Into the Woods

This blog has grown increasingly serious lately.  As we've been dealing with one collective tragedy after another, from mass shooting to our equally derranged mass votings, it's becoming increasingly difficult to remain flippant in the face of a callous, uncaring world that is slowly going mad.  However, I still strongly believe in the power of humor to help us work through difficult times, and let's be honest, sometimes you just need a break from all the heaviness that occupies so much of our attention.  With that in mind, I wanted to share a silly little story about a topic that stirs so little emotion or controversy that discussing it could in no way be construed as a serious political statement.  I am of course referring to the topic of gun control.

Okay, maybe it's a bit of a touchy subject.  Especially when dealing with one of the most consistently contentious questions surrounding the issue, whether or not we should be banning the sale and ownership of assault rifles.  There is a lot of extreme rhetoric floating around this issue on both sides.  Some say they're weapons of war that have no place in the hands of private citizens.  Others say they're essential tools for ensuring our safety against criminals and terrorists.  And still others would argue that, sure, assault weapons are probably unnecssary in most people's day to day lives, but if we ban them then we're opening up the door to our next lefty, liberal president coming 'round your house and personally collecting all your guns so that he may melt them down and use the metal to print new money to be handed out to poor people.  Then there are the defeatists, people who say that there are just too many guns out in the world to make any meaningful change, so what's the point in trying?  Or their counterparts who see the constitution as a binding contract that can't be adjusted to fix simple grammatical errors, much less the clarification or reexamination of a potentially flawed premise, those who argue that there's no point in talking about change, because it's not like there's some magical way to ammend the constitution.

Yes, passions run high.  Yes, it's an important matter to a lot of different people looking at it from a lot of different perspectives.  And yes, it's a conversation that has far reaching rammificaitons to our fundamental definitions of freedom and safety.

Even so, I maintain that this story is mostly just silly.  Mostly.

First, we need a little backstory.  Okay, we don't technically need it, but it provides a great context in which to insert a few unnecessary attempts at humor.  Back in the summer, my wife and I decided to go to a bluegrass festival upstate.  The festival took place over the better course of a week, but we decided to go for a single day as there are only so many banjo songs about trains that one can listen to before they all start to blend together.  That number, if anyone is wondering, is significantly smaller than the number of songs on a single bluegrass band's typical set list.  Even so, we like the down to earth, folky sound of acoustic instruments accompanied by the down to earth smell of overpriced tent food, and decided to make it as full a day as possible and stay the night so that we could hootenanny long past our bedtime.

As hotels are prohibitively expensive and we aren't the sort of dedicated festival goers who have invested in an RV, we opted to camp.  Which, for the record, is never my first choice of lodging.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional bit of nature in my life.  I love the peaceful stillness of the forest, the view from on top of a mountain, or the gentle sound of a babbling brook.  I'm just the sort of unadventurous urbanite who would much rather enjoy them in the form of an overly long nature documentary series, the serene calm of nature's bounty regularly being broken up by large animals ferociously eating smaller ones.  So I don't tend to go nuts for camping like some people do.  In fact, to me, the whole idea of camping seems to fly in the face of the entire history of human civilization.  Our entire existence up to this point has been to create more comforts for ourselves, constantly distancing ourselves from the natural world from which we came.  We needed shelter from the elements, so we built huts, then houses.  But even as we developed finer building materials, from thatch to brick, the elements kept creeping in.  So we created space heaters and fans and air conditioners to further ensure that the world outside didn't impinge on our ability to sit about in our underwear.  Once the novelty of that began to wear off, we needed entertainment in our homes, so we invented board games and TV and Netflix to amuse ourselves and anyone we could trick into coming over so that we wouldn't have to leave the house.  Then when it became too bothersome to try to get other people to come over, we started inventing substitutes for other beings, from robotic pets and maids, to flashlights that you can have sex with, all for the purpose of creating this barrier between ourselves and our natural state of being.

