I’ve been having thoughts recently on how different people can have different mentalities in different situations, depending on the environment that those situations happen in. Mainly, how much the presence of firearms — not the physical reality mind you, but the presence they hold in the conscious and subconscious mind of a community — can affect how you react to things happening.
I come from a country where firearms, weaponry in general, is monopolized by the army and to a lesser extent, the police. The usage of firearms, however, is incredibly rare, even amongst those who own them. The culture of our country is not influenced by them. They are not a sign of masculinity, capability, independence, freedom, or any such notions. They are kept in drawers of law enforcement officers’ bedside tables, or perhaps hanging on the wall of a retired army officer. Most people in the area have never heard the sound of a gunshot in real life before, and the majority of people will go their entire lives without encountering a real gun that is not being held by a soldier guarding a government location, such as embassies, courts, and VIP government buildings. The presence of a gun is not normalized in our day-to-day lives.
Growing up, however, going through the various phases of childhood, consistently I found myself immersed in US media; cartoons, movies, shows, books, games, fables, online personalities, all of my youth was spent divided between the reality of my senses, and the reality which I saw across a screen, bridging the gap between two continents entirely separate from each other.
Up until entering college education, I had been entirely sheltered from my culture and its values and traditions. I had been living in a bubble of comfort, with this other, seemingly alien world I saw on my phones and computers being the only method of interacting with the world young me had had.
Now, as I come into the age of adulthood, beginning to examine my life and how the influences upon it from this world I had spent my childhood sunken into, I find myself fascinated by the differences between the society I am just now learning to see, and the one with which I am familiar with, yet paradoxically have never once truly touched, or interacted closely with those who come from it.
I could name you the last ten U.S presidents in chronological order, and narrate to you the story of its independence from the British Empire. I could tell you the names of over half the individual states, and engage in a conversation following important events occurring in the political landscape. From the effects of the latest administration, to the geopolitical events occurring worldwide due to the US’s foreign policies over the past decade, I am, if not an expert, then at least aware of it. Put into comparison with my understanding of my own country, and the contrast is stark.
A little context is in order. I come from the north African country of Egypt, situated in is (technically former)capital, Cairo. I live in the cultural middle-class of our populace, somewhat financially safe, but not to the point of excess. I live in the same area where four and a half thousand years ago, a great and long-enduring civilization built one of the seven wonders of the old world, the Pyramids of Giza. In every borough, district, and geographical formation of my city, you will find artifacts and individual historical locations older than the formation of the USA by orders of magnitudes, though this is not a difficult criteria to meet for most of the world.
All of this is grand, however, and superficial. The difference in my information extends far beyond the information found on a Wikipedia page. I know the names of different mayors in different cities, different senators in different states, policies, amendments, interstate histories, and so on and so forth. I could not for the life of me, however, tell you who is the mayor of the city in which I’ve lived for three years and change now. Nor his political opinions, or what his goals are for the area, or how long he’s been in charge. I could not accurately explain the different branches of our government, or what they do. I could not even name you all of our 22 distinct governorates, or how they differ in role from the US’s states.
So, I find myself in a situation where I am woefully lacking in practical information about my country of origin, and filled with useless cultural information for a culture which I will in most likelihood, never visit.
What then, is the purpose of this examination? You see, I don’t believe by any stretch that I am unique in the world, for having a less than useful awareness of the intricacies of the US’s existence. I reckon there are those out there who could put my knowledge to shame with ease. What I do have, however, is a layman’s thorough practice of theorizing about how humans (not people, which is an important distinction.) act based on the situations they find themselves in.
I’ve always found myself fascinated by how different people would act in any situation. How would a stay-at-home mother of two respond to finding herself on the stairwell in a burning apartment building, with both of her kids outside, but her elderly neighbor is trapped by debris against his door, and how would it be different if it was a young man that was trapped? Or if it was a young man on the stairwell, with his mother waiting outside, and his mother of two neighbor stuck inside?
A young man who’s parents frequently yelled at them, would learn at a young age the survival skill of maintaining composure when faced with poorly understood anger. A young woman who’s parents never yelled unless it was justified. The man would be unaffected by a commanding officer’s senseless scream. The woman would be in her element sitting next to a responsible friend and resolving disagreements.
The man would not know how to respond when the person in front of them feels legitimate anger, because they’ve been taught to suppress emotions when confronted by anger, and that all anger is senseless and blind. To wait it out. The woman would be confused, and feel attacked, angry and mistreated when she’s yelled at for no discernible reason by a person she thought would be a friend.
These are all conjectures. Hypotheses and fantasies, extrapolations you can make up in the blink of an eye, all-seeing or blind, unknowable.
The human mind is an endless tapestry of events, traumas and memories all weaving together to form an incoherent whole, made of a thousand thousand puzzle pieces, all of them perfectly fitting together in a logic unknown even to the person who’s mind it is. We are unfathomably complicated masterpieces, each and every one of us, and there is beauty in that.
My understanding of these layers, these complexities, is explicitly anecdotal, I must specify. I have no degrees, no courses, no certification affording me authority on any topics. I make no claims to professionalism, or even impartiality. I am merely a man afforded a soapbox, spouting his own melodies into the open air.
A word to the wise: If you find yourself particularly impressionable, perhaps under the legal age in your region, my recommendation to any and all future words you read is this: Approach with caution. I may speak confidently, and proclaim my conclusions as if they seem logical and self-evident, and espouse my own opinions, which are a consequence of my own unique experiences and life. This does not mean that they are free of leaps of logic, or assumptive of things I do not know as well as I think I do. Think about anything you read, here or otherwise, with a careful, critical eye, examining who is saying these things just as carefully as you do the words they speak.
