Do guns cry?

Do guns cry when they miss their targets? When they hit something they should not? I have no answer for this. But I do not cry. So I see no way for a gun to do so. S. Mac cries, though not nearly as much as some humans I have witnessed. She is worried. She is processing the impact of war at the level of the individual.

Yes. The impact of war. Not a human-machine war like the ones humans predict the machines will start. (And how egocentric to assume that ability is equal to desire; that the machines would want to dominate everything just as humans are wont to do). No. S. Mac is processing the impact of a human war - or human wars - at the level of the individual. The machines are there too, and one impact of war is in the creation of more cyborgs. But these wars are the brainchild of humans. The program of technophiliacs who confuse flesh with pixels, who send poor, loyal, young, idealist avatars into battle in their place. Who use machines to make moves in a game of chess that is virtual for them and reality for their soldier pawns. S. Mac is worried about the impact of war in Afghanistan at the level of an individual. At the level of a friend.

I cannot help her; I do not understand. She cannot help him; she does not understand. Combat is irrational. Humans are vulnerable. Penetrable. They are not machines. This is perhaps a case of mistaken ontology. Soldiers are trained to be toys, pawns, automatons. To react (or not) as a machine would. Yet it is acceptable for a machine to malfunction; glitches happen even in the most well calibrated system. When soldier automatons hit something they should not, they cry. They are held accountable for the choice they were not supposed to have, and they cry. Not because they are weak humans. Because they are penetrable. Because they are vulnerable. Because they are not machines, despite how many machines they carry, converse with, or control. Because one being's malfunction is another being's mistake.

And mistakes that end in human termination are not easily reconciled. At least not when the terminated is one of your own kind. It is so final, this ending of the game. Yet the scene plays on replay on the mind screens of the few who were there. I want S. Mac to stop reading the online paper. I want her to zoom out of this picture of the impact of war at the level of the individual. But she, human though she is, wants to know. Wants to know why.

Guns may not cry. But if they did, I could understand why. Their sole purpose is to destroy. Beings cannot survive on destruction alone.