The Crown of Creation

Tonight we trade
our vanity for insanity
--Charlie Sheen

We cannot have peace among men
whose hearts delight in killing any living creature.
By every act that glorifies or even tolerates
such moronic delight in killing
we set back the progress of humanity
-- Rachel Carson

We have guided missiles
and misguided men
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Could kill a man with a gun like this.
Kill anybody, black or white.
And if he were holding his gun in his hand,
nobody could run over him;
they would have to respect him
--Almos' a Man, Richard Wright
_____________________

Ranger recently acquired a WW II-captured P08 Luger with accessories from the grandson of a recently-deceased veteran. The pistol had no value to the man and he did not feel the need to keep the items.

Shooting the pistol yesterday I recognized it as a precision piece of advanced firearms engineering, mechanically complex and ergonomic, before CNC capabilities -- tight and efficient. (As an aside, the gun was designed before we had a clear definition of how a semi-automatic pistol should look or function. The toggle bolt was copied from the 1873 U.S. Winchester lever-action rifle and adopted to a recoil blowback system; pure mechanical genius.)

But, so what? Technological marvels of the 20th century abound. There was the P51 Mustang fighter escort, ground attacking aircraft. The Enola Gay sits in a place of honor in the Smithsonian. What they, like the Luger, Mauser, the MG 34 and 42 machine guns, share is their unity of purpose: to efficiently kill our fellow humans.

My Luger is a beautiful piece of nastiness highly-coveted in the collector world. As with all of the aforementioned items, they were the crown of creation of God's chosen species, and they all rain death. When these weapons were introduced the U.S. was not an electrified society and indoor plumbing -- much less cars -- was not a given. To keep it on a Ranger level, venereal disease was incurable and appendicitis along with other routine infections were killers. Children died young from common childhood ailments.

High school education was a luxury for the average person, but the manufacturers of death-dealing devices were decades ahead of commensurate civilian advances. The U.S., Germany, Belgium and the Czech areas armed the world, and everyone had a repeating long-range rifle available to them at a reasonable price.

Even as we were peddling Jesus to the natives we were arming them, too, before they even had proper clothing or reliable food. Christianity always flourished next to the firearms distribution centers of colonial precincts. The pictures in Ludwig Olsen's The Mauser Rifle show that the sign of arrival in most parts of the world, no matter how primitive, is the possession of a fine hand gun or other weapon (This is why Osama bin Laden is always photographed with his AK 74 ready to hand.)

Who could deny a God that arms his believers with such magical fire sticks? Such an item is a miracle akin to converting water to wine. We pretend to export culture, but really we export guns and violence, in the name of our God or creed.

Ranger is not against the use of weapons to justly defend one's person or country, but we must consider the brutality wrought by our fine technology. The march of civilization has often advanced at the end of a rifle, and this is worthy of consideration. Much as we revile Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), gunpowder-based weapons have killed far more people than has what we now call WMD's. Firearms are WMD's as wielded by the individual.

Richard Wright's "Almos'A Man" considered the idea succinctly, the naive protagonist "Dave" standing for all of mankind. After he gleefully feels the power of the shot, he realizes his mistake in shooting Jenny the mule, an innocent beast so vital to the farm, and helplessly packs the bullet wound with mud. He is overcome by guilt and shame, but there is no unshooting the poor beast.

For all of our fancy engineering, we are but children playing with morbid, murderous toys.

--Lisa & Jim