If you own more than one gun, something is seriously wrong with you

 

A coworker of mine, around 1997, was a Probate Pre-screener, the clunky job title for social workers who respond to leads that someone in the community is acting mentally aberrant. The worker was a retired cop but very attuned to, compassionate and bland with disturbed people. One afternoon, I rode along with him to see a shut-in old woman with a long psychiatric history. She sometimes wouldn't eat, believing her food was poisoned. She'd venture out on a hot summer day wearing a winter coat, scarf, fur hat and gloves. John, as easygoing as Mr. Rogers in a hammock, asked her: "Millie, do you think you're the Queen of England?" No, she said. "Have a good day." We left. He knew she wasn't delusional enough to cause herself harm.

John was a solid, wise and grounded man. But he owned a big collection of knives, many of them old-fashioned switchblades. There was something very wrong with him.

Knives and guns meant to harm and kill. What does it say about you if you feel a need to own more than one for protection? What does it say about you if amassing several or many of them gives you a "good" feeling? You harbor a fantasy of murder or revenge. You feel terribly unsafe and may be paranoid. If you are warm to, and not frightened by, a hand-gripped device that can so easily kill accidentally, whose perfectly machined metal says nothing but destruction, you may be on the continuum of sociopathy. You may feel so weak, skinned, so shell-less an egg that you must armor yourself like the Bionic Man, the Tin Man. A suicidal person with a gun set next to him on the table feels more suicidal, more helplessly resolved, more pulled by the gravity of death. When he calls the Hotline, we ask him to carefully deposit the weapon in the most remote place in his residence then return and talk with us. Proximity to a gun is like proximity to sarin gas, or to a black hole, or to fate.

Human psychology is an infinite amalgam of sensations leaving stains in our chemistry, bleeding wounds poorly scarred over, molecules of happiness, pain and developmental abort, all of which come to inform our behavior and what we call our thinking. This vast ocean of time in a body means we'll never know completely who we are, and most people will not care to know. But we could learn a lot by diving deep into the feeling of wanting instruments of killing, of violence. Since the feeling is the fact – the thought is the rationalization, the escape – we can know our true source, the darkness that likely formed in our childhood and became, in eventual hopelessness, our soothing.

To value guns or knives, or bombs or poison, or sarcasm or cruelty, or superiority or hero-worship of a psychopathic former president, is to say "I need help." Unfortunately, the most forcible help we may seek is the symptom itself.