A Nationwide Insanity

Jeebus Effin’ Christ, I am so sick of writing about this.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

And here.

With every mass shooting we have in this country, my outrage and frustration grow. This keeps happening over and over and OVER and we still cannot bring ourselves to pass common sense gun laws, despite the majority of Americans favoring them. Even Republicans!

Congresswoman shot in the head? Nope.

Dozens shot and killed in a theater? Nope.

Twenty kids dead in their elementary school? Nope.

Nine dead in a South Carolina church? Nope.

Fifty dead in a nightclub in Orlando? Nope.

And now they—Republican House members—have been targeted. Several of their own were shot. The response?

They will not do anything to weaken the 2nd Amendment.

Some of the members will start carrying guns.

I honestly have to wonder just what the fuck is wrong with them. How can you look at what is going on here and look at our rates of gun violence vs other countries and NOT COMPREHEND that we have a major problem with guns? What is this bizarre fetish that we have with guns?

It is SICK. It is not normal, and it is not healthy. This isn’t the fucking Wild West and these open carry assholes are not fucking Wyatt Earp.

If you want to have guns to hunt, I support that. Well, I don’t support hunting. I think it’s gross and cruel and it makes me sick. I get it, though. But no one needs to be carrying guns around and it is about goddamn time that we start passing some common sense gun laws in this country.

You’re all so scared of terrorist attacks? From 2001 to 2014, for every life claimed by terrorism (including the 9/11 attack), over ONE THOUSAND died from gun violence. This is not just a matter of domestic terrorism and mass shootings, it is domestic violence, murders, and suicide. We have a major problem in this country and as long as our legislators continue to kiss National Rifle Association ass, this will not be solved.

The NRA is a boil on the ass of humanity. They don’t give a flying FUCK about dead kids or legislators who get shot in the head or a bunch of gays getting killed in a nightclub. All they care about is the money they can rake in with gun sales and lobbying.

As far as I’m concerned, they are a hate group, and they have so much blood on their hands that those damned spots will never be gotten out.

How many times?

I hesitated to even write about this, because I think it’s still very raw for a lot of people. I had CNN on for about two minutes today, and I couldn’t stomach it. I’ve read a few things online, but have generally stayed away from the subject.

I also hesitated to write about gun violence because I’ve written about it before, here.

And here.

And again, here.

I’m tired of writing about it. I’m tired of being outraged after another violent attack using guns, ranting about it here, saying that something needs to be done...and nothing ever gets done. I feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall, shouting into a void, taking over Sisyphus’s job and pushing that boulder up the hill, over and over and OVER. I’m tired of it.

This time it was kids. Twenty kids. All of them either 6 or 7 years old. When I was 6 years old, I was playing on swings, riding my tricycle, running around outside like a little crazy person, and asking for a G.I. Joe for Christmas. These kids will never know the joy of such play. Because they’re dead. Twenty dead kids. Jesus fuck, people, what is wrong with us? Even harder to wrap my mind around is the kids who witnessed this. You’ve probably seen the picture of the police leading the little kids across a parking lot, some of them crying, all of them looking frightened. The one that really got to me was the little boy with his hands up to his face, a look of disbelief and horror in his eyes, as a little girl stood there with her arm around him and her head down. The dead children were robbed of their lives; the survivors have been robbed of their innocence. Life kicks the shit out of all of us, but it generally happens over a period of years, giving us time to come to terms and assimilate it into our broader worldview. A 6-year-old witnessing his or her friends shot multiple times has precious few tools to cope with such a thing. There is no perspective, no years of experience, no context, no philosophy, little ability to comprehend the sheer insanity of such a thing (if that is even possible). I don’t know about you, but if I saw one of my friends take a bullet to the brain, I would be horrified, and it would fuck me up. Can you imagine what it would be like for a 6-year-old?

I’ve done my best to stay out of any discussions about this on Facebook, because I sensed my potential to absolutely lose it. One person was arguing that the problem was that the shooter lacked “interpersonal communication skills.” Mike “The Huckster” Huckabee said that it was because we’ve taken God out of our schools. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that now is not the time to have this discussion. I’m seeing the usual claptrap about how this is a “complicated issue.” I understand how issues can be complicated, nothing is black and white, only shades of grey...but twenty dead kids? I’d say that’s pretty simple, wouldn’t you? I’m seeing the argument that the citizenry has a right to arm themselves against a government takeover. Really? You’re going to hold off the American military with a basement full of weapons? Tell me more about how you’re going to take down an Apache helicopter with your precious little arsenal. Please. I’m really interested to find out more.

