"It's just a tool"

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“There’s nothing wrong with firearms,” says McIntyre. “I own many of them, and they’re not scary, they’re not misbehaved or anything. They’re just another tool.”

The StarPhoenix article is titled “It's just a tool: Why guns are essential for rural life in Saskatchewan” The article presents a rural view on firearms rather well, and raises again the debate about gun control as a remedy for far too many gun deaths . . . yes or no. To call the ubiquity of firearms in ranching/farming communities proof of a “gun culture” is probably unjustified, but to say that firearms are integral to a certain prairie sub-culture (along with stetsons, riding boots, rodeos and wide-open spaces, perhaps?) is arguably fair.

According to the article, the “tool” that's absolutely necessary in ranch country serves only a few purposes: euthanizing sick or injured farm animals and dealing with predators and pests. The point is made in the article that for these purposes, a standard .22 caliber rifle is adequate. Why McIntyre “owns many of them” is a signal that there's something about guns that goes beyond the “tool” designation, protests notwithstanding. 
 
Whether it's the lure of a Western, rough-and-ready lifestyle or some other impulse, the clues to why some of us love firearms (or cameras, or movies, or books, or football, etc,) enough to consider them a necessity of our chosen lifestyle probably lies in the intricacies of how-our-brains-work. It's probably not advisable to oversimplify what is a complex field of neurological study, but the brain pathways we would like to think we've chosen are etched in our minds by a myriad of influences, both inherited and learned. Habits of life, preferences and loves deeply engrained in some of us, puzzling to others.
Mazlow, Piaget, Skinner and many others have delved deeply into the workings of the human mind and it's probably safe to say they'd agree that our habits of life originate with cravings for the feeding of basic hungers. These basic longings include food, shelter, safety, belonging, comfort, efficacy, but also power and influence. Those “tools” that extend our control over our safety, power, etc. are likely to be grasped and held onto for obvious reasons.
The gun is one of those tools for some of us. Falling in love with our “tools” shouldn't come as a surprise.

There's a phenomenon that bears consideration, it's import contained in the maxim, “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” (For a great lecture on this by Wilson Miner click here.) For our purposes, the proverb serves as an admonition to think about how the presence of guns (like the car, the computer, the airplane, the smart phone, etc.) shapes our outlook; the presence of a collection of guns in a house where children are maturing undoubtedly influences the development of their values systems into adulthood. Their view of how the world works may well come to include the conviction that power and safety are secured through the possession of lethal means. 

Militaristic tendencies that surround us, that make of every international quarrel another threat of destructive war, are these not just the natural consequence of people growing up with guns, stories about men with guns, the heroism of soldiers and police who wield guns?

One explanation of our love for guns, for earth movers, for massive agricultural machinery, for military paraphernalia that goes “boom” seems obvious. It may well arise from the temptation to pursue mastery over our environment, to have the power to “make big stuff happen.” 

Some would say, “it's a man thing.”
If only the gun were just a tool. When firearms possession becomes iconic in a culture, in a lifestyle, we get what we see today: an atmosphere of threat, fear and a giving in to the temptation to “whip ours out and show whose is bigger,” to misquote Justin Trudeau only slightly. 

Can you see Christ packing heat in order to feel safe as he perambulates Palestine preaching and teaching? 

Neither can I.  

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