Gun Culture is Killing It
My new ep, War Is On Its Way, dropped on 09/09/2020. I shared about each song through the lens of current events throughout the week.
I got my first and only gun in middle school. I can’t remember my exact age but I can pinpoint the time because of my Industrial Arts class. Our second assignment was to use the band saw to make a gun rack. My cuts were about as symmetrical as an Henri Matisse paper-cut tree but I was proud of it anyway. I stained the soft pine with “mahogany” covering the white wood in a strange dried blood color.
My parents let me hang the gun rack on my bedroom wall where it held my shotgun and my dad’s rifle/shotgun combo. I’d periodically take them off the rack and clean them with long steel brushes and gun oil after school. Occasionally I’d take them out to shoot. Perhaps on Thanksgiving weekend to knock over cans with my dad and uncle, or to hunt with my dad for rabbits in the cow pastures behind our house. Sometimes it was with my neighbor shooting fence posts near the woods, but at most it was twice a year. By high school I shifted my interest to guitars, lost interest in the guns, took down the rack, and put the firearms in the closet. Any interest I had was nostalgic and sentimental. It was something to look forward to at Thanksgiving.
Guns were just rural life. I never questioned it. They were part recreation, part protection. The protection mindset came from the fact that there were no local police where we lived. The county sheriff covered a half dozen cities. We had a “constable” but he was just a volunteer driving lonely roads on weekend nights to ensure teenagers weren’t toilet papering yards. Everyone felt it was really up to themselves to take up the role of public safety.
I don’t remember being afraid of anything or anyone then. Fear culture was, ironically, limited to music. Heavy metal was going to take the souls of us children. Satanic symbols on album art, back-masked messages, men in make up and tight pants. That was the real threat. Guns were useless against this dark spiritual world.
Things have changed. As I draw a line from then to now, I’ve seen a clear rise of fear culture. The exponential curve began on September 11, 2001. The fear of terrorism and the carry on effect of Islamaphobia and bigotry toward brown people in traditional dress of any kind rose sharply—Sikhs anyone? Then when Obama took office in 2008, there was a rise of blatant racism against Black people that came to the fore. I remember right wing radio hosts stirring the pot claiming that Obama would take the good (code: white) people’s guns. Maybe there would be race riots because the Culture Wars were turning into Race Wars. Even today’s President questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship at the time. And what about his Arab sounding name?
As if it couldn’t get worse, mass shootings increased in frequency too. Sometimes they had racially charged undertones, but often it was more about hopelessness and glorifying death. This is when gun culture met fear culture. And so the rise of threats like terrorists and mass shooters led to the rise of gun purchases for protection. By 2017 Pew Research found that nearly half of America lived in a house with a gun. Of those households, 2/3 had more than one gun. 1/3 had more than 5 guns.
I wrote a song called Bullet Point for this record. I was channeling these ideas, embodying the culture of guns and fear, trying to understand the mindsets. I was thinking about how violent our language is and how common place it’s become to use it, especially at work. If someone is doing well, they’re “killing it”. Our sales team has the competition “in our sites”. We make sure that our contracts have a “kill fee.” We tell our colleagues not to get “trigger happy” on those emails. And then we have “bullet points,” those little dots in all of our presentations, daily representations of the gun culture we live in.
- I didn’t even think about it.
- Until one day I did.
On October 2, 2017, a colleague texted me early in the morning. There had been a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. One of our employees had gone to the festival with her husband. We were trying to reach her to see if she was OK but weren’t getting a response. Within a few hours we learned that our deepest fear was true. Rhonda had been killed.
It is difficult for me to write about this, but I am because it was that day that my eyes opened to the world we had created, a world that accepts widespread violence at such a deep level that it no longer recognizes it. It was a day we lost a friend, colleague, mother, and wife to a man’s nihilistic whim and his raw power. 57 other people lost their lives that day too. And we all became a little more afraid. And America bought more guns to protect themselves.
It’s also a day that I began rethinking my own history. It’s hard to imagine a sixth grade assignment to create a gun rack today. Maybe that shouldn’t have been normal? Maybe things are getting better? But the escalation of violent rhetoric and especially the recent clashes in Portland and the teenage vigilante in Kenosha are among the many recent events that have me worried that things are declining despite the small wins. My rural life has twisted into paramilitary life. It’s not just my observation. Even the recently ousted lieutenant of the NRA, Josh Powell, says the same in his forthcoming book: “The N.R.A. fueled a toxic debate by appealing to the paranoia and darkest side of our members, in a way that has torn at the very fabric of America.”
Bullet Point is the kind of song that doesn’t promise anything will be better. In fact, it might just make you feel worse. It’s meant to do that. I want you to know that it’s OK to be scared and feel bad because these are the kinds of things that should make you feel scared and bad. There are many of us struggling with this. The situation is messed up and there are literally gangs of men in pick up trucks driving from city to city to “defend” freedom with their semi-automatic weapons. Some are salivating for civil war. But the answer to guns isn’t more guns. That ups the ante of fear culture and can only lead to more death. And the answer also isn’t to accept this situation. We can’t normalize it by becoming numb to it or by thoughtlessly using the language of it. Some people will argue that our freedoms are being protected by this gun culture, but I believe there is no safety here.
They’re killing it.
