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Logan doesn’t like guns. You say something like that and it has to mean something. Not liking guns has baggage attached to it, people assume an opinion about guns is connected to opinions about violence, or American politics, or war. But guns and violence hold very little overlap in the symbology of Logan’s mind. He doesn’t give a shit about American politics if he can help it (though admittedly he can’t help it more times than he’d like). And his opinions about guns predate and are irrelevant to his experience of war.
Logan just doesn’t like guns. It’s not deep.
It’s not so much what he doesn’t like as what he does. Logan likes his claws. He likes the way he doesn’t have to think, likes the immediacy. He likes the blood on his hands, likes the movement, the realness. If his opinion of guns is a take on violence, it’s that guns aren’t violent enough.
Someone doesn’t like guns, and that someone is Logan, people assume there has to be some kind of tragic backstory. Fuck knows he has plenty. But there isn’t one. Logan doesn’t give a shit about getting shot. It happens more or less on a weekly basis in what might be generously described as peace time, and it never leaves much of an impression. Even during war, it’s getting blown up that sticks in his mind. It’s waking up after a land mine and looking around at all the bits of meat, wondering which ones might be him, which ones might be his buddies. Logan doesn’t mind getting shot, and he doesn’t have any particularly traumatic memories of shooting people either. The people who’ve used him as their weapon have done so as expediently and efficiently as possible, and that has almost never involved guns.
Logan doesn’t dislike guns. He’s used them plenty, they come pretty standard in war. He has enough practice, he’s a decent enough shot. He’s decent enough, but he’s nothing special, he’s not great, not an expert the way a lot of people are, guys who make shooting folks their whole life. Logan is the best at what he does. He isn’t the best shot. So he doesn’t, for the most part.
Alright, okay. You want a tragic backstory? Here it is. When Logan was sixteen he shot a deer. Badly. The deer died an extremely slow, extremely painful death. Logan cried about it.
That’s it. That’s all there is.
The most obvious problem with guns is that you gotta carry them around. It’s a hassle. It isn’t subtle. Logan’s ready for a fight at any given moment. He’s a weapon all on his own, he doesn’t need help.
The problem with guns is they’re inelegant. Not that elegance is a prerequisite for killing. Not that it matters either way as long as the people who need killing end up dead. You can kill a lot of people a lot faster with a gun than with your fists, even if your fists have knives on the end. But still. Logan doesn’t like guns. They feel wasteful. So much effort put into something as simple as killing. Killing is simple. It’s easy. Maybe, technically, Logan could kill more people faster with a machine gun than he could unarmed, but he can do it a lot more effortlessly with his own body than lugging around a machine gun.
There’s more to the story, of course. There’s always more to the story.
When Logan was sixteen he shot a deer. He was all gangly limbs and sharp angles back then, with still nearly two inches of growing left in him. Musket balls and gunpowder were expensive, not worth wasting just to practice when he could practice just as well with something to shoot at.
He felt awkward, climbing the tree with the gun in hand, like for the first time in years he didn’t fit in his environment. He hit the deer on the first try. Old Henry hadn’t expected him to. Logan hadn’t expected to.
Logan had never been so close to a gunshot before he pulled the trigger. The sound startled him, and he closed his eyes, jumped and nearly fell from the tree. The smell of gunpowder was sharp and acrid, and it made him nose-blind, not used yet to smelling around it.
Logan didn’t expect to hit a deer on the first try. The gunshot surprised him, he closed his eyes and didn’t see that he’d shot it, didn’t see where it ran off.
Henry was the one who saw that the deer had been hit.
“Good job, Lad,” he said, “A pity it ran off, but you’ve a steady aim for a beginner.”
“I need to find it,” Logan said.
“She’s long gone,” Henry said.
Logan had seen them before, animals that had been shot sloppily. Sometimes they stumbled on for days before they died, terrified and in pain.
“No. I have to go after it,” Logan said.
Logan hadn’t seen which way the deer ran. He couldn’t smell properly. It took him far too long to find its trail. Far too long before he could pick up the scent. The deer was too fast and Logan was too slow, but Logan ran after it anyway. Ran and ran and didn’t stop. He could smell the blood and the pain and the fear and the odd sick smell that echoed wrong wrong wrong in his head. He’d found animals like this before. He’d killed them quick and gentle as he could. He’d never been the cause..
