Tammy Letherer 
I come from a family of gun enthusiasts. My younger brother is a fire arms instructor in Iraq. My older brother, who lives in Atlanta, keeps a handgun tucked in his waistband. Even my 66-year-old mother is taking up arms, having just earned her permit to carry a concealed weapon in Michigan. Recently she held up her paper target for me to see — 2 bulls’ eyes! Her exuberance seemed to expect matching enthusiasm from me.
I couldn’t do it. I’m the pacifist, the tree hugger, the overly sensitive type, all labels I’ve historically rejected. My position on the gun issue has been one of avoidance. At best, a forced indifference. I’ve become quite comfortable straddling the politically correct fence between my right-wing roots and lefty urban friends.
That is, until my children got involved. They returned from a week-long vacation with the news that they’d been to a makeshift shooting range in someone’s back yard. My 11-year-old son got to shoot an AK47. My 6-year-old daughter shot a handgun.
Now I was up in arms, and political correctness be damned. Loaded guns in my babies’ hands? What exactly was their father thinking? Was the goal to demystify guns? To teach gun safety? We’re not a family of hunters. In fact, the last time my brothers hunted prey was probably in a nightclub. And as far as I know, assault weapons are for killing people, not animals. So what then? For giggles?
I ranted a while, and ended up having a very good conversation with my son, a sort of metaphysical-lite discussion about war and peace. Privately, I had to wonder why I was being confronted on all sides by guns. Then I realized that I have my own piece. I didn’t know I was concealing it, but apparently it’s time to show what I’ve got.
First, because I mentioned metaphysics, a framework: I’m of the belief that everything that surrounds us in the world of form is a result of, a projection of, our collective thoughts. I wish I were smart enough to wax philosophical here, but someone, namely Einstein, summed it up nicely with 5 little symbols: E=MC2. Energy equals matter. Words are energy, actions are energy, ALL is energy. And no word or action is random, in my opinion. All things carry an energetic charge and, with that, a deeper meaning. So when I say I feel under the gun, or that my family is packing the heat, but I’ll be taking it, I’m not just being cute. I’m confessing a fear, of being different, being laughed at, being attacked. When those around me are armed, I feel the need to arm and defend myself. Instinctively I prepare my arsenal. I feign courage. I joke. I justify. See, the First Amendment comes before the Second Amendment, I might say, so it must be more important! All this thanks to my own internal war.
The truth is, I’m not 100% anti-gun. Nor am I anti-military. Last month I volunteered, with 50 other Healing Touch energy medicine practitioners, to give free sessions to veterans as part of the Welcome Home Celebration at Soldier Field. We worked on some of the 5,000 vets who attended, and it was gratifying to support men and women suffering from PTSD. I honor the job these soldiers perform, and I recognize our need for them. That doesn’t stop me from imagining a time when the word ‘soldier’ has fallen from our vocabulary. I don’t have any grand plan for how to get there. I think it starts with the smallest things, and with the understanding that there are no small things. My brothers would likely say that a gun hidden in a waistband makes no difference to those who don’t know it’s there. I disagree. I argue that two opposing thoughts cannot be held in mind equally without one holding a stronger vibration than the other. So where does your energy go? Toward the idea that you must walk through life ready to defend yourself? That those you meet serve as threats, rather than opportunities? When you carry a firearm on your body, how does that energy stand between you and your relationships? Certainly we all carry our own unique ways of hurting others. We all create a sense of security by stockpiling evidence that life is ‘us versus them.’ But I think a belief in separation is the true enemy, fear the true captor.
You may say that I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.
I’m inviting you out of the fox hole and down the rabbit hole to consider some of these ideas in a new way. I accept that the gun-lovers among us have valid beliefs, and that these beliefs may be an accurate reflection of the caliber of our culture. But since all change begins with a thought, I propose a new type of target. In this target, we are each our own bull’s eye. What is required of us is a steady hand and an ability to shoot from the hip, to ask:
Is there a time in my day, and I mean EVERY day, set aside for disarmament? A time to meditate on, pray for, or visualize peace? Do I consciously disarm those I meet, with a smile, a kind word, a blessing? If I’m going to allow fear to make me reach for a weapon, how am I defeating the fear itself? I can’t shoot at it. I can only outshine it.
My question is, how strong is my light?
There are over 16,700 non-firearms death each year. The number one item used is a baseball bat. Firearm deaths just under 11,500. This is to include police shootings and armed citizens defending themselves. About 11,000 people are killed each year from drunk driving. Now that I’ve gotten the numbers out of the way. Murder: The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. The key word unlawful. A gun does not make one a murderer. It is a dark hart and an evil soul makes one a murderer. Above all people it is the warrior that prays for piece. It is he who knows the horrors of war. I wish I didn’t need to carry a weapon to shield my loved ones from harm. But I am not willing to die for them but to kill for them. Because I know the pain to take a life and the hole it leaves in your soul. So, to shield them form that pain I will bare that burden. Peace can shine but the darkness of evil is all around us. The greatest trick that evil played on the world is to make people believe that there is no evil. Have love and peace in your harts but be ready to confront evil when it comes your way. And yes I need a gun for that.
Oh this is exactly how I feel….. Thank you for putting words to what I often fumble over when I attempt to share my similar beliefs. You are so articulate in your writing and the content radiates HOPE!!!! A trillion thank you’s, always in faith & love, Heidi
Tammy, your insights and your message is, again, spot on!….and I will say that Samuel is spot on, too….It’s the perennial “tension of the opposites” that requires humanity to perpetually chose: Fear or Love and all the colorations that these two opposites bring to our lives. What Connecticut tells me is that we have a long way to go to recognize and attend to broken-ness in our selves, in our children, in one another. Guns don’t create massacres, people do….perceptions do. And persons disconnected from their humanity can and will do terrible, evil, unthinkable acts. This is truly an opportunity to come home to ourselves. My dearest wish is that every community had a walk-in Healing Touch Center and especially a NADA Center (5-point ear acupuncture)….a place where persons could go and find solace, balance and help in letting go of that which does not serve their humanity–or the collective’s humanity. No talking necessary….no therapizing about “why” or blame-throwing about him/her or this or the other…..Only a place where persons can be helped to come back within, to their heart’s center–to their soul’s source. We need more overt places where citizens can release tension/aberrant thinking. We have the tools that allow us to help one another shift our perceptions from anger to serenity, fear to calmness, grief to peace. We don’t have a culture that values these tools or deems it necessary to make them accessible to families, teachers, health care professionals. We could deal with the Darkness much better as a society–if we wanted to value what we already know—and make it an inalienable right that children, families, teachers, and our society as a whole, deserve to have access to tools that create health, growth and love.
It could be a way that we find “middle ground” between the NRA folks and the Tree-Hugger folks–every community have a place where Healing Touch and NADA are easily accessible–and children are taught Healing Touch in school–as ways to self regulate and deal with stress….and people could still have their guns….now there’s an experiment for America.