{"id":24356,"date":"2012-12-17T15:20:11","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T21:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=24356"},"modified":"2012-12-17T17:26:52","modified_gmt":"2012-12-17T23:26:52","slug":"on-guns-mental-hygiene-and-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/2012\/12\/17\/on-guns-mental-hygiene-and-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"On Guns, Mental Hygiene, and Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It may surprise people who know me that I am not completely anti-gun. It seems like something I might be. \u00a0I don\u2019t like loud noises and I don\u2019t like violence, and killing hurts me. I have to avert my eyes form a lot of TV and movies. But the gun thing is no longer simple for me. \u00a0The last time I was stridently anti-gun was while lecturing my father about the dangers of guns. He happened to be holding off a midnight intruder with a hammer and wanted me to go get his gun. \u00a0I was a senior in high school and I knew everything and I refused.<\/p>\n<p>The intruder had awakened my parents \u00a0by announcing he was a private investigator investigating a murder that was about to take place. \u00a0He held a hammer over them. He was all kinds of high and very unpredictable. \u00a0My father wrestled him down the stairs, getting the hammer away from him and was standing barefoot in the broken glass of our back door window when I came downstairs.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0get the gun, and my father was too preoccupied to deal with me. My mother had called a relative who came over with his big gun while we waited for the police. They got lost, we lived in the sticks. \u00a0It was a good thing my cousin was there, too, with his big gun. Because when the intruder went for the gun in the holster of the cop who had finally arrived he was helpful in stopping him. \u00a0No shots were fired, but additional reinforcements were needed.<\/p>\n<p>I usually tell this story as a funny one. \u00a0It can be, within the safety of the present. But it is also terrifying. \u00a0Forty-something me looks at high school me and is speechless at my arrogance and my naivete. That story could have ended so very differently and I no longer feel the same way I did in high school about much of anything &#8211; weapons included.<\/p>\n<p>I know too many responsible gun owners who I respect and trust to be totally anti-gun. \u00a0The discussion we need to have is not pro-gun\/anti-gun. Why must we always force our world into stark dichotomies that don\u2019t fit? Guns are tools. They are not inherently evil (Is any device? Is any person? What is evil? I don\u2019t like using that word). \u00a0It is true that they are tools for dealing death and dealing death is never something we should do lightly. However, the real problem lies not in the weapon, but in the person\u00a0wielding\u00a0it. I have needed the help of a trusted and responsible friend with a gun several times in my life.\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0been comforted by the presence of a weapon. \u00a0I want to tighten access to certain weapons and ammunition, but I do not want to ban all guns.<\/p>\n<p>We need to look at our need for weapons more closely. \u00a0Yes. \u00a0We need to ask ourselves how much death we need to deal and how swiftly. \u00a0Yes. We need to wonder how readily accessible these tools need to be. Yes. We need to look at a culture that glorifies guns and desensitizes us to violence. Yes. We need to disentangle the manufacturing and sale of weapons from our politics. Yes. Limiting guns is part of the answer. Oh yes. But guns are not the core problem. The fact that people go to a place where they see mass murder as a viable option is at the root of this horror. How dark must one\u2019s lens be to see that as a choice you make? \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:SIG_Pro_by_Augustas_Didzgalvis.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-24362\" title=\"gun &amp; Bullet\" src=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/gun-Bullet-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/gun-Bullet-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/gun-Bullet-440x290.jpg 440w, https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/gun-Bullet.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We need to look at a culture that is a such a pressure cooker of dysfunction that people go to that place. Yes, I know not everyone goes to that place &#8211; most do not. But many people are closer than we think, and our culture desensitizes us to the plight of people we don\u2019t know (and even those we do). \u00a0We have an empathy deficit, a lack of emotional resilience, an abundance of\u00a0entitlement\u00a0and tools for dealing so much death in ready reach. \u00a0It is a toxic recipe.