It is a pretty well-known fact worldwide that the United States has an ongoing love affair with guns.
Though not the only country in the world enthralled with guns, it is the only one to have enshrined a citizen’s right to bear arms in the second amendment of its Constitution.
Personally, although I don’t own a gun, I also don’t have any hang-ups about them. In its essence a gun is just a tool. What that tool is intended for however, is a matter of ubiquitous debate.
It is my opinion that where things get complicated – as they usually do with just about anything – is when the human element is introduced. Especially when it comes to a person’s intentions behind owning a gun.
Case in point: this weekend, one of my tenants, at my rental property, bought a gun and brought it home. The first thing he did was show it to his roommate.
The roommate – who is trained in handling guns and knows his buddy is not – immediately removed the magazine, and the bullet from the chamber, before returning it to the owner.
Maybe feeling affronted by his roommate’s actions, the new owner grabbed the gun by its nozzle and rammed the magazine back into the handle. The gun fired!
The bullet shattered most bones in his hand and exploded into fragments. Worse yet, because the gun was pointed at the roommate – who’d returned to the couch and his phone – bullet fragments hit the roommate square in the face.
One fragment broke his jaw in half, another cracked his nose open, and a third lodged millimeters from his aorta. Thankfully he will survive but will need multiple operations to reconstruct his face. The fragment near the aorta will stay – the doctors feel it’s too risky to remove it.
This is but one among thousands of incidents every day, every month, every year, in which people get hurt by the misguided use of guns in the hands of inexperienced people.
Contemplating this sad event, and reminded that I have this essay to write, I find myself questioning what intentions could that young man have had, that drove him to purchase the gun? Conjecture aside, maybe I will never know…maybe I don’t want to know.
Rather, I feel it would be more productive to look inside and explore what might be my own intentions for owning a gun. On-and-off, I have flirted with the idea of owning one. In fact, a few years ago I even went as far as obtaining my carry permit, despite the fact Indiana repealed such legal requirements in 2022.
Before I get to my intentions for buying a gun though, or not, I wonder if, first, I should explore and understand my motivations?
For example, if I feel that owning a gun makes sense to better protect myself from potentially dangerous people, then what am I motivated by? Is it fear, bravado, self-preservation, anger?
Why else might I intend to own a gun? Hunting? I’m not a hunter. Sport? Possibly…I’ve shot guns for sport before and found the experience quite exhilarating. Committing a crime? Hardly.
This introspection on my motives and intentions around gun ownership is ongoing and will likely not be resolved soon. But it does raise another interesting question which I am more interested in exploring in the present.
Do my motivations drive my intentions? Or do my intentions influence my motivations?
I did some research and found an interesting contrast coming from the realm of criminal law; ironic given the event that triggered this introspection.
“While intention determines whether the accused committed the crime purposely or accidentally, motive answers the question, why the accused committed the crime. Simply put, motive impels intention, so, the latter arises out of the former.” (Source: https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-intention-and-motive.html#KeyDifferences)
Truthfully, I have no definite answer yet. Do you?