20 January

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn anything into a fetish. A guy at work said that if government strengthens gun laws, he’s going to buy more guns. I think he has four or five already. He’s a suburban living person with no actual use for a gun.  Also loves his cars, those two fetishes often coexist.  Turning an object into a fetish is really about creating another social group or team, to create social status and therefore identity. They would probably never admit it, but car nuts and gun nuts aren’t really that interested in cars or guns. They’re interested in their ‘team’, and the identity it gives them.  You can prove this by actually talking about the engineering of these things, something they very quickly lose interest in. You can show them that the cars or guns they mostly like are actually rubbish in an engineering sense. They have zero interest in those discussions, they often like to tinker and see themselves as experts in the technology itself. But they’re not, and it’s not what it’s really about.