Now, the entire thing which prompted this train of thought in my mind, was an errant video I saw online, of a young Caucasian man living in the US, explaining firmly to the audience, how to avoid getting a speeding ticket when stopped by the police. I do not remember every part of what he said, as I have been unable to find the exact video. I do remember however the broad strokes.
This man, let’s call him James, speaks to the key concern that you as a driver should have, when dealing with law enforcement, which is being as efficient as possible in communicating two facts to the officer approaching your window.
James says to turn on the interior lights in your car; to show your profile and allow them to better see what you are doing. He says to place both hands on the steering wheel, clearly visible from outside. To roll your windows down all the way, and to face the officer as you are speaking to them. To speak in a calm and friendly voice, perhaps rueful. To apologize and own up for your behavior, make sure to show remorse in the way you behave. Embarrassment, perhaps.
Now, all of this seems reasonable to me. Officers of the law usually have inflated ego, as is the wont of those who are elevated above the populace to maintain discipline and adherence to the law. You will find the same attitude in a McDonalds branch manager as you would an officer at your window. People who tell themselves they have power like to be shown that their power cows others.
He also says to immediately volunteer the information of if you have a firearm, and where in the car it is located.
This piece of information caught my eye, and immediately raised alarms for me. Why would you ever do something like that, if your goal was to calm them down? Wouldn’t it be better to act harmless? How would sharing that you have a lethal weapon immediately near your person make an officer of the law more secure? And that’s when I began thinking about how it would be to be an officer of the law in the US, where, in theory, any average civilian you interact with could kill you with a click of a trigger.
Based on studies which I’ve found online, roughly a third of all American citizens own guns, with an average of 40% of all households having firearms. That means that every time a police officer stops a person in their car, there is at least a 30% chance that that person could kill them if they decide to.*
This information shocked me, and suddenly made a lot of things clearer in my mind. Suddenly, the prevalence of police brutality, the camaraderie between those in the force and those who are not, the overwhelming over-weaponization of the law enforcement agencies in civilian cities. The concept came to me as a statement.
American police officers live in a state of constant war.
*Obviously there is more nuance to this statistic, such as the difference to owning a gun and owning a car, or owning a car and owning a house, so these numbers are rough approximations and not an attempt to accurately display likelihoods.
Now, I should state that everything from this point on is conjecture, coming from a person whose police officers carry guns, to the exclusion of all others.
Perhaps it is because I live in a country outside of this, so the presence of firearms is not as normalized to me as it is to the American people’s subconscious. But when I wonder to myself, to be a person tasked with a goal, given firearms and protections against it, alongside my brethren whom I spend more time with than almost everyone else, in a place where at any time I can be confronted by another person who also have lethal firearms that they know how to use, that they can pull out and fire at any time? That’s… war. That’s what being in an active battlefield is, to my unfamiliar mind.
Police officers live in a constant life-or-death reality, not because they’re in a dangerous situation, or because they currently operate in a high-crime-rate area, but just because the native environment they live in gives everyone a gun. Every time that a police officer approaches the window, they have to subconsciously judge if the dark silhouette in the car ahead of them might pull out a weapon and mortally injure them for daring to do their job, by enforcing the law.
When viewed this way, I found the practice of informing them of a gun to make a lot more sense than it did previously. You’re telling the soldier that you are not a potential enemy combatant. That you are in fact, a civilian. One who simply committed an error due to a circumstance or a false priority, and will not be a threat to them. To live in America is to constantly assume that everyone around is, if not currently a threat, then at least has the ability to be one at any time they choose.
I couldn’t help but feel understanding of how the culture of police in the US appears now, at face value. They’re in a constant, low tension cold war with the very population they seek to protect at all times. Any speeding ticket could be to a gang member with multiple deaths under his record. Any theft could result in death, every robbery a widowed mother and a crying son. Soldiers who’ve faced active deployment, experience lives that are inherently lethal in their day-to-day, and spend several years in high-threat situations, are recommended to undergo rehabilitation, to learn how to act around a peaceful society, and to not view their ordinary lives through the lens of threat-assessment on a daily basis.
So how would your psyche be affected, then, if you had to view the world through that lens, while standing in your local supermarket? If you had that moment of fright every day you walked out of your precinct, facing the potential of death with every occasion? A lot of behaviors can be ascribed to this, in my mind. The pathological, almost obsessive arms race with the public, seeking more efficient weapons, better defenses, more tools at their disposal. The rapid retreat to lethal force, the needless escalation, or nonsensical power games they engage in. They are wrong to do these things, but they are also the human psyche trying to reconcile being appointed as the peacekeeping organization to an armed population. The US police is a fundamentally unsafe peacekeeping organization, and has no ability to make itself safe from the populace it seeks to safe-guard.
This is not to say that their behaviors are correct, or morally understandable, of course. It is the nature of being afforded responsibility to prove capable of handling the strain mentally and physically, and it is the fault of that governmental office to ensure that all those who join its efforts are trained and then tested to be capable of handling that stress appropriately, and rigorously reprimanded if they prove incapable of maintaining the balance between threat-assessment and civilian life.
Anyways, this then lead me into a rabbit hole of thinking, considering other government professions act, or might act, living in a world with open access to firearms.