Some (Incomplete) Thoughts on Men and Guns

Men practicing at a North Dakota gun range

There’s one guy everyone hates to see arrive at my job. Let’s call him “Jack.” Jack installs HVAC components, a job requiring both significant upper-body strength and an eye for fine detail work. He’s extremely good at his job, and everyone knows it. But he’s also constantly irritable, combative, and temperamental. He thinks it’s very manful to ignore basic safeties; management must constantly remind him to wear both a COVID mask and a hard hat.

Jack also, for over a year, angrily demanded his god-given right to open-carry a loaded firearm at work. He strapped an autoloader pistol into a snap-flap holster on his belt, above his right ass cheek. His bosses insisted he not carry his gun. The general contractor insisted he not carry his gun. He was repeatedly ejected from the jobsite for refusing to leave his firearm in his car. Still he demanded his unrestricted 2nd-Amendment rights.

This weekend, an unnamed Phoenix, Arizona, man shot and wounded a bystander while attempting to stop a shoplifter. My initial eye-rolling response reflected a long history of botched gun stories. Notice that, rather than attempting to apprehend the accused offender, the gun owner opted to escalate the situation to potentially lethal violence. Firing a gun isn’t a proportional response to low-level property crime. Yet this rapid escalation is exactly what gun advocates would probably celebrate.

Yet thinking about this man, and HVAC Jack, I realized they probably had something in common. Both men desire to fight injustice where they see it, injustice they believe is so insuperably evil that it requires swift, fatal intervention. The manichaean morality of “Good Guy With a Gun” rhetoric divides humanity into heroes and villains, whose morality is innate and unchangeable. Only bringing the hammer down, even at the cost of human life, restores balance.

When I describe this principle as a “male power fantasy,” it’s tempting to think I’ve simply dismissed men’s feelings flippantly. Admittedly, some do. Yet, watching Jack’s daily working routines, I’ve realized how thoroughly powerless he feels. Despite his demonstrated high skills, he has no workaday autonomy. Management thoroughly owns his daily routine; more than half his waking hours belong to somebody else. Jack is the walking embodiment of powerlessness in the face of capitalist hegemony.

Back in 2018, Spike’s Tactical, a Florida manufacturer of decent, but not particularly distinguished, assault rifles, ran a controversial ad. “Not Today Antifa,” read the banner, over a painting of four White men in store-bought tactical gear and rifles. The subjects formed a cordon between a rampaging mob of violent protesters, and us the viewers. Though the image offers much to unpack, mostly unsavory, it highlights the myth of civilian violence defending a brittle civilization.

Men like Jack, or the Phoenix shooter, see a world defined by powerlessness. Crime seems endemic, amplified by prime-time media reports of continued urban awfulness which make violence seem more imminent and widespread than it actually is. Simultaneously, the leading way many blue-collar men once defended their families, work, is increasingly mechanized, outsourced, or done by undocumented immigrants. Jack has good reason to feel angry and afraid. Capitalism has made him powerless, and arguably useless.

Spike’s Tactical, the NRA, and other for-profit institutions latch onto this feeling of helplessness. Jack comes home every day tired, physically and mentally, from a job defined by hard labor and mental acuity. Asking him to read scholarly reports, or even investigative journalism, regarding gun safety, is ridiculous. He wants easily digestible information, often in visual form. Spike’s Tactical gives him that, reaffirming his belief that somebody without a face is overrunning his dying world.

Evidence highly suggests that guns don’t help much. In combat situations, untrained gunfighters are more lightly to shoot their own fingers off than stop an attacker. In ordinary situations, gun owners are more likely to commit suicide with their guns than defend their property. Suicide is, of course, the ultimate expression of powerlessness. Rendered unnecessary by capitalism, and backward by social evolution, these men face a future of continued uncertainty, or no future at all.

Therefore, when I say “male power fantasy,” I’m not disparaging men like Jack, or the Phoenix shooter. These men feel powerlessness to their bones. A Marxist revolution might fix that powerlessness, but that’s trading one form of uncertainty for another. For all their volatility, guns are at least knowable and immediate. They provide the comfort of at least a little control. Yes, that control is pretty awful. But at least they know what it is.