worked for North American Aviation as an armament specialist in the production of the F-100 Super Sabre and the A3J Vigilante.
Dad required all his children to memorize the ten commandments of gun safety by the time we were five years old. We were taught to respect the potential danger of guns, which he always kept locked up. He also taught us to shoot a gun. Weapons were a serious matter in our family.
Despite my familiarity with guns, I do have concerns. Unfortunately, I don’t have any silver-bullet recommendations for resolving the gun-related issues that plague our society, but I do think there are some obvious considerations that any rational, responsible person ought to be able to reflect upon without automatically spouting the second amendment followed by proclaiming something like, "...over my dead body."
Do we need more guns? I realize that’s a dumb question, one that is guaranteed to set people off in reflexive paroxysms of entrenched opinion. I don’t intend to make a case one way or the other, but I thought it might be useful to share some of the data I dug up about guns and gun violence in my research for this article. For those of you who think about such things, consider these tidbits as food for thought (nod to Jayne).
In the United States, in 2023, approximately 16.7 million firearms were sold and between 8 and 15 billion rounds of ammunitions were purchased, generating around $11 billion in revenue for the firearm and ammunition industry. The number of dollars varies depending on which source you use - but it’s a lot of money. The gun industry generates as much as $90 billion in total economic activity in this country, which includes sales, shipping, wages, taxes, and tangentially related activities. In addition to “normal” sales, there is a robust market for sales and trades among individual gun owners and gun collectors, not to mention a growing demand and supply for illegal weapons, weapon kits, and devices like binary triggers and bump stocks. The point is - weapons are a big business.
I often hear the phrase, “people kill, not guns.” You could argue that a gun is just a tool, and there are millions of people who own guns but don’t go around killing others. Fortunately, this is also true enough. But a gun is a weapon and definitely capable of killing – that is, after all, what they’re designed to do. I presume the inference from the “dyed in the wool” gun advocates is that, when it comes to addressing gun violence, the focus should on the people who misuse guns. I think most people could agree with that logic, at least as one aspect of a solution. But the debate gets pretty sketchy after that. Typically, any suggestion for limiting access to guns, even by people who clearly should not be allowed to have one, is thwarted by those who wield the second amendment like the celestial shield of sacrosanct righteousness.
Gun controls are not new, and recent surveys indicate that a majority of Americans think it’s reasonable that some controls ought to be defined. The National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 was the country’s first major federal gun control legislation. The law required the registration of certain firearms, imposed taxes on the sale and manufacture of firearms, and restricted the sale and ownership of high-risk weapons such as machine guns.
For the record, I personally don't think citizens should be allowed to own machine guns. I mean, why does anyone, other than people in the military, need such a deadly, murderous weapon? Yet, despite the law prohibiting ownership of that type of weapon, I know a few people who have them. I take great pains not to piss them off.
Gallup’s latest update on American’s opinions on gun laws finds the majority, 56%, favor strengthening those laws. 31% believe they should be kept as they are now and 12% favor less strict gun laws. If you look at these studies over the years, you’ll find that public opinion shifts over time and by location.
Curiously, opposition to a handgun ban is consistent with a majority of Americans’ belief that having guns makes people’s homes safer rather than more dangerous. Currently, 64% believe guns make homes safer, while 32% believe they make them more dangerous. The typical self-protection weapon kept in homes is a handgun. Incidentally, handguns are involved in 46% of all homicides in the United States, and the 9mm caliber pistol is used in more fatal and non-fatal shootings than any other caliber, according to recent studies.
The so-called assault rifle gets a lot of attention these days. This is the weapon often used in mass shootings and many people are clamoring for placing restrictions on them. The AR-15 style rifle was once banned in America, but now an estimated 20 million of them are in civilian hands. What makes this more remarkable is that, if you go back to just 1994, there were only 400,000 in the country at that time.
I wanted to know how many people are getting killed by guns, and under what circumstances? I discovered that it’s like an onion; you have to peel back the layers to get a good sense of the carnage. The first thing I wanted to know is how many people die from gunfire compared to all the other ways people die. Here are the numbers from a 2013 study that I found:
33,636 died by gunfire, including homicide, suicide, mass shootings, and accidental shooting
24,936 died in non-gun homicides and suicides
35,612 died in auto accidents
35,663 died of drug overdose
65,866 died of other accidental injuries
2,404,054 died of illness (heart disease, cancer, etc)
60% of the gun deaths were suicide (this statistic startled me)
37% of the gun deaths were homicide (this includes 1% for mass shootings – there were 348 in 2013 compared to 630 so far this year - 2024)
You will draw your own conclusions from these numbers, but one thing that surprised me was that drug overdoses killed more people than guns. The suicide by gunshot also caught me off guard.
You’re probably getting tired of reading this blog article by now, but if you can hang in there for a bit longer, I want to make a few more observations.
Do we need more guns? Given how many we already have in this country, one might conclude that we do not. But I’m certain more will continue to be manufactured and purchased each year. Remember, it’s big business. People who already own guns will buy more of them for one reason or another. In some respects, that won’t necessarily change anything one way or another.
The sane, mature, responsible people will use their guns safely and will hopefully take the necessary precautions to safeguard their weapons from thieves, children and mentally impaired people. The irresponsible, violent, mentally impaired, and stupid people who manage to get their hands on a weapon, whether legitimately or through some deviant/illegal behavior, will wreak havoc on the rest of us unfortunate enough to cross their paths in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
I’m aware that more and more people are arming themselves in anticipation of needing to eventually defend themselves. Keeping a weapon in the house for personal protection is one thing, but in my opinion, carrying one in the car or on your person raises the ante in a dangerous game. If everyone were to carry a gun, like in the days of the Wild West, it seems there is an inherent increase in the probability that accidents will happen, but I do understand why many people feel like they need that level of protection.
Earlier this year, I decided to take one of my handguns on a trip to Fort Lauderdale – just in case. I don’t think I’ll do it again. I was hyper-aware that I had it in my car and in my room. I worried about leaving it in the car when I went out to eat or while visiting friends. What if somebody stole it? What if I was stopped for a traffic infraction? I don’t think I felt more secure. I just felt nervous. But that’s just me – I worry about everything. Of course, there are lots of people who are stockpiling weapons and ammunition for the big uprising they are certain is coming. Yikes!
I personally believe that there are opportunities for creating well-defined policies and laws for managing gun ownership and gun use in this country without taking away everybody’s guns. Raising the issue of gun controls, however, typically polarizes the various factions who “have a dog in that hunt”. In this day and age, it’s the same problem we have with almost any national issue. Pick one – immigration, economy, education, foreign policy, morality (separation of church and state), natural resources. You name it, and there are opposing sides with deep-rooted beliefs which they will stubbornly cling to and use to avoid common-sense, pragmatic solutions. [Sigh]
And, if that’s not enough to keep you up at night, just remember – the world is also full of assholes.