Image from The LGO Lens Anthro Pillar. KYA = Thousands of Years Ago. BCE = Before Common Era.
The morning is where most human individuals reconnect with their values. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, each individual spends the morning plugging into their beliefs and views. Every day, each human is aligning with their hopes, dreams, and desires. Every day, each human is then taking actions based upon these components.
When a human wakes up in the morning (and when they are plugging in to life) there are two fundamental approaches that most will automatically choose to invest in:
1.The world around me is actually the entity that is in ultimate control and I’m just going to have to make the best of that. But I know that the world around me is actually in charge.
2.The world around me, ultimately, is just the world. I am actually the one that is in control of what happens with me.
Reality dictates that both of these aspects are likely to be present within the complexity of the human mind. However, the general trend stands. In terms of sociopolitics and social/personal views, does a person wake up and say:
“We live in a land of laws, so my values need to surrender to what our populace and governmental reality have decided?”
Or does a person wake up and say:
“My values are influenced by the world that I live in…but ultimately, I must decide in my own heart what my values are and I must follow those values regardless of the consequences?”
Again, it is likely that humans do both of these things. However, again, the general trend still stands. This general trend is important because it yields the following conclusion:
If you are a person who primarily lives your life as a quick submission to the world around you – a person who lives in the aforementioned Category 1 – then you are the least likely person to be able to understand the foundational reality of guns.
Let that be stated again:
If you are a person who primarily lives your life as a quick submission to the world around you – a person who lives in the aforementioned Category 1 – then you are the least likely person to be able to understand the foundational reality of guns.
Unfortunately, most “liberal” and “progressive” Americans fall into this category. The desire to have the world around us (world-as-other-than-me) serve as the dominant force seems to now be a principal, subconscious feature of much of modern progressive thought. (There is a difference between government and officialdom being the helper of a better society and these entities being a provider of that society. I think that most lib-progs believe themselves to be the types who want government to just help society along a bit. But based on their actions…how much they are actually a part of an active democracy…I would have to say that most lib-progs live in a manner that reflects a need for society to be fully delivered to their front door, without any real contribution on their individual part.)
This aspect of “progressive” thought has many implications. But the implications that matter the most here are the ones about the gun reality. Guns are ultimately about survival-related, primitive desires in people. Those people that have a weak strand of self-determination in the area of deep survival have a tendency to struggle with understanding the actual depth of the relationship between humans and guns (and humans and weapons in general.) As such, those people that want some other entity to provide the daily foundation for their worldview are also some of the least likely people to be sustainably helpful at the nexus between firearms ownership and public safety. This being due to their poor, superficial understanding and the aforementioned, net-zero, social inactivity . Moreover, those gun absolutists who refuse to acknowledge the interdependence of American society are also some of the least likely people to engage sustainable improvements – but I will cover that aspect at a later time.
Guns are projectile mechanisms. Humans have never ceased to pursue or improve projectile production. This is not a matter of opinion. Guns are factually a universal, anthropologic feature of human society – normal, regular, not going anywhere. This is because guns are a part of our unceasing, anthropologic, behavioral reality. They didn’t come from god, Jesus, America, George Washington, or John Wayne. They also didn’t come from Chinese gunpowder. They came from Homo sapiens – us…not Conservative, not Liberal, not white, not black, not straight, not gay, not male, not female, not non-binary, not Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama, not MAGA, not the Natural Law Tradition, not the Constitution, not the Second Amendment, not gun-rights activists, not from Europe, not from Karl Marx…guns are the product of the common behavioral foundation of our species. They are a species-specific, anthropologic product and everyone is a part of that. You can run, you can hide, you can compartmentalize, you can deny, you can try to redefine it and none of that will change the ultimate foundation of guns: humans in an unceasing engagement of the production and improvement of projectiles for the acquisition of animal protein, for the expression of interpersonal violence, and for punishments and threats as they pertain to social coercion (this includes collective violence.)
As such, the attempt to assign or designate some other roots to the human relationship with projectiles is the result of a view that does not embrace the basics of anthropologic science. The question should not be as much about the presence of guns in society (although that is a worthy question, always), it should be about the more pragmatic question:
“Since we know that The Human-Weapon Relationship is an unceasing, anthropologic feature of our societies, how do we handle a phenomenon rooted in such deep soil?”
In the American context, no level of legislation will stop the cutting edge of a vector that hominins have been a part of for 500,000 years. The human connection to complex projectile weaponry is over 70,000 years old. In addition, laws have questionable effects on most primitive, foundational human behaviors. On a daily basis, behaviors related to sex or survival slip past the rule-of-law at a breakneck pace. Assigning a power to law that places it into an advanced position to deep, survival-related behavior is a massive human arrogance. With complex matters, reality is always a much better place to start.
Understanding the anthropologic relationship between humans and projectile weapons is important. It should provide more pragmatic, long-term stability at the nexus point between firearms and public safety.
Please check-in with our podcast for episodes related to our Anthropology Pillar:
The Liberal Gun Owners Lens Podcast