We’ve had the logic of statistics, the emotions of seeing innocents die, the public health rationales of experts – but nothing has yet swayed the outcome of the gun debate. This is because the gun identity is embedded into the psyche of American culture. Nothing less than a transformation of national character will save lives. Guns Are Not Our God! The NRA Is Not Our Church! explores all facets of this debate, delving into the psychological and public health research on guns. This slim volume is sure to inspire debate and action on this pressing issue of our time.
Buying a gun means buying into an identity, an ideology, a psychological defense more than buying into an actual physical defense. The material defense is often mainly a cover for the psyche’s gravitation towards aggression and defense against corporeal and philosophical threat, man against man, and usually, in this country, White against non-White. Guns become more important than facts. Guns create their own “facts.” Gun identitarians machine-gun bullet-point, self-rationalizing arguments to justify the status of their true love. Guns have their own Archimedes’ principle, displacing an equivalent mass of empathy and compassion. Our humanity splashes out of the tub.
We must decide - do guns have more rights than human beings?
Dr. Ravi Chandra explores the issues with sensitivity and compassion, pointing the way towards clarity and transcendence. We must decide who we are, and who we are to each other.
“The steel of a gun is the coldest thing in the world. Even when silent it shouts a threat. But it has never been silent, never in the history of the United States.
But there are other voices. There are the screams of millions dead. More have died by gunshot than in all our country’s wars combined. Are these millions louder than the gun?
Only if we join their cry. We must speak for the dead. We must speak for the living. We must speak, or be silenced by death itself, seeping out of the barrels of our guns, 350 million and counting.”
Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist and author living and working in San Francisco. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a graduate of Brown University, Stanford University School of Medicine and UCSF’s residency training program in psychiatry.