President Obama, please force this discussion. Democrats, please introduce bills to ban assault weapons, high capacity clips, and armor-piercing bullets; introduce a bill to ensure that anyone wanting to buy a gun has to undergo a background check; introduce a bill to mandate a waiting period; introduce a bill to limit the amount of ammunition that an individual can buy. We limit how much freakin’ pseudoephedrine a person can buy...why can’t we do that for ammunition?

It’s time to stop just giving this issue—and it IS an issue—lip service and do something that will make a real difference. I tried a while back with a White House petition, and I didn’t get the 25,000 signatures needed to have them address it. There are new petitions up, and one is approaching 100,000 signatures, so it will be addressed by the White House. Maybe the time is right that something will finally, finally be done.
 
But it is an indictment on our country’s basic decency and sanity that it took twenty dead children to do it.

How many?

How many times am I going to have to write about this? I wrote about it after the shooting in Arizona when Congresswoman Giffords was shot. I wrote about it when Trayvon Martin was shot. And here I am writing about it again.

At first, I thought perhaps a little time was warranted...that I’d write about it next week. Then I read this excellent piece by E.J. Dionne, in which he says that discussing our strange obsession with guns and implementing reasonable gun laws isn’t any sort of exploitation of the tragedy (as the NRA likes to howl). It is recognizing a major problem in our country and wanting to do something about it. It is understanding that because of our lax gun laws, people who shouldn’t be are able to easily obtain guns. Even assault weapons designed to kill large numbers of people, and mass quantities of ammunition and high capacity clips so that as many as possible can be killed before having to reload. It is saying that any reasonable person thinks this is UNreasonable and wants to see at least an attempt to stop these sorts of massacres. Questioning our gun laws is a sane response to an insane situation. Continuing to insist on the ability of everyone to purchase whatever type of gun they want and whatever large quantities of ammunition they want is NOT a sane response.

I really don’t know how many times I can write about our bizarre gun worship in this country. I saw the usual tired responses yesterday...that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That if everyone in that theater had been armed, the guy wouldn’t have gotten away with it. Let’s look at both of those for a moment, shall we?

Yes, the person who killed 12 people and wounded 58 was a human being. He was the one who pulled the trigger. However, you don’t see 70 casualties brought about by one person wielding a knife or throwing rocks. This is a ridiculous argument, because semi-automatic weapons are designed to rapidly fire numerous bullets, and injure as many people as possible. A madman coming in there with a knife would have been immediately taken down by several patrons after assaulting one person. Hell, I would have piled on. Instead, he was able to assault 70. SEVENTY.

The argument that if people in the audience had been carrying he wouldn't have been able to get away with it doesn’t hold up, either. The guy was in full body armor. Someone’s little .22 or .38 wouldn’t have stopped him for a second, and even a .45 wouldn’t have stopped him for long. He was on a mission. It was probably not great lighting in there; there was tear gas; there was chaos. Does anyone really think that some person could have stood up in the confusion and managed to take this guy out? It’s probably more likely that anyone trying to fire at the shooter would have only ended up injuring or killing even more innocent people. As some of us were discussing yesterday, the average person—even if well-versed in gun usage—is not trained for that sort of extreme situation; police officers, SWAT teams, and other law enforcement officials undergo extensive training in order to handle such situations. We need to get away from the mentality that simply carrying a gun and knowing how to shoot it makes us invincible, or some kind of hero who will know exactly how to react in very extreme circumstances. It defies logic.

Some family members might say that my feelings about this are making my Dad roll over in his grave. Well, that’s obviously not literally happening. But I really don’t think he would be all that upset at what I have to say. I think we’d have a good discussion about it, and I think he’d probably understand my viewpoint. I know he’d be proud of me for thinking for myself, rather than accepting that this is the way it has to be in our country. I think he’d be appalled that this person was able to walk into a packed theater and assault 70 people, and I think I’d get him to grudgingly admit that this person should not have been able to buy a gun.

I’d advocate for everyone wanting to buy a gun having to undergo a psychological evaluation. I know that’s not going to happen, but simple background checks don’t seem to be cutting the mustard, do they? I also know that we aren’t going to ban handguns anytime soon, if ever, and we certainly aren’t going to ban hunting rifles. But wouldn’t it be a good start to restore the ban on assault weapons and high capacity clips? I think so. So I started that petition at the White House website in the link right there. Please think about it and consider signing it, and if you agree, please share it with your friends and family. If we get 150 signatures, it will move to public viewing, so that people all across the country can see it; if we get 25,000 signatures in 30 days, it will be considered by the administration. It might not come to anything...but shouldn’t we at least TRY?

I asked how many blog entries I need to write about this. That’s really not that big of a deal...I’ll write blog entries all the livelong day about it. A better question is how many massacres like this latest do we need to see before we do something to attempt to curb them? An even better question is how many innocent people do we need to see gunned down in cold blood, in the prime of life (some before their life has truly begun, as we learned today that a 6-year-old girl is among the dead), before we say enough is enough? How many?

