Who do you want to shoot?

We live in a highly cooperative society and we know that gun violence is horrific. So why do people buy guns?

Several friends of mine told me about their new guns, which made me question their sense of reason. If you’re reading this from a US perspective: private gun ownership is not the norm in Germany. Even if you don’t talk about school shootings and rampages, life with domestic guns is more dangerous than without. If you compare the US gun violence numbers to Europe, guns at home facilitate accidents with children, increased rates of suicide attempts*, domestic violence and crimes with weapons that are stolen from households. The sheer lack of domestic firearms in Europe is making life safer. So how come my friends are into having a weapon? I asked them.

All of my gun-wielding friends are living in Germany, where gun ownership is highly regulated, so they had to jump several hoops to get a gun. They are now registered hunters or member of a sports team.

Better Meat

A point that got me by surprise was meat. Eating wild animals is unarguably healthier than eating industrial livestock (some people question a carnivorian lifestyle in general, but that’s a different debate). Hunters have the possibility to have their share of wild meat while taking care for some forest area. But in the densely populated center of Europe forests and wildlife parks are rather small and most people live in cities and large towns, so that’s not an option for everybody.

Wild meat and hunting is expensive, so this option is not open to everyone. It’s a valid reason to own a gun, though.

This leads to a common thing of the gun owners: they are well up middle class conservatives. I was wondering: is there some correlation between being armed and being a good businessman? Does having a gun — and talking about it —make you look tougher? Does it boost your confidence? And doesn’t confidence makes you look more competent? No: successful and confident guys simply have money to spend for toys.

Resistance against oppression

One of the lads (and they are all men) considers what I call the the second amendment people argument. It’s the idea that private gun ownership makes a society stronger and somehow more resistant against oppression. This was obviously the case when the second amendment was written in the war-ridden 18th century, but today — after 70 years of peace in central Europe — this sounds somewhat ridiculous.

Obviously a state of gun owners can not be overrun easily by another country. For example the people of Switzerland did maintain their independence, even while the Nazis were able to seize most of Europe. The Swiss were always able to use their alpine terrain as a fortified position, which makes it immensely difficult to conquer. Until today almost every Swiss household has a gun in the closet (except all female households — the Swiss resistance also covers female empowerment). But to keep everything in order the ownership of ammunition is very much controlled by the state.

“But if the goverment has to be overthrown …” you might say. And you will overthrow the government tanks and drones with your semi-automatic rifle then? Give me a break. A society of gun owners isn’t harder to control by a “bad government”. Looking at German history we have to agree that the transition towards a bad government (and the Nazis make easily top of that list) can happen by a seemingly regular election.

Even If you strongly disagree with a new elected government, you will not change the outcome standing on your front porch angrily waving with your gun.

Control <Siri play Joy Division>

One of the gunners is a physician and he had one of the most profound pro-gun arguments: the gun is a symbol of control of his own life*. While he’s not suicidal, in his job he is confronted with a lot of suffering people. Based on his experiences, he has become kind of pro-choice about life itself.

There is a great book of the bestselling writer Wolfgang Herrndorf called ‘Arbeit und Struktur’ me and my friends have all read. It makes a point about the psychological impact of having a gun while the author himself suffered from terminal brain cancer. The feeling of being in the driver’s seat might be beneficial to the mental health of some people, but of course very much the opposite for others.*

*Self-harm always harms others, too. If you feel depressed or have do deal with bad feelings, please talk to someone about it before you do something stupid.

Home security and ‘bad people’

My friends and I agreed that shooting an intruder is in any circumstances a really bad choice. Also, threatening an intruder at gunpoint while calling the police is more of a movie scenario than something that happens in real life. If you have a look to the US again, you can see that there are 2.5 times more burglaries per capita than in western Europe. Obviously there is not a single reason why the crime rate in Germany is lower than in the US, but the existence of guns doesn’t seem to discourage burglars very much.

The German police has a very clear opinion about self defence and home security:

Spend more money on sturdy doors, locks and windows and let the policemen do their job.

A breakdown of society

Another one of my gun-wielding friends wants to have ‘options’ if there is ever a situation when he has to defend his family. This ist the most interesting one. I call this the prepper argument: The future is uncertain. I want to be prepared. Who knows what will happen. There might be a Day X when I need the gun. Whatever happens at least I have a gun to deal with it.

I’ve heard a lot of Day X theories so far. The breakdown of society has been described in countless movies and novels. Its cause could be natural disasters, an outbreak of a virus, alien attacks, a zombie apocalypse or the rise of eco-terrorism. Some people fear that just a week without electricity could shove society off its fragile rails.

But we can simply look at places where disasters take place today and we can see that humankind is in fact still very cooperative and helpful, even without having free wi-fi. Health and life expectancy is improving globally. There is a decline in extreme poverty. There is an increasing number of local conflicts, but with a decreasing death toll. But of course humankind will have to struggle with mass migration caused by climate change, with inequality and with religious and ethnic tensions.

Engineers of NASA have been famously stated that there is no thing without failure. When something can fail, it will fail, sooner or later. It’s good to be prepared when something bad happens. But if you keep an optimistic view, if you can focus on the goals instead of any possible points of failure, you can make things better. Doing things usually improves any situation. Pessimism is sometimes just a fatalistic excuse to be lazy.

If the stakes are low it may be a reasonable strategy to wait until something bad happens then cope with the fallout. But if the stakes are high, you can’t risk failure. If you want to shoot people to the moon and bring them home safely afterwards, you have to work every detail. The same applies if you have a nuclear power plants full of toxic waste that can poison a whole countryside.

But having a gun is not detail-oriented, it just plays into vague fears. Do we really need to prepare for a seismic shift in society that makes guns necessary?

It is usually better to try to prevent bad things to happen in the first place, even if this is costly. That’s why cars have seat belts, that’s why we banish ads for smoking and gambling and that’s why it is necessary to push industries into protecting the environment. And that’s why we have to give the state the monopoly to use force. We need a police and that protects us from each other and that is effectively controlled by a democratic system that controls the flow of money. This way words and laws are more effectively more powerful than guns. Duh!

We don’t have to prepare for a breakdown of society, we have to strengthen our paradigm of non-violence.

Funs with guns

Today, all my gun-owning friends are very stable, reliable people — if I would have to decide who to give a gun, it would be them. They don’t want to go start a revolution. They’re family people. They have something to lose and they want to be able to defend it. And of course they have fun with it. It makes them happy to have the ability to make holes into people, if necessary. It makes them feel safe and in control.

And of course this makes me feel safe, too. I have armed friends. They will shoot you if you try something bad. Bang Bang.

Why not to have a gun

Don’t understand me wrong: I like guns. I grew up with toy guns. As a child we dressed as cowboys, policemen and pirates. It was the 80s and everyone on TV was shooting. I loved it, and the engineering and craftsmanship that goes into real handguns fascinate me today.

But I’m very much advocating not to buy guns for a treacherous feeling of safety, because it takes something away from our cultural achievements. It somehow denies that we can do better. I know this is easy said, sitting in a western ivory tower and I might be dead wrong with my assessment that I will never need a firearm on Day X. But even if it‘s naive to face my fears without a gun, I feel brave enough.