If so, Reason is the cure.

Is gun obsession an addiction?

America is addicted to guns – which only give an illusion of strength and security

I grew up with guns all around me in Lebanon. So I understand America’s relationship with firearms, and just how dangerous it can be

Peter Daou

You are not the same person carrying a firearm as you are without one. A device that can extinguish a life with the flick of a finger places inordinate power in the hands of an individual. That power – whether exercised or simply imagined – can be addictive.

Growing up in the midst of a war in Lebanon and undergoing military training in high school put guns at the center of my childhood. As the grandson of an experienced marksman, the son of a hunter and a hunter myself, I loved my guns. I loved shooting. I loved the feeling of slinging a double barrel shotgun over my shoulder before dawn and wandering off into the cold mountains.

I am also someone who, as a 10-year-old, collected shrapnel and spent bullets from the streets and alleys around my home near Hamra Street in West Beirut – daily reminders of death and violence, but also of survival. As my collection grew, so did my appreciation for the value of each new morning with an intact family, which was a privilege that many of my friends and neighbors lost.

My military service quickly taught me that there was an inextricable link between the weapon I carried on my shoulder and the suffering to which I bore daily witness. I was trained to use guns against others before I was old enough to be considered a man.

In Lebanese culture, “manhood” was an issue teenage boys were taught to think about. What did it mean to be a man, to be respected as a man? A gun was an instant pathway to respect – or as I more accurately understand now, fear masquerading as respect.

America’s obsessive relationship with firearms is familiar to me; I know the intoxicating sense of power that a gun bestows, particularly to a young man. But in the aftermath of the terrible violence I witnessed and with the passage of time, I know that guns are dangerous and illusory shortcuts to strength and maturity and no guarantee of personal safety.

After another horrific mass shooting – this time at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College – our intractable gun control debate has begun once again, with those who are categorically opposed to rational controls on gun ownership already insisting that a mass shooting is no reason to contemplate new laws. What is it about America and firearms? What makes us different from every other developed country that we tolerate such disproportionate levels of gun violence?

I see the debate about guns through the lens of that teenager surrounded by weapons and by bloodshed and terror created with guns. I can also see it as a hunter and amateur marksman – as someone who spent years perfecting the Zen-like art of hitting the head of a pin with a tiny projectile.

Guns are a high. For someone just entering adulthood and grappling with the attendant challenges, emotions and sense of powerlessness, easy access to firearms is easy access to the ultimate drug: the feeling of omnipotence.

In America, that access means that the consequences of contentious interactions between people can more readily turn deadly. According to a report by the Center for American Progress, “The easy access youths have to guns across the country creates the opportunity for otherwise nonfatal confrontations between young people to become fatal.”

Allowing unfettered access to deadly weapons leads to the carnage we’re seeing in our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our shopping malls, and our streets. The frustration expressed by President Obama in his statement about the Oregon shooting is shared by millions of people, like me, who cannot fathom how we permit these travesties to continue.

Those of us who advocate for stronger gun control measures must understand that we are dealing not just with an obsession, but an addiction. And addictions are notoriously hard to break. Meanwhile, the death toll keeps rising.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.