NRA, HUSTON, AND BIOLOGY

The last thing I want is to turn firetreepub.blogspot.com  into a dream analysis site; however, last night I had a dream after struggling to fall asleep. The news they were celebrating a victory over gun control from the NRA convention in Huston, Texas disturbed me. Eventually I fell asleep and dreamed of seeing a cat calmly setting in the bottom of a swimming pool several feet under the water.  I dived in grabbed the animal and delivered it safely to the deck surrounding the pool. The cat looked at me and jumped back into the pool to sit on the bottom again. It didn’t have the qualities being a nightmare—more like a matter of fact statement.

The people attending the NRA convention want zero impediments to what they see as their rights to own weapons of any kind: even black powder and bazookas. We cannot change their minds. Twenty, thirty, or one hundred shooting death, 30 thousand suicides by gun, hundred of thousand of shooting throughout the United States, statistics that show countries with gun control laws do not have this problem, the solid logic of arguments pointing out that there is no conceivable need or benefit to have guns and explosives—nothing, not matter what—will cause them to change their mind. They are clearly in the minority so even bandwagon logic (per pressure) does not apply. They do not care what you or I think, they have to have their guns, weapons, or what ever.

In this blog site, I have advocated the idea that our behavior is in our genes. Most people, including scientists argue against this concept. We have, they declare, something called free will; they argue that we are not genetic robots. I think when we run up to something like opposition to gun control; we are facing something genetically imbedded in the human genome. Trying to convince them that society would be a better place if there were no guns is impossible. They are impervious to argument. It is tantamount to trying to argue that you are not a male or a female, which ever the case may be. There is no female gene or male gene any more than there is a gun owner’s gene.

Evolutionary psychologists might dig into our bestial past and decide there is a gene complex giving rise to a “gun owner trait”. Among the genetic tiles leading to this pro- NRA mosaic, I expect we would find self-preservations to be at its heart. Translated to Darwinian terms would be “survival of the fittest”. The deeply embedded sense of self-preservation is bestial, pangenetic, and paramount to human activity overriding even our evolving senses of humanization. I like to think that our humanization is natural adaptation to survival. Our political organization with laws substituting for brute strength, which transfer our individual strength and cunning to an army or police force, did not exist in kin groups setting around a fire in an Africa savanna where anthropologists found our ancestors bones. Of course, there were no “petrified” thoughts to find with the bones but rest assured they were there and self-preservation, in some form, would have been first among them.

I see the NRA convention as driven by a primitive innate trait. They will have to “learn” what we as a society have learned, which is that there is a better way to survive than by gunpowder and guns. As liberals, we like to think that conservatives are out of date; this is just one example giving rise to that thought. We will have to wait until they catch up or like the cat that prefers to be under water, they will suffer because of it. It is their right because they are independent and have “free will”; thus, they have the inalienable and selfish right to defend themselves—they trust only themselves. In contrast, we, and our friends and neighbors as liberals, have the inalienable right to freedom from fear of individuals with guns. We trust the police and army to defend us.

The point is that our biology and politics are in conflict. I made a mistake trying to rescue the cat from where it wanted to be. It did not want to be rescued. I would have been different if all cats, or even a majority of cats, lived under water but they do not. I cannot think that way about cats, no matter how hard I try.

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