Gun owners have made the best possible country for themselves

When I hear pro-gun folks talk about "solutions" to mass shootings, I have a couple of visceral reactions.

First, "solution" is the wrong word. A solution is final: you solve equations, you solve puzzles. You can't "solve" human behavior.

Second, the pro-gun lobby always says that more guns and better mental health treatment are "the solution". See above re: "solution", but beyond the simplistic nature of the recommendation, the argument itself serves another purpose. By constraining our imaginations and our political responses to these options, the pro-gun lobby seeks to perpetuate a dreadful status quo.

From their rhetoric you might imagine that pro-gun activists envision a society in which everyone is armed. No bad guy would dare pull a gun to rob someone or to shoot up a school or concert because hundreds of good guys' guns would be trained on him before he could get away. (That has certainly been the vision my own imagination conjured up in the past when I wondered how a cop would tell the good guys from the bad guys in the wake of a mass shooting. I asked the same question when open-carry laws gained a higher public profile.)

However, there has never been a major nation in which all or nearly all of the population has been armed. It's only the aristocracy that is able to afford weapons, and the aristocracy never lets the peasants own effective weapons. Why would they? Some smart peasant would realize that they didn't have to take the lord of the manor's guff, and that would be that for the lord of the manor. No, the peasants, aka the great majority of the population, have always remained unarmed except in wartime.

So when I hear pro-gun activists arguing for more guns everywhere, I call bullshit.

Gun owners today are a kind of shadow aristocracy. They throw their weight around in politics a little more subtly than the medieval lord of the manor did, but they throw their weight around just the same. They've become dominant enough in the Republican Party that they don't need to threaten elected officials with guns: their interests can be secured at primary time by simply voting as a bloc.

However, when push comes to shove, gun owners are quite willing to remind everyone else that they're packing. Their possession of weaponry is their ultimate claim to political power. Under the ex-domestic Dear Leader they didn't hesitate to make "Second Amendment" a threat to their opponents rather than a right conferred by the Constitution to defend the nation.

If the vast majority of us were armed, current gun owners wouldn't be an aristocracy. Ours would be a nation full of highly armed people where any dispute would turn fatal very quickly.

That dystopian, nightmarish vision is repellent to most of us — and that's just how current gun owners like it.

When they call for more guns, they mean more guns for them. They don't want me to own one, or to learn how to use it effectively.

Gun owners have exactly the kind of nation they want: one in which they're armed and the rest of us aren't.