MANN TALK: The Juvenility of Gun Lovers and NRA Members

“I am a proud gun owner and, like all West Virginians, I strongly believe in the Second Amendment. Our great country is great because of our freedoms, like the 2nd Amendment, and America should never sign agreements that infringe on our cherished constitutional rights and freedoms. I strongly urge the president and the administration not to use this arms trade treaty as a back-door route to infringe on the freedoms of law-abiding Americans and our 2ndAmendment rights.” Great because of the 2nd Amendment! What nonsense.

What tyranny it would be if gun lovers had to treat guns for what they are: instruments to kill; and had to be restricted in their purchase, their concealment, their sale and all else with regards to guns. What tyranny it would be if the government confiscated every Saturday Night Special and every gun that was designed to kill people, to kill a multitude of them in a few seconds.  It wouldn’t be tyranny to me and millions of others who don’t sleep with a handgun under their pillows but worry about some psychopathic nut who has the freedom to have an arsenal in his house, including the one from Norway who tired of killing with dum-dum bullets while waiting for the police to arrive to stop him.

 The 2nd Amendment reads so ambiguously that one cannot find in it solid evidence that the Founders meant for every America to be able to pack heat on his hip in the manner of the cowboys of the Wild West. It was anarchy in those days and it is becoming anarchy in these days. Even the Supreme Court was divided on the meaning of the 2ndAmendment.

Guns are toys of juveniles. Significant toys because the ownership of one gives the owner power. It’s an equalizer. A skinny kid can down a muscular brute with just the pull of trigger. The more guns one has the more power one feels he has. For someone to challenge his ownership of guns or to restrict his use of them strikes a blow at his power. Since some people have no sense of power except guns, it enrages them to have their freedom to have guns and to use them as they see fit---challenged.

Juvenility is a stage in growth of a human. During this period, the person reaches sexual maturity and intellectual maturity and enters into a period of moral maturing. But often the moral maturing is arrested before it can flower into a morally mature individual. There are those in history who were obviously imbecilic juveniles and those who had matured beyond the juvenile stage. The former take the instrument of their worship and in ideologically outrage kill indiscriminately, for example, Norway’s Breviek. Then, there are those who stand for their principles such as Martin Luther King and are gunned down by a juvenile who is of mature age but of juvenile development, for example, James Earl Ray.     

In the evolution of Homo sapiens, the species for eons hunted to live. It was the only livelihood for thousands of years. It was man’s occupation and the better the hunter the more likely his race prospered. But the home place had a feast one week and a hunger the next. Women decided to do something about this  worrisome feast and famine. So they gathered seeds and began to garden, to harvest and to preserve. The hunter is writ on the DNA of the male and the gardener is writ on the DNA of the female. In the male the hunter dominants until his empathetic nature overcomes the genetic compulsion to hunt and to kill. I know for I was once an avid hunter.

Watch a male in the hunt. When he has spotted an unsuspecting quarry, a deer with a rack so big it couldn’t be brought into the front door, he shakes from buck fever like he can hardly contain himself. Nothing except a sexual tryst parallels for males the excitement of the kill. I know for I have been sized by buck fever numerous times.  

If a chicken were put in a bank vault and a roost were built therein, when dusk came the chicken would fly to the top rung of the roost to protect itself from the fox or weasel. It would do so, even though in a bank vault there was no danger from any kind of predator, because during eons of time roosting has been writ on the genes of the chickens as life preserving. Man hunts for the same reason a chicken roosts. It’s a call of nature that is much more demanding than the call of reason and conscience; that is, in Juveniles and morally arrested adults. .  

Senator Manchin has been elected by the people to represent them in a manner to assure them of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He apparently believes that the right to own guns---instruments that can kill murderously---without any restriction or regulation in accordance with the NRA---is a legitimate pursuit of happiness. And that without the 2nd Amendment the pursuit is hobbled.  

I submit that he is either a person with an arrested morality and thus a juvenile or he is an adult who panders to an electorate who, he knows, are largely members of the NRA cult and thus are those who consider the right to bear arms, to store guns, to have every right with regard to guns---should be constitutionally free of government control.

Freedom to own instruments of death not only does not bring greatness to this country, it brings death to thousands yearly. It was observed long ago that he who lives by the gun dies by the gun. And he who so observed has proved to have been prescient.    

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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV. He turned 90 this year; he was born in Charleston, WV in 1921.