NRA's psycho-etymological error, and more

I recently dished up two comments to a MotherJones.com article on the “March for our Lives” teens. Here, with additional commentary:

Gun fanatics actually have an etymological problem – the meaning of the word “gun.” They appear to believe that any device created by Man or Woman that ignites gunpowder and projects metal chunks is, by virtue of being labeled a “gun” or “rifle,” sacred and somehow tied as a unity to the 2nd Amendment. Seriously – How could any fanatic draw the line between a simple handgun and an assault rifle, and an assault rifle and some theoretical weapon that could shoot five-thousands rounds of metal-piercing bullets per second? Cherishing “guns” as they do, drawing such a line would be completely self-contradictory and arbitrary. I think the point has to be to redefine “gun” and “rifle” NOT to include the murderous weapons of war presently at issue. (Or else, the fanatics must realize there have to be established levels of differentiation, sanctified by law.)

While it seems absurd to suggest that the NRA and fellow travelers came to have miscreant beliefs because they were confused by two poorly defined nouns – “gun” and “rifle” – I believe there is a kernel of truth in the notion. We can’t say these people think hard about values outside their hidebound fears and hatreds (of other people’s needs) and loves (owning guns and shooting). They have a neurosis, coming out of childhood injury, that grew angry and self-protective feelings, which then came to attach like a magnet to gun love and often to other self-enclosed ideas and philosophies such as survivalism, patriarchy and global anti-government nihilism. It is this neurotic chain that allows their emotional conflation of the term “gun” with anything that shoots and kills.

But less- or other-disturbed individuals will not buy this conflation, this cockeyed umbrella under which “anything that shoots” is a gun and is therefore protected by some herd-interpretation of the Second Amendment. Just as they are acute enough to differentiate a firecracker from an atomic bomb, even though both explode, so they easily see qualitative, meaning, and politically actionable differences between a handgun and an assault rifle.

Defining terms or concepts in psychologically idiosyncratic ways is not peculiar to gun folk. It’s universal. “Love” is “internally defined” by people as deep intimate admiration, as lust, as need for or ownership of the other, as dedication, as “a choice,” as a word they endorse or feeling they have but can’t describe. “Self-esteem” is defined as the sense of personal efficacy (Nathaniel Branden), the belief that one values oneself, a portable sense of OKness, or possession of one’s Real Self and feelings (Alice Miller). “Success” is variously defined, for reasons rooted in early childhood, as power or money, prestige, independence, happiness, constant growth and improvement, or in reverse, contentment without having to struggle for it. Many people will agree that “we are human beings, not human doings.” Many will not.

The NRA and its sympathizers have substituted their neurosis for a principle – carte blanche gun rights. That dysfunction has rewritten their dictionary: If it shoots a slug, it’s a gun, given them by the Hand of God.

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I agree that there is reason to look fondly upon these youngsters. But from a psych perspective, it’s a fact that many of them have been ripped out of their childhood by these traumas, and it's never mentally healthy to have an aborted childhood: Development needs to proceed along its "organic" path. So these youngsters who might otherwise have grown and crystallized their natural interests (or might have gotten psychological help if they had no interests) now have two incubating problems: They've been forced into the ideational (cognitive-heavy) world of adulthood, and they've been injected with a meaning or identity – champion for children’s safety, crusader against assault rifles – that may replace whatever would have been a more natural growth. While most people will never notice, at least consciously, the problems these displacements can later cause, it's a certainty that depression and identity problems percolate up, sometimes decades later, in individuals who had to "grow up too fast."

I think this comment is pretty self-explanatory. But I’ll add that it troubles me to see adults admiring 11- and 13- and 15-year-olds giving speeches before crowds of thousands, being interviewed by reporters, being the center of a movement. My feeling is: You are forgetting these are children. You are seeing them as effective adults, you are letting them be the adult. What does that make you?