We do all these things, then what do we do next?  We turn to each other and say, "Hey, do you want to pay thirty-five bucks to sleep next to a tree?"And we all reply in unison, "Sure, as long as we can get drunk and set things on fire, why not?"But I digress.  I agreed to go camping, partly because it was the will of the group and I don't like to difficult, but mostly because I'm cheap, and typically, the most economical place to sleep is next to a stump.  Plus, you can pass as a much more authentic banjo aficionado if you haven't slept or showered in at least forty-eight hours.  So it was that we found ourselves crawling out of our sleeping bags bright and early on Saturday morning before heading out in search of music, merriment, and deep fried everything.

We had a lot of fun at the festival, but the day was cut a little bit short when it began to rain around sunset.  At first, we weren't particularly bothered by the gentle sprinkling.  If anything, the light dampening helped to heighten the sense of adventure, and reinvigorate the subtle aroma of stagnant human sweat.  But as dark storm clouds began to ominously thunder in the distance, and we could see the inevitable torrential downpour making its way towards us, we decided that it was time to pack it in.  Perhaps a more dedicated bluegrass fan would have stuck it out with nothing more than a makeshift poncho to get them through the deluge and the ensuing mud orgy.  But we are weak city folk, and prefer our orgies dry and freshly showered.  And really, after you've spent eight hours listening to nasally white people sing about trains, you've pretty much gotten the gist of the show.  So we packed up our damp blankets and headed back to the car.

When we arrived at the campground, it was almost eerily silent.  The ground was becoming soft and soggy as the dense forest canopy proved no match for the buckets of water that were being dropped upon it.  Once even the  most waterproof of tents had tested the limits of their warranties, all the other campers had either left, or gone to sleep, or headed over to camp store for shelter and stale junk food.  There were no signs of life to be heard through driving rain, not that we would have heard them, sitting as we were inside our car, fruitlessly hoping that the rain would pass before our consciousness did.  After sitting for an hour and picking at the amorphous blob that our Trader Joe's marshmallows had become, we eventually decided to give up and join those who had crawled into their sleeping bags early for a damp snooze.

The rain finally tapered off a little after midnight, and we were woken back up almost immediately by the sounds of the forest springing to life in complete defiance of the site's imposed quiet hours.  Music started playing, fires were lit, and teenage couples went for boisterous walks to the bathroom, occasionally stopping directly outside our tent to cry in each others arms about the romantic scars that would haunt them forever until they were no doubt forgotten in twenty years.

Needless to say, when the camp woke up, so did we.  Like the cranky old people that we are, my wife and I tried to ignore the signs of life around us, but it was no use.  Like someone trying to sleep next door to a frat party, staying in bed eventually became little more than an unnoticed protest about the injustice of the world.  So when Leah popped by our tent to ask if we wanted to build a fire, I agreed and promptly got up.  My wife, on the other hand, who was more dedicated to the cause then I, decided to stand firm on the picket line and continue pretending to sleep in.  Ordinarily, I might have been inclined to follow suit, but we still had half a lump of dirty marshmallow kicking around the floor of the car, and there's very little that I can't be persuaded to do if s'mores are involved.

No sooner had we started rooting around in the trunk for firewood than a man came over from the neighboring campsite.  He immediately struck me as the consummate stereotype of an outdoorsman, friendly and likable to a fault, early thirties with a stubbly beard and doughy sheath of skin covering his muscular build.  Fully prepared for a late night camping party, he was decked out in camouflage pajama pants and flip flops, and already boisterously drunk.  Though that was perhaps inevitable, as apparently he'd stolen an entire case worth of shitty liquor from his boss, and was making sure that none of it went to waste.  Ever the charming and gracious host, he invited us to join his family at their campsite, and offered us a drink before even asking our names.  He even offered us the good booze if we weren't in the mood for the grape vodka and Mountain Dew Black cocktail that he was favoring on that particular evening.  When we declined, saying that we really wanted to build a fire of our own, he kept wandering back at regular intervals to share a laugh and help fan our damp, sad, smoldering embers.  All around, he seemed like a very nice, friendly, and helpful guy.

