US’ addiction to guns is a nightmare

Weapons are dangerous and illusory shortcuts to strength and maturity with no guarantee of personal safety

You are not the same person carrying a firearm as you are without one. A device that can extinguish a life with the flick of a finger places inordinate power in the hands of an individual. That power — whether exercised or simply imagined — can be addictive.

Growing up in the midst of a war in Lebanon and undergoing military training in high school put guns at the center of my childhood. As the grandson of an experienced marksman, the son of a hunter and a hunter myself, I loved my guns. I loved shooting. I am also someone who, as a 10-year-old, collected shrapnel and spent bullets from the streets and alleys around my home near Hamra Street in West Beirut — daily reminders of death and violence, but also of survival.

My military service quickly taught me that there was an inextricable link between the weapon I carried on my shoulder and the suffering to which I bore daily witness. I was trained to use guns against others before I was old enough to be considered a man.

America’s obsessive relationship with firearms is familiar to me; I know the intoxicating sense of power that a gun bestows, particularly to a young man. But in the aftermath of the terrible violence I witnessed and with the passage of time, I know that guns are dangerous and illusory shortcuts to strength and maturity and no guarantee of personal safety.

After another horrific mass shooting — this time at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College — our intractable gun control debate has begun once again, with those who are categorically opposed to rational controls on gun ownership already insisting that a mass shooting is no reason to contemplate new laws. What is it about America and firearms? What makes us different from every other developed country that we tolerate such disproportionate levels of gun violence?

I see the debate about guns through the lens of that teenager surrounded by weapons and by bloodshed and terror created with guns. I can also see it as someone who spent years perfecting the Zen-like art of hitting the head of a pin with a tiny projectile.

Guns are a high. For someone just entering adulthood and grappling with the attendant challenges, emotions and sense of powerlessness, easy access to firearms is easy access to the ultimate drug: The feeling of omnipotence.

In America, that access means that the consequences of contentious interactions between people can more readily turn deadly. According to a report by the Center for American Progress, “The easy access youths have to guns across the country creates the opportunity for otherwise nonfatal confrontations between young people to become fatal.”

Allowing unfettered access to deadly weapons leads to the carnage we’re seeing in our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our shopping malls, and our streets. The frustration expressed by President Obama in his statement about the Oregon shooting is shared by millions of people, like me, who cannot fathom how we permit these travesties to continue.

Those of us who advocate for stronger gun control measures must understand that we are dealing not just with an obsession, but an addiction. And addictions are notoriously hard to break. Meanwhile, the death toll keeps rising.