There Are No Good Guys with Guns

I grew up in the suburbs, which means I suckled the teat of well-fed angst alongside Ben Folds. I thought I had plenty of things to be angry about, but I mostly lacked the physical strength and bravado to do much about my relatively minor grievances.

Despite later earning a BA in Peace Studies, I spent many a lonely afternoon nursing my anger and imagining violence. A favorite mental exercise was imagining I had a superpower: From a distance, I could—with my mind—cause the heads of my perceived enemies explode like a Gallagher melon. I rewound the cannon shot from Glory a million times to get the splatter just right.

My father hates guns, so there never was one in our home. Judging by my ability to find anything remotely related to sex hiding in our house, I’m confident I could have found a gun, too. Knives we had, but that seemed too intimate. Absent a long-range weapon, my imagined superpower had to suffice.

Was I “disturbed”? Maybe. I never had a therapist until college (though I probably could have used one), but I’d like to think I was a fairly normal boy growing up in a macho culture saturated with violent imagery and its pervasive myths of dominance and vengeance. Aside from a spate of playground fights in early elementary school, I never acted out my imagined revenge. But I sure wanted to, and I’m hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly what force kept me from crossing that line.

When another mass shooting piques the national consciousness, a number of tired tropes get trotted out. “Mental illness” is one. But what passes for “mental illness” that might bar a person from having unfettered access to semi-automatic weaponry is notoriously unclear. Should 17-year-old me have been able to possess an AR-15? What mechanism would have stopped me? We need comprehensive access to mental health care for all people in this country, but even with that on board, we wouldn’t even begin to solve our addiction to violence and the tools to act our vengeful fantasies out.

Another trope is the “good guys.” Sometimes euphemized as “law-abiding citizens,” the argument goes that good guys with more guns will solve the problem of “bad guys” with guns. Arm the teachers. Station militias on school grounds. We’ll all be safer if every public place is militarized by the “good guys” who can take out the “bad guys” before another kindergartner’s chest is torn open. You know, like in all the first-person shooter games whose graphics get more spectacularly real with each iteration.

The notion that we can solve a gun problem with more guns seems absurd to many of us on its face. But let’s give it the benefit of the doubt: We can solve the problem of bad guys with guns by giving more guns to the good guys.

Here’s where I, as a Lutheran theologian, cannot abide the fundamental premise:

There are no good guys.

Within every person—at any age, though especially before the frontal lobe really settles in around age 25—there resides enormous capacity for both “good” and “evil.” Even without a diagnosable mental illness (and there are myriad to choose from) or mind-altering substances onboard, anyone is capable of either acting out the dominant narrative of “redemptive violence,” or engaging the counter-narratives of compassion and kindness, on any given day. Other narratives of race and religion make it easy to mislabel nearly anyone as “good” or “bad” based on painfully insufficient categories.

Folks with no criminal record, a nominally clean bill of mental health, and judiciously restrained online activity, can easily “snap” and make all manner of imagined gore become a real-life bloodbath.

The record is replete with police officers and military personnel—“good guys” if there ever were any—employing itchy trigger fingers against folks who, while often imperfect, ought not be targets of summary execution.

There were teachers in my district growing up who threw chalk, used yardsticks for purposes other than measurement, and physically mishandled students when the stress of teaching unruly kids pushed them over the edge.

And I regularly imagined popping the heads off people who called me names, locked me in lockers, and spread rumors about me.

We can—and should—have a complex debate about what measures, if any, constitute “reasonable gun control.” The history of interpreting what “right” inheres in the Second Amendment is fascinating and complicated.

But every “bad” person was “good” until they weren’t. Everyone is “law-abiding” until they aren’t. (And yes, I’m one of those hopelessly generous people who believe that people who have done wrong retain the capacity to be and make good.)

Which means I have no idea how to tell which neighbor of mine “should” be armed to the teeth today, because I have no idea what they are capable of doing tomorrow.

In the meantime, I send my children into a warzone every weekday morning and pray like hell they make it home. Pardon me for doubting that pouring more guns into that battlefield will make them any safer.