By the time he found the deer it was long after dark. It was already dead. He found it at the bottom of a ravine, neck broken. The body was still warm, blood still fresh.
Old Henry found him there, eventually. He was kind about it.
”It’s alright, boy,” he said, “You’ll do better next time.”
Logan did get better. Not the best, but good enough.
Logan does like swords.
He likes violence as art form. Where the effort put into making a gun, the engineering, the metal and assembly lines, the constant, never fulfilled scientific innovation, feels wasteful, the effort put into making a sword almost feels as if it makes up for something. There is something very human about it, violence that you carry with you and make beautiful. Violence that you make external from yourself, but build from your own heart’s passion, blood sweat and tears.
It’s about control, restraint, precision. The ideal to get the best results with the least effort, the least damage.
Logan likes swords, and he’s good at them. Good at violence as art form, violence as dance, violence as expression of the will. He’s good at martial arts, he’s learned them, and learned himself through them. But he’s still not the best.
And when it comes to the actual point of it, when it comes to the actual fight, all of it tends to go out the window. Logan does not engage in violence as self expression, merely violence as self.
He knows all of this, the art of the swordmaster, and he loves the magic of them, swords, believes in them in a way he never could with guns. But the art of the swordmaster is a thing he strives for, not a thing he is. A sword is a deeply human thing, violence made civilized, violence made clean. A sword is something ugly honed into something beautiful. A sword is the promise of humanity, that a thing can be real, have the power to change, and still shine. That violence can be taken out of the self and made into something useful, belonging but apart. Or maybe the fact that Logan keeps chasing this ideal and never reaching it is simply because it isn’t real. The promise of human civility and the beauty of civilized violence is only an illusion. But Logan wants to keep on believing in it, and that’s why he so seldom actually kills anyone with the sword.
Here’s the context for the story. Every story has context.
The first time Logan killed a deer he was twelve. He was with a pack of wolves. The wolves surrounded it, slowed it down, but Logan was the one who leaped up onto its back, dug his claws into its sides to hold on, and bit down hard through its neck.
The red hot blood was delicious in his mouth and the adrenaline surged through his veins, and he laughed when the deer collapsed and he could let go.
It wasn’t an easy death for the deer, not a painless one. It was not elegant or precise, it was not beautiful, the furthest thing from art, but Logan could be proud of it. They’d done their best, he and the pack, and been rewarded for it.
That was the first time, twelve years old, with nearly a year of being on his own and surviving to his name, feral and delighted by it. By the time he was sixteen he had killing deer down to a science.
By the time Logan was sixteen he could kill a deer as easy as breathing. When he was sixteen he could walk right up to a deer, pop a claw through its brain before it even knew he was there, sever its nervous system before it had a chance to feel a twinge of pain.
Logan could have done that, when he was sixteen. He shot a deer instead.
By the time he was sixteen, Logan had been living in the wild for five years. He was good at it, the best. But by then there had begun to be rumors. Stories about a monster in the woods. Stories about something inhuman, with claws and teeth and uncanny deadliness.
Logan was alone, but only mostly alone. He still had people who cared about him, who had seen an eleven-year-old boy, alone and mostly naked in the wilderness, and worried. People who still worried now he had survived and grown strong. They had tried to lure him home with them, like a stray cat, and like many feral cats, it had never more than halfway worked.
“You can’t go on like this,” an old woman told him. He sat beside her fire, beneath the stars. It was as close to civilization as he would permit himself to come, and she knew better by then, than to try to extend her hospitality further, “You must grow up sometime, and when you do, you must grow up to be a man. You cannot be a beast, child, you cannot live wild forever. There are stories in all the towns now, and some of them are believed. What the white men do not understand, they fear. If they fear you, you will never be safe. Do you understand?”
And Logan did understand. He understood, because he had lived in a large house once, and wore fine clothes. He understood, because he had run away, and thought that that world would never catch up to him again, but he knew how much power such houses had, and he knew he couldn’t escape forever.
So when the woman had him apprenticed to Old Henry, he didn’t fight it. He followed after him and learned to be a man.
Old Henry put a gun in his hands, and Logan shot it. Badly. There was no need to do it, except that it was necessary for Logan’s survival. The deer suffered so that Logan would not be hunted, or caged, or burned as a thing possessed.
Logan shot a deer. It was not a kind killing, it was not efficient, it was not elegant. But it was human violence, and that made it the only type of violence that was safe.
Logan doesn’t like guns.