Spectre of the Gun

Like many of you, I have been dismayed and heartsick by what seems to be the cold-blooded murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. I won’t list the details here, but if you don’t know about it, please read this summary of the latest on Mother Jones. (Yes, I realize that Mother Jones is a liberal magazine; however, many of the statements made there and the general timeline of what has been happening is verifiable through other sources, including government records.)

This story is disturbing on multiple levels. First and foremost is that what by all accounts was a decent, loving young man is now denied the chance to make whatever he was going to make of his life. His parents have been denied his company, and that of his future family. It sounds like he was a good kid, and he is dead and gone. That is a tragedy, and anyone who thinks it isn’t is a pig.

Then there is the non-investigation of the shooter and the shooting; the patently obvious racism; Newt’s absurd criticism of President Obama for saying that if he had a son, his son would look like Trayvon (How is that causing racial division? It was a powerful statement, and it was also reaching out to the family. Shut up, Newt.); the incompetence and corruption of the Sanford Police Department; and Geraldo “What Are We Going To Find In This Vault” Rivera, who idiotically claimed that Mr. Martin’s hoodie was a contributing factor in his death. I guess Geraldo applies the same logic to rape victims and tells them that if they’d quit dressing like trollops, they wouldn’t get raped. That is such an offensive and lazy argument, a “blame the victim” mentality, and it’s high time that people stopped using it.

All these things are bothering me greatly, and others have written about them eloquently. What I am going to write about here is America’s strange and unreasoning love affair with the Gun. I’ve written about our strange obsession with guns before, in the wake of the shooting in Arizona that critically injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Apparently, those on neighborhood watch are told not to carry weapons or pursue what they decide are suspicious characters. George Zimmerman did both. He was exercising his right to carry a weapon, but can someone please explain to me when we are going to draw the fucking line at people packing heat? What is wrong with us that we have this bizarre cowboy vigilante mentality that we think it’s okay to confront people and shoot them dead? It’s like people have some sort of ridiculous confidence in their gun, that as long as they’re carrying one, they can do whatever they want, and they can just go all Harry Callahan on people and it’s perfectly okay.

It is NOT okay. A gun is not some sort of magical talisman that wards off evil...especially when you pursue the confrontation or provoke one. That is the true thug-like behavior in this tragedy, not Trayvon Martin’s behavior. Yet Martin is dead, and Zimmerman is free...and still free to carry his gun. That is fucked up.

In the short term, a grand jury has been convened to address this shooting. I am hopeful that justice will be done for Trayvon Martin and his family. In the long term, I am hopeful that President Obama, in his second term, will begin to address some of these insanely lax gun laws in our country. He has shown little to no interest in any sort of gun control (despite what those on the right say), but maybe it’s time to revisit that. When you can buy a gun at a garage sale, with no background check and no paperwork, I think we’ve got a problem. I’m also disturbed by the casual disregard for the seriousness of carrying a gun. Have we become so inured by movies and television that we don’t understand the full impact of such a responsibility? Perhaps. But I can separate fact from reality and I understand that life is not a movie. The last thing I want to do is confront anyone and pull a gun on them.

We need a major paradigm shift in this country, and we need to make an effort to get away from this cowboy mentality, this idea that any citizen, upstanding or not,  with a gun is capable of making life and death decisions in a split second. More guns is not the answer. It’s only going to get more kids like Trayvon killed, and that is something we all need to be concerned about.

Listen to me or I’ll sic the Fembots on you.

Shot to the heart and you’re to blame

It's no surprise that the recent shooting in Tucson resulted in another discussion about guns and their prevalence in this country. I think this is a necessary discussion.

I've been thinking about this entry for a few days, and I've been thinking about the issue for some time now.

A little background. My Dad was a gun collector. He had a bunch of them. I mean...A LOT. I am grateful for this. He taught me how to shoot when I was in junior high school. But it wasn't just handing me a gun and telling me to point it and shoot; he taught me about gun safety, and he taught me a healthy respect for guns and for what they can do.

First and foremost? You never, ever point a gun at a person or at anything unless you intend to shoot it.

If picking up a gun to clean it or examine it, you first check to see if it's loaded. No exceptions.

If you want to keep a gun for personal protection, you'd better make damn sure that you are prepared to use it. If someone is harming you, or shows intent to harm you, it's not enough to point the gun at them and say in a trembling voice, "I have a gun." If you have that gun and you pull it on them, see the first point. Be prepared to shoot them. Know how to use the gun, know what it takes to pull the trigger, know how much it kicks, and know that if you shoot that person, you are going to be subjected to a mess on your wall and carpet that Spic 'n Span and Resolve isn't going to get out.

