By Alec Wilkinson, News Desk @ newyorker.com, Dec. 24, 2012

Years ago, when I was twenty-two, I was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and I had a .38 Smith and Wesson. It wasn’t mine; it had been given to me on my first night of work, selected by the sergeant [....]

Somewhere Chesterton writes—I think it is Chesterton—that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn’t deliver him to. A few days later I was taken to the firing range and given six bullets to shoot at a hillside, which was all I could hit. It was the first time I had fired a gun, and by the time the chambers were empty I understood something: a gun was an object in which a power of nature was concentrated so forcefully that a person could use one and feel party to a solemn and thrilling mystery. The thought crossed my mind, unbidden, that if I pointed the gun at the man beside me I could end his life. I don’t mean that I had a murderous impulse, I mean that I had become aware of the authority that the gun had given me. Absent its hard, mechanical shell in my hand, I had no special power. I was just a guy. [....]

I don’t think there is any mystery to understanding the passionate feelings people have for guns. Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. What argument can meet this, I am not sure, especially since the topic isn’t openly discussed. [....]