One more year begins. Both for those who are believers and for the average skeptic, the winds of hope that a new year will change lives for the better were blown away by a gun in the hands of a disturbed young man in Tuscon, Ariz.
I understand it’s a delicate issue, so I choose to dismiss political positioning and hop out of the repetitive, noxious blame-game the media passionately embraces when a wacko like Jared Loughner decides to kill.
Although I think the constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms” was conceived in a much different social and political background than the one we live in today, it’s easy to see how deeply rooted this concept is in the American society, all the way to the 21st century.
But I must admit it’s a tricky reasoning process to understand the purposes one would present to justify having a gun in the household. Even if it’s for hunting — as a friend in a family of hunters told me — it still means you have a gun at home.
If it can kill a deer, it can kill a person.
The whole point of the discussions about guns could be stripped down to a primary condition: In the face of a gun, the meanings of life immediately jump to other levels.
Then again, especially coming from a country where you can’t buy a gun easily — or legally, for that matter — the association of individual liberties with owning or using a gun, or the assumption that I should feel safer or freer because I own a lethal instrument of self-defense, is to me a volatile and disputable truth.
It’s one thing to be granted the right to possess a gun because the forefathers founded one of the nation’s principles on that affirmation. But different issues arise when the notion of individuality is associated with the right to have and use a gun. More than that, when those issues are woven into the social and cultural values of people, the consequences are hard to take.
After Loughner did the unthinkable on Jan. 8, opening fire on a crowd at a political event in Tucson, the race to find justifications and unlikely ways the tragedy could be avoided throws us in a catharsis that feeds our weakest emotions and our faintest mind mechanisms.
There is no predictable pattern, no justification and no way to prevent such an unfortunate event.
However, rare incidents like this make the case for the debate-freaks that want to politicize the issue of gun regulation. That’s not the point.
Obviously, regulation is a good thing when the subject is the possession of arms. The critical matter is to ask why guns are so dear to American society — and what purpose they serve in the first place.
I once saw a bumper-sticker that said, “God made man. Samuel Colt made them equal.”
I don’t see equality between Loughner and the people that died. The fact that he had and used a gun actually makes him very different from all of those who died and are wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
And his actions make us think about our right not to shoot back. Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us of that right:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. … The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
Marcelo Vieira is a 33-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter
@TDR_MVieira.
 
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]