The only trouble was, after his first few trips back to our site, he wanted to talk almost exclusively about hunting and, in particular, his guns.  Which wasn't much of a problem in and of itself.  I may not know much about guns, but I'm always happy to listen to someone talk about their passions, and maybe learn something new.  But in this particular case, I was a little put off by the fact that all the gun talk was regularly interrupted by our new friend insisting that he was, in fact, completely crazy.  And if there are two subjects that don't go well together, they are guns and possible mental instability.

Still, I wasn't too worried.  As a general rule, I don't pay a lot of attention to people who call themselves crazy anyway.  In my experience, anyone with the self-awareness to call themselves crazy probably isn't.  "Crazy" is a shorthand moniker that socially awkward, aspiring creative types like to apply to themselves in hopes that it will sufficiently substitute for "interesting."  As such, I don't think you should be anywhere near as concerned about someone who calls himself crazy as someone who assures you that they are the only one who can see things for what they really are.  Especially if this assurance is followed by the word "man."  If you ever have to pick between sharing a train car with someone who calls himself crazy and someone who says things like "my mind works on a whole 'nother level, man," I'd guess that the crazy person is more likely to let you enjoy your book in peace.I did start to get a little concerned, though, when he told us about his preferred weapon for killing deer in his yard.  As he explained it, and I feared he might eventually have to explain it in front of a judge, he had a special Nuisance License for hunting deer.  In that neck of the woods, deer are badly overpopulated, and as such viewed as pests.  So with his special license, he was legally allowed to kill deer out of season, by any means necessary, if they come on to his property and start causing problems.  And since you can't leave a rifle sitting by the kitchen door for obvious safety reasons, he kept a baseball bat there instead."

They're a little harder to get that way," he explained, "since they spook so easily.  But if a herd wanders in and you're quiet enough, you can usually take down one of the dumber ones."  Still the gracious host, he even invited us back to his place to go deer clubbing if we were up for it.  We politely declined his offer, as it hardly seemed appropriate given the hour and the fact that we didn't have our bludgeoning permits on us.

Then he started walking us through the rest of his arsenal.  There were rifles, hand guns, shotguns.  Some new, some antique family heirlooms, just all kinds of guns with names and numbers that meant nothing to me.  I quickly began to lose count, but the important point, as he reminded us repeatedly was that if the government ever came and tried to take any of his guns away, he was pretty sure that he had enough of them to hold off an invasion for at least a month.  Which seemed a bit optimistic to me, given how many guns the US Army has.  But he seemed very confident, and it didn't seem like a good idea to suggest that he might not be as good at shooting people as he might think.

But his latest purchase was his prized possession.  He had just acquired his very first assault rifle, an AR-15, and was very excited to tell us all about it.  It was fully legal and only semi-automatic, of course, though his buddies had shown him how to modify it to fire fully automatically.  Which, to his credit, he seemed to think was a bad idea if you didn't want to attract the authorities.

Now, in our sheltered, urban existence, it's not every day that we get to talk to an open and enthusiastic owner of an assault rifle, so our curiosity was piqued.  Leah asked him what made him buy one in the first place, and it turns out he had a perfectly reasonable explanation: he bought it out of spite.  Due to reasons and legal technicalities that I didn't quite follow, he had been turned down when trying to purchase another, much less dangerous gun.  In any case, he felt this was unfair as he was fully licensed and had a clean record.  So in a fit of rage, he drove to another county where he knew he could purchase an assault rifle.  His reasoning went like this: "If they won't let me buy the gun I want, I'm going to buy the biggest, most dangerous thing that they don't want me to have, just to show 'em."  Couple that statement with an increasingly strong smell of Vodka and artificial grape flavoring, and I started getting a bit uncomfortable again.

Leah, on the other hand, didn't seem the slightest bit perturbed, and kept pressing for answers.  "But why do you actually need a gun like that?" she asked.

Our new friend paused for a long moment as he contemplated the question.  "I dunno," he eventually said with a shrug.  "Because it's cool."