<\/p>\n<p>Life can be hard. Life is often unfair. People struggle. Reality rarely matches up with our pretty imaginary scenarios. \u00a0We need to understand that mental health is not a clear dichotomy of health and illness (us and them). \u00a0Emotional health is a complex changeable spectrum and is, for many of us, a landscape fraught with effort and risk. Many of us can slip easily in and out of dangerous emotional places. \u00a0We all need to work on our emotional health just like we do our physical bodies and it is a constant process for everyone &#8211; even if we don\u2019t admit it.<\/p>\n<p>We need to look at how we teach people to deal with their emotions and how to deal with life\u2019s disappointments right from where they are. Life is an ocean of failures and successes and so many feelings &#8211; some of which are so intense they threaten to overwhelm. We need to learn to swim in that ocean despite things falling apart &#8211; because things do.<\/p>\n<p>Change is part of life and the ability to deal with the rapidly accelerating pace of change in our world and the ability to work with even the most intense of emotions are the most important skills we can\u00a0posses.\u00a0 \u00a0Why do we just assume people magically develop resilience? \u00a0Some of us have to learn it. \u00a0No matter what our cognitive\/emotional situation we all have to learn, right where we are, to live the life we have. \u00a0No matter our cognitive\/emotional situation we can learn to work with our minds.<\/p>\n<p>Over the last several years\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0struggled with fear, anger, anxiety and doubt that were, at times, crippling. \u00a0I\u2019m a self-employed sales person and I sell people to people &#8211; highs and lows are part of the business, and\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0always ridden that roller coaster pretty well. But, like many people, my physical health and my mental health are intertwined and so deciding to \u201cwork with my mind\u201d became not an abstract concept or a luxury, but necessary for my survival.<\/p>\n<p>Self-awareness, mindfulness, acceptance and rigorous self-honesty involve facing feelings that are gritty, difficult,and anything but some new-age fantasy. \u00a0As we learn to feel what we feel and face what is in front of us (instead of living in denial or fantasy), we can learn to navigate anything that we encounter. \u00a0I think a lot of people lose heart when their life\u00a0doesn&#8217;t\u00a0turn out the way they thought it would, or the way they wanted it to, or when things fall apart as things so often do. \u00a0It is in those crunch times when we think \u201cI can\u2019t (or won\u2019t) do this anymore\u201d that terrible things can happen.<\/p>\n<p>Skills to navigate challenging times can be learned, and as a society we must make these life skills part of being a responsible\u00a0person in a functioning society. \u00a0We teach physical fitness, and dental\u00a0hygiene, and we require a license to drive a car. We need to teach mental and emotional\u00a0hygiene as well. \u00a0Resilience is essential to modern life.<\/p>\n<p>Tuning up how we think about and acquire weapons as a\u00a0society\u00a0is a very necessary beginning, but we will need to go beyond these first steps toward a \u00a0gun control policy, and have a really different\u00a0conversation about emotional health and how we incorporate mental\u00a0hygiene\u00a0and resilience training in daily life. \u00a0We can\u2019t afford not to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It may surprise people who know me that I am not completely anti-gun. It seems like something I might be. \u00a0I don\u2019t like loud noises and I don\u2019t like violence, and killing hurts me. I have to avert my eyes form a lot of TV and movies. But the gun thing is no longer simple for me. \u00a0The last time I was stridently anti-gun was while lecturing my father about the dangers of guns. He happened to be holding off a midnight intruder with a hammer and wanted me to go get his gun. \u00a0I was a senior in high school and I knew everything and I refused . . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6348,27,3664,8,5021,5218,4],"tags":[6450,789,6152,6347,2827,2842,421,6363],"class_list":["post-24356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aggression-and-violence","category-culture","category-human-animals","category-meaning-of-life","category-neuroscience-science","category-quality-of-life","category-science","tag-american-culture","tag-emotions","tag-featured","tag-gun-control","tag-guns","tag-mental-health","tag-psychology","tag-tragedy","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}