An Open Letter to the NRA
Proposing an alternative to gun culture . . .
Dear National Rifle Association,
I’ve got an ax to grind with you, NRA. It involves mass shootings, and the fact that they happen far too frequently in the United States. While you apparently cannot fathom your complicity in this issue, I think that your members understand, on some level, the problem with gun violence. After all, why else would they be stockpiling so many firearms to defend themselves? But apart from that, your singular commitment to the second amendment has rendered you unable to consider the hypothesis that fewer guns might lead to less gun violence.
Thus, I am not going to waste words trying to convince you of the merits of gun control. Instead, I will meet you on your own terms and propose a solution to the problem of gun culture that could bring us closer together rather than driving us apart.
Oh sure, I could start by reciting the grim statistics about gun violence in the United States. I could tell you there have already been 333 mass shootings in the first half of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and that we’re on pace to have almost twice as many shootings as there are days in a year. I could tell you that the New York Times has reported that guns are now the topmost cause of deaths among American children and teens, outpacing both car crashes and congenital disease. But these sorts of figures don’t seem to resonate with your members. Indeed, the NRA faithful probably consider the Gun Violence Archive and The New York Times to be purveyors of “fake news,” making me no more than one of the benighted sheeple who has bought into mainstream media lies.
And then, following from the above statistics, I could rehash the various arguments in favor of gun control. I could suggest that limiting access to firearms, particularly for people with a history of violence or mental illness, would prevent mass shootings and homicides. I could tout measures such as licensing, registration, mandatory training, background checks, and waiting periods. I could advocate for restrictions on high-capacity magazines and military-style weapons, most notably AR-15s, with a view to curbing the damage done by malicious actors. I could then move from arguments to evidence, citing the lower rates of gun violence in countries with tougher firearms regulations.
But I won’t do any of that. Your members have made up their minds, and they have committed to a gun-owning identity. By now, these same members have no doubt dismissed me as a gun-grabbing socialist.
So with that in mind, I’m going to keep with your weapon-centric worldview in proposing my alternative to guns and the lifestyle that comes with them. If any given NRA member has read this far, he or she may even possess the patience to hear me out.
The answer is axes.
I’m talking fire axes, splitting mauls, carpenters’ axes, hatchets, boys’ axes, tomahawks, and yes, battle axes.
Like guns, axes offer many empowering benefits. Firstly and most fashionably, axes have exciting sporting applications. From childhood onward, firearm owners put in hundreds and thousands of hours at the shooting range. After a while, this is bound to get boring. Enter ax throwing, which has recently become modish in urban centers. Instead of spending another afternoon at the shooting gallery, why not pick up an ax for a change? Tossing hatchets and axes at target boards provides exercise for a lot more than just the trigger finger, engaging your entire arm and shoulder. Any slob can pull a trigger, but it takes an eminently masculine person to wield, swing, and throw a full-sized ax. And if the archery-like ax-throwing targets sound uninteresting, committed NRA lifers can surely sub in the anthropomorphic targets familiar from the gun range. With a little practice, your members will soon see that axes and hatchets can turn hunting for big and small game into a more intensive sporting challenge. You can’t call yourself a hunter until you’ve bagged a bighorn ram with a battle ax.
But let’s face it: recreation isn’t the main reason Americans own guns. A person packs heat to protect and defend family and property, and that’s also the main reason why people like myself own axes. If that ever-lurking intruder forces his way into your house at night, or if an unrecognized person rings your doorbell during the day, your arrival on the scene with an ax at the ready will quickly discourage these unwanted guests from sticking around. The sight of a home-owner brandishing seven pounds of sharpened metal atop a hickory handle along with a menacing scowl (or, if you prefer, a goalie mask) will make trespassers think twice. In this spirit, I keep several axes in plain view by my door for all would-be entrants to see. A collection of axes on your living room wall can put out a far more intimidating vibe than a cabinet full of guns.
Another advantage of axes that guns simply don’t have is broad functionality. Axes are just as good for chopping trees and splitting logs as they are for self-defense. You can’t heat your home with a freshly fired AR-15, after all. Axes can also help with hacking away at pesky tree roots when you need to dig a hole four to six feet in depth. All guns really do is make noise and cause injury and death.
The best thing about the ax is the sense of intimacy. Attacking an interloper with an ax allows for a much more intimate encounter than gunplay. To be sure, the ax-owning experience is all about getting up close and personal with your target. As you swing your ax, you get to know something profoundly visceral about your adversary, smelling what he smells, hearing what he screams, and seeing all the nuances of his surprise and terror as they take shape in real-time. With a gun, it’s all over so fast. The ax, by contrast, takes a violent encounter, which might only last a few seconds in a gun-violence culture, and turns it into an undertaking that lasts for minutes and possibly hours. In that interval, you can really gain a respect and an appreciation for the person you are inflicting injury upon. If America is going to be defined by violence, axes could lead us to a more interpersonally attuned form of mayhem.
Perhaps axes could even help to formalize how we deal with individual antipathy between fellow Americans. Your trigger-happy NRA minds might be thinking that a world of pistol-packing “good guys” can eliminate similarly armed baddies far more effectively than an edged weapon ever could. But what if every American carried an ax instead of a gun? In place of chaotic shootouts, American conflicts would now be settled in a more ceremonious fashion via battles with hatchets and camping axes. Perhaps up-close-and-personal ax duels are the key to a better future for these United States. In this brave new America, aggrieved males (as well as women and non-binary people) could meet face-to-face, beard-to-beard, and ax-to-ax. Rather than sniping rivals from afar with bullets, axes mandate that we as Americans have to settle our conflicts head-on.
Thus, to the NRA and all its dues-paying members, I ask that you consider the ax. You’ll soon see that ax culture has the edge over that of guns. Personally, I’d rather live in a society of ax-wielding lunatics than gun nuts. Ax maniacs are necessarily more physically fit and more closely engaged with their fellow humans, and they likely rack up lower casualty counts, ultimately making America safer. And, more importantly than all that, with an ax in hand, your sacrosanct right to bear arms does not go unfulfilled.
So let’s drop the guns and pick up the ax, chop-chop. I took the ax to my gun collection just over a decade ago, and I’ve been a happier, healthier, better-adjusted person ever since.
Sincerely,
John Adam Gosham (see Figure 2)