Which, for me, was nearly as frightening a response as if he'd let out a blood curdling scream, then muttered "vengeance" in a low, raspy voice.  Not because it made this particular man dangerous, of course, but because of what the rationale signaled about the average gun owner.  Are people really buying these weapons for no better reason than because they can, and it's cool?  Are we really allowing our public policy and safety to be swayed by the same sort of reasoning that Ralphie employed when asking for an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle?  Call me crazy (after a few Grape Mountain Dew's I might even call myself crazy), but I find it hard to believe that when the founding fathers were drafting the second amendment, their first intent was to protect our God given right to have cool toys.  You know, when drafting the bill of rights, I really doubt that James Madison turned to George Mason and said, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because dude, muskets are SICK!"Needless to say, we still had some follow up questions, and Leah still had enough of a sense of personal safety to keep asking them.  "No, really.  If all you use it for is hunting, why do you actually need a gun like that?  Why can't you just use a regular hunting rifle?"Again, our friend paused, and stared into the fire in silent contemplation.  And the answer that he came up with was a lot more practical than the ones you typically hear in political arguments about banning assault rifles.  Politicians and lobbyists usually hide behind vague notions of safety or freedom.  They cite the sacred inviolability of the constitution, or recall the names of dead Americans to make their point.  But for our friend, the answer was a lot simpler, a lot more concrete.  For him, it all came back to the deer in his yard.

"Well," he said, "if you've got five or six deer in your yard, and you want to keep the population under control, you don't want any of them getting away.  You want to just shoot, bam bam bam, one right after another.  It's a lot harder to do with a conventional rifle, this makes it easier to make sure that you make your kill.

"I started to feel uneasy again.  From a certain perspective, his argument made an odd sort of practical sense.  After all, if you're trying to eliminate a pest, you typically do want to use the most effective extermination tool at your disposal.  On the other hand, as those words were coming out of his mouth, it was hard not to think about how perfectly they could summarize the feelings of murderers as well.  They also don't want anyone getting away, they want to make their kill as quickly and easily as possible so they can move onto the next target before it escapes.  Sure, the targets may be different, but the logic seems to be exactly the same.  And to me, that parallel would seem to raise a very basic, question, which should be pretty easy for most people to answer: which is worse, letting potential murderers have the most effective tool with which to kill people, or letting a few too many deer continue to romp through their fields?  If some mild pest control is really the best rationale that a typical gun owner has for keeping these weapons legal, are we really arguing that it's more important to kill deer than to keep people alive?  I may not be the strictest animal rights activist, and I'm not going to argue that hunting as a whole should be outlawed.  But we can't really hate deer that much, can we?  What are those deer doing in your yard that is so terrible?  Are they smoking, or standing on the escalator instead of walking, or borrowing your car without filling up the tank?Now, I don't mean to make too much fun of this guy.  Again, he was friendly as could be, and he really didn't strike me as a dangerous individual, so he doesn't deserve to be treated like a lunatic.  And I also don't mean to say that he should be taken as a representative of the entire gun-weilding community.  After all, I know a lot of gun owners, and none of them spend their free time sneaking across the lawn so they can bludgeon Bambi's mom to death.  I'd like to think that most of them would know that grape vodka isn't worth stealing as well.  But when you hear so much rhetoric from detached third parties, making proclamations from on high about other people's rights and safety, these sweeping decrees about what the American people think or want or deserve, it's interesting to hear what the average person really thinks, even if he's just one lone man thinking for himself.

And despite my obvious liberal bias, I'm also not saying that we should ban assault rifles purely based on one random guy's drunken campfire musings, any more than I'd say that we should keep them legal because it's annoying to have to slow down at deer crossings.  But it does seem to me that if the people actually buying the guns can't give a more convincing argument as to why they should be able to than that guns are awesome, or that our gardens need to be kept safe from jittery herbivores, then maybe it is a policy worth reconsidering.  Maybe we don't need to have easily modifiable assault rifles in the hands of people who never need to shoot anything more dangerous than Rudolph.  Maybe, if politicians don't seem to know what regular people are thinking, then they aren't qualified to speak for them.  Maybe it's at least worth listening to what those regular people actually have to say for themselves before deciding whether or not they can be trusted with such a dangerous toy.

Or maybe these conversations are better saved for a time when everyone is sober, and no one would rather be discussing the problems of toasting a marshmallow over low heat.

-TC