I grew up in a rural place, coal and timber country. People there hunted. Pretty much everybody owned guns. Until they shot their first buck, boys let their beards grow, as a tradition. Gun safety was a high school elective. When my aunt ran low on meat, my male cousins would go into the woods and shoot a couple of groundhogs. Guns were a tool where I came from.

I’d be lying, however, if I said that was all there was to it. Guns were also a kind of talisman of manhood, and, more deeply, an indulgence, not unlike the booze my uncles drank and the Winstons my mother compulsively smoked.

Sometimes, my cousins and their friends would let my sister and me tag along when they did target practice – a privilege, they all made clear, because guns were a guy thing. To varying degrees, just holding a weapon seemed to excite them. Something about the weight of that metal and the power behind that trigger would make even the nice, well-adjusted boys adjust their demeanor, and make the less-well-adjusted ones talk about it too much or burst into weird, high-pitched giggles. They liked those guns. Maybe too much, in some cases, and in ways that creeped my sister and me out.

What we get out of guns doesn’t get enough airtime, but it comes to my mind every time there’s another mass shooting like the one in Oregon, followed by another fruitless national fight. Years after I left what President Barack Obama once famously called the “guns and religion” belt of Pennsylvania, an astute Los Angeles psychologist put it to me this way: Yes, the right to carry a gun is a civil liberty, constitutionally protected. But whatever their other uses, firearms also are a lot like liquor and pornography and tobacco.

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/shawn-hubler/article37844901.html