I am not a gun.
I don’t believe the giant who said that was given a proper name. He’s just the Iron Giant. He’s not wrong. Many people, I might suggest most of them men, have in us a great potential for violence. Not necesarily physical violence alone, but conflict, cruelty, dishonesty, discourtesy, distrust, distaste, inhumanity.
When we are uncomfortable, and we are uncomfortable often on this earth, our hope is the cessation of that discomfort. More often than not we go about putting a stop to our discomfort by cutting it off, by putting a stop to some sort of source. We slap the mosquito, we tell off the snotty person, we remove the rock from our shoe, we ask people to move out, we quit our jobs. More often than not this is the right move. But some of the time it isn’t. And those times are important.
Often the right thing to do is to sit with the discomfort and understand that actually, it is a piece of virtue, or at least the path to virtue, that we do not yet understand. Just because something is causing you discomfort does not mean it is bad. If we make the mistake of assuming that an uncomfortable thing must be stopped at all costs we close ourselves off to a great deal, I think.