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"The Republican-run Texas state legislature voted last year to allow students to carry concealed handguns into classrooms, dorms, just about anywhere on campus." While the law appears to encourage innocent self-defense, in fact it intensifies the hysteria that makes gun-deaths routine news in American culture, with an average of more than 30 gun deaths a day in the US in 2015. After each rampage, headlines, politicians, and the NRA pump up fear and rage. Gun sales spike. Then the nation simmers down and tenses up for the next outrage.
There is an aspect of the hysteria that goes unseen. We screen it out because it raises basic psychological and cultural conflicts that are too intimidating to think through—and that, too, is a symptom of the hysteria.[1] In American culture, self-defense is a core belief, whether you're "fighting" flu or crime. But self-defense comes with a temptation to self-aggrandizement. And that can be tragic because it's unrealistic.
Guns are tools for killing. They promise control over life and death, so they make you bigger, as in the slang term big shot. At a Tea Party rally in East Texas on July 4, 2009, Ted Cruz captured the fantasy of omnipotence when he said, “The most fundamental ethos in the state of Texas is, ‘Give me a horse and a gun and an open plain, and I can conquer the world.'"
So the gun is a tool for killing, and since everybody knows that, just carrying a gun commands attention. It intimidates. That power to command others creates an aristocracy. In history, it was a warrior aristocracy. The armed warlord promised to protect a group, even as he dominated them. It was a bargain. Because we believe this is a democracy, and because people with guns are always potentially killers, we overlook the conflict and anxiety. Yet the tension is there and makes for an arms race. If they have a gun, you should have two. Or ten. Since there's no natural upper limit, it's a recipe for hysteria.
This is why wannabe aristocrats like Justice Scalia hung out with “an Austrian secret society for hunters named for the patron saint of hunters,” St. Hubertus. They wear dark green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures” by shooting them. Why? It’s all about chivalry, because “hunting was considered a basic preparation for warfare and was held among the highest activities a gentleman could pursue.” Notice the prestigious use of the cross and a Latin slogan. The order dignifies and sanitizes the power to kill. Superlatives such as “highest” are used to honor warfare, in which guns kill people as intended, no doubletalk about antlers or Ivanhoe.
The St Hubert rigamarole is a bid for prestige. Like Disney’s Davy Crockett, gun owners with no Latin say they are merely responsible hunters and “king of the wild frontier.” By contrast, in their bid for prestige, NRA warriors use 1776 and the Constitution to pump up a crisis. “I’m only carrying this tool that could kill you because we’re surrounded by enemies and maniacs who wants to kill us.”
Why do we fall for this self-aggrandizement? For one thing, having the power to kill helps tame the deep fear of being nobody. The self is not a durable thing like a diamond or a bone. It needs recognition. Respect. Esteem. As the gods teach us, nothing generates respect like the power to zap you. Jihadi terrorists are candid about feeling godlike; global attention confirms that rampage killers and terrorists are larger than life. Guns are fascinating and addictive. Yet we want to be innocent too.
And socially, there’s transference and charisma. Like kids, big shots pretend they can save us, and we want to believe them. As loyal followers, we imagine we share their power. We call them hero, leader, or boss. We tolerate their demands, and love them for not hurting us.
Civilized societies use law to control warlords. Terrorists and rampage killers scare us because they defy laws. Respectable big shots and wannabe big shots warp the law to give themselves a bigger shot. In Texas, legislators win over supporters by letting them be big shots everywhere, including on campus. And so we have copycat epidemics in which frustrated nobodies run amok with guns, and cops shoot unarmed strangers because “I was afraid for my life.” After each rampage, gun sales spike, the news reports a new vigilante mistakenly whacking a disoriented neighbor or a kid with a boombox.
When law weakens, threat rises. It creates hair-trigger tension. All over the world we see failing civilizations living in an armed standoff. And Texas is joining those failed civilizations. If students can carry concealed handguns, << imagine how you’d feel if you were a professor. . . . The chilling effect seems pretty obvious for students and faculty.>>At the University of Houston, they’re warning that faculty “may want to”
* Be careful discussing sensitive topics. Drop certain topics from your curriculum
* Not "go there" if you sense anger
* Limit student access off hours
* Go to appointment-only office hours
* Only meet "that student" in controlled circumstances
You can see the danger. Education is a power relationship, with echoes of parent/child dynamics and predictable ambivalence. It’s easy for students and teachers to overestimate or scapegoat each other. It’s transference.
Contrary to pop prejudice, the role of student is stressful. After all, the role asks you to admit that you don’t know everything. Faculty want you to master scads of information, challenge stereotypes, ask nerve-wracking questions, and eat a lot of anxious fog. As the key to jobs, status, and money, the university is increasingly also a contest. Students have family to impress as well as faculty and friends: you don’t want to be a loser. With good jobs scarce and student debt increasingly treacherous, students are pushing and shoving for grades.
Universities too are conflicted. They’re free to investigate and doubt. But they’re also supposed to produce careers and quantify their output like factories. When worldly ambitions meet disturbing questions, as they do in a university, you need trust. The Texas gun-doctrine would undermine that trust. Gun-toting students foment alienation (“Limit student access off hours“), denial (“Drop certain topics from your curriculum”), and bullying threat display (“Do not ‘go there’ if you sense anger”).
This hysteria is an American flu. It undermines reasoning and also self-control. The trigger has become a popular metaphor for danger that suddenly overwhelms personality, supposedly introducing trauma symptoms such a intrusive memories and panic. Like guns, the term is a tool for manipulating morale. It enables a self-appointed victim to command others to use only words and ideas the victim approves of. Given such hysteria, teachers would face two kinds of concealed weapons, mirror images of vigilante aggression. Both obsessions with “triggers” stem from insecurity. But it’s the reflex of insecurity that pulls a trigger: the demand to be “somebody” and not a “loser.”
To appreciate the danger, you have to remember that today’s epidemic of rampage killing began with failing employees “going postal,” and then infected schools. Rampage has a strong copycat quality, with killers competing for headline infamy, desperate to be “somebody.” They follow popular models, dressing up as soldiers amok in combat. Many pull the trigger knowing that police will kill them, ending their own tormenting hysteria. After all, this is the rhythm of rampage in much American entertainment. The climax comes in a blaze of horror and glory, with all threat magically blown away. Home from Iraq and celebrated in “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle, his wife says, relived the intoxication of his kills by jokingly pretending to shoot bad guys on TV with a real gun. Kyle, you recall, was killed by a hallucinating vet even more uncertain what’s real.
The casualties of rampage killers are horrible yet in the bigger picture, few. In terms of risk-analysis, Texas politicians are pumping up a self-intoxicating bad habit. They're one expression of the nation's fascination with hysteria. In effect, the nation is teaching itself to enjoy hysteria and the thrills of fear and vindictive aggression. It may be that some lawmakers feel actively hostile to the universities as a refuge for sissy ideology.
The Texas legislature, which should stand for law, is instead teaching that law cannot protect you. That's no way to run a ball club.
Or a democracy.
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1. For an in-depth account of gun hysteria, see The Psychology of Abandon (Leveller’s Press), which examines letting go as a behavior and a fantasy about behavior. As berserk running amok, abandon terrifies us, yet in entertainment, sports, and the military, we are also fascinated by the possibility of getting access to hidden resources by throwing off inhibitions. This is what makes guns so dangerous. The book investigates rampage killing, military psychology, financial and criminal uses of abandon, and apocalyptic religion.
