I Know Someone Who Has Fantasies of Committing Suicide

My background has led to my having relationships with gun fetishists. I am not talking about regular gun owners, the ones who own a pistol for protection and/or rifles for hunting. I am talking about the people who yearn for semi-automatic weapons, who relish their prerogative to own one hundred-round magazines, who pack gun stores every time our president says something about gun control, who, in spite of their having sent their children to public schools and universities, having received treatment in clinics and hospitals subsidized by the government, and having enjoyed the protection of forces ranging from military troops and federal agents to local police, firefighters, and rescue workers, who pay lower fuel prices because of government subsidies and drive on roads built and maintained by that same government, who eat government-subsidized foods, who live and work in companies, factories, and communities of people who also have benefited from these same programs, consider themselves "libertarians." They believe in their hearts that the federal government wants weapons to be registered so that one dark day the government will show up and take their weapons away, so they buy more weapons than they could possibly fire off in an attack and so much ammo that they have serious storage problems. They imagine that someday they will be taking a stand somewhere and will kill off as many of those government troops as they possibly can. If they pursue their fantasy long enough, they imagine that they will die valiantly, their weapons clutched in their cold, dead hands, just as Charlton Heston, the Moses portrayer turned National Rifle Association president, claimed would be necessary to get his guns away from him.

In sum, they dream of committing murder-suicide, except that rather than turning their weapons on themselves, they will be committing suicide by proxy, making it necessary for a marksman to take them down in the midst of their defending their liberty to have the potential to kill people.

Of course, they do not necessarily follow their imagined scenario to its logical conclusion. These folks to a person tell me that mentally ill people should not have access to firearms. But they, unlike the great majority of the members of our American community, are opposed to background checks. They dislike the idea that people who take some medications should be denied access to guns. They hate "big government," and they to a person hate "socialized medicine" (even the ones who are on Social Security, receive disability payments, and get treatment from the Veterans Administration), but they apparently have no idea how people are supposed to afford treating the mentally ill. They do not want mentally ill people to get guns, but they are opposed to every conceivable step one can take to prevent the ill from getting those guns.

These people trouble me. There are so many of them that they appear to be "normal," a significant, vocal portion of the demographic that we have to accept as neighbors, that our elected officials have to court as constituents. They intend to do harm. They feel committed to the idea that, under specific circumstances, they will do harm. They do not intend to live long enough to see the consequences of that harm.

At least we agree that mentally ill people should have restricted access to firearms.