DUCKOFYORK | Indonesian Lifestyle Blogger: Juli 2015

When I was a kid, around the age of 10 or 11, my father show me the picture of him with his fellow friends hunting. Hunting wasn't exactly the kind sport that I like (because no matter how much I hate boars, I can't even imagine having to kill one), but I was fascinated with the gun that they use. My father, being the ultra-protective father that he always is, refuse to teach me how to use that gun. Later on, when I was in junior highschool, my school had this program where they sent us to live in a military base, where they taught us a little something about guns. I was so fascinated yet I know I can't hold one because of my age.

A few years later, my father taught me how to handle gun albeit the airsoft one. I was so happy when I hit my first can. I feel like one of those cool kids in the action movie (particularly the police story series, because come on, who doesn't love Jackie Chan?). Then like a normal, regular kid, I ask my dad whether I can have my own gun when I grew up, to which he replies:

"I'm not really sure about getting you a gun, even when you grew up. You see, kid, civilians like us doesn't have access to that kind of world. Even if you are a member of shooting and hunting community, the burden of having a gun, and a properly licensed ones, were bigger than you imagine,"

My father then proceeds with explaining his point of view any further. Thousands (or maybe millions) people shot dead every year. Now, whether they were incidentally shot or not, is out of question. The problems lies with the weapon itself. Some people might say it was the fault of the user--on which was the shooter, but my father thinks exactly the opposite.

"I think us human weren't ready for such weapon. With weapons came power, and with power comes responsibilities. Now we're talking about the power to hold someone's life. The power to decide that in just matter of seconds we could just easily kill a being. A being with life, with feelings and with heart, possibly have families and other responsibilities too. I think we weren't ready for such huge responsibilities, and we'll never be since human were easily carried away by their emotions," he said to me with a very mellowed face.

He explains to me that the only thing acceptable for gunning something is to protect your loved ones, other people, yourself and your country. But even that standard was crooked to some degree because we tend to be protective of people we loved regardless whether they're wrong or right.

Years later, I was on facebook and saw one of my facebook friends (for easier storytelling let's called him Y), a gun toting indonesians--and I didn't know whether he was licensed or not, for his sake, let's assume that he is licensed--was arguing on his facebook feed regarding the president who were spotted at the cinema, leisurely enjoying a movie despite his tight schedule. There's one commenter who was pointing that finding someone's fault was easier, maybe this commenter was too tired of Y's hate comment/status especially about politics (I personally hide him from my timeline after reading some arrogant remarks that he made) And you know what happened?

Y commented with his photo shooting a bullseye. Yes. A photo of a gun with a snide remarks toward that commenter.

[Seriously I am tempted to upload the screenshot in which I possessed as a proof and self reminder of how emotional people should never held or even touched a gun--but most of my friends said he already deleted that posts, and we need to protect his name since he's actually a reputable person and have his family to feed. With that being said, I tried to keep this posts as subtle as possible to protect his identity]

Now I understand what my father had said. That having a gun means you have a greater power than most people around you. Thus, you have bigger responsibilities--to not fuck things up. You need to control your emotion, your environment and your opponent. Truthfully, Y's action had made me look in retrospect on how bad I control my emotions (haw-haw!) and understands why civilians were not to yield guns. The lack of training, mostly psychological training were noncompensable. Military and policemen had their own psychological training to control their emotion and their environment so they don't fucked up their job. Civilians, even the ones with licenses lack of these kind of training. This can further aggravates shooting incidents.

image are from visual.ly

Indonesian have a stricter gun laws than most countries pictured here. Although there are no further statistics, we can see that Indonesia falls into the strict gun laws category (and yes, it's pretty strict compared to the other countries, so you debaters trying to make arguments about gun and shooting societies, fly the f away). But even with the law as strict as it is, we can't hinder from incidents as long as we still have guns in an uncontrolled environment, and with the arrogance from some of gun users *cough*like Y*cough* there bound to be incidents in the future. And maybe, just maybe, my dad is right. Maybe, we're not actually ready for the gun and the responsibilities it holds.

The question is, when will we?