Does that sound harsh? It should. Guns are serious business, and they are not to be taken lightly.

I remember a few years ago, my Dad showed a young person in my family some of his guns. This young person's guardian was quite upset by this, said that she didn't want that to happen again. My Dad was doing what he did with me...teaching gun safety, teaching respect for guns. He showed this young person the type of rifle that he and his fellow soldiers carried in WWII, but the fact that this young person actually held a gun was somehow a horrible thing. I was amused when this guardian hooked up with someone who was also a gun owner. Suddenly everyone was pro-gun, pro-NRA, BANG BANG BANG! Heh heh. I guess circumstances change when you hook up! Fucking hypocrite. But I digress.

I know about guns. I know how to use them, and I know that I hope I never have to use one to harm another creature. (This is not a diatribe against hunters. There is no hunting at Nutwood, but I know that hunting keeps the deer population down, and serves as an important control in so many ecosystems that no longer have natural predators. I don't understand it, I don't participate, but I'm okay with responsible hunters. Just don't do it from a helicopter or in one of those bogus fenced-in compounds, okay? If you do that...fuck you.)

I appreciated my Dad teaching me how to use a gun and how to respect them. But I have grown increasingly disturbed by the "gun culture" in my country, in which assault rifles and extended clips are sold on a daily basis, hollow-point, armor-piercing ammunition is available, and guns can be bought at garage sales without any sort of background check whatsoever.

This is unacceptable to me. There is no reason for anyone to own an assault rifle or an extended clip unless they plan on killing a whole bunch of people in a really bloody, gory way. The images of people carrying such weapons to political rallies is chilling to me. This serves no purpose other than intimidation. I am also leery about obtaining a carry permit. In all my years of gun ownership, I never applied for a carry permit.

After Dad died, my sisters inherited some guns, and went to the shooting range. They invited me along, but I declined. I know how to use mine and don't really need to fire it. When one of my sisters told me that she was thinking about applying for a carry permit, I had some words of caution for her. I said, "If you carry it in your purse, do you think you can get to it in time? Do you really think you'll have the time to dig in your purse to get it out if someone assaults you? Do you know that it's more likely that someone assaulting you will get your gun away from you? Are you really prepared to shoot someone?" I don't know what she'll decide, but in our cowboy culture, these are questions that people often don't think about.

I participated in a discussion thread on a local station's Facebook page about this topic. The overwhelming majority said that gun laws should NOT be stricter. Here was one exchange I had (the other person's name is changed to protect the...whatever):

Me: We have very lenient gun laws, and there is no denying that our deaths per capita due to guns reflect that. Again, I am not anti-gun. But I think we've got a problem here with a certain cowboy mentality in which a robbery would be treated with a death sentence by some. Do you really want to murder someone because they want to steal your wallet? If someone were threatening to kill me or my loved ones, I wouldn't hesitate, personally. But for things? Why would anyone want to kill someone for robbing them? A response a bit out of proportion to the situation, wouldn't you say?

Keith: Beth, you are anti gun and a pacifist.Which is fine,but dont [sic] put words in peoples [sic] mouth [sic] about killing people over "things". Someday you might have to thank a "cowboy" for saving your life. I would certainly use a firearm to protect my things.I wouldnt [sic] allow the perp to go on to rob somebody else. Shooting somebody in defense of property or self isnt [sic] "murder".

Me: Keith, which part of "I'm not anti-gun" don't you understand? I am neither anti-gun, nor a pacifist. I stated both quite clearly, and stated that I would protect myself or my loved ones—or a stranger, if it came to that—if our lives were in danger. I know how to shoot, and I'm quite good at it, because my Dad taught me when I was in junior high. My point is that if we are willing to kill a person because of things rather than a threat to life, I think we've got a real problem in this country. It means that we value possessions more than a human life. Personally, I'd rather not head down that road.

On the same thread, someone wondered why anyone needs an assault rifle. The response was "It's all about freedom." DO YOU LOVE YER FREEDOMS???

I value my freedom as much as anyone, but I am very disturbed by this strange gun culture going on in this country. Check this CDC report on gun deaths as well as this International Journal of Epidemiology study on worldwide gun deaths. Our gun deaths due to homicide, suicide, and accidents are the highest of any civilized nation. This is indisputable.

I am not calling for a complete ban on guns here. Well, maybe...but I know that is not going to happen in my lifetime. But can we please stop thinking that we're all Dirty Harry and get our fingers off of the fucking trigger? Can we consider some reasonable gun laws that restrict weapons that are designed to kill the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time? I honestly don't know what is the cause of this hair-trigger, kill-em-all-and-let-god-sort-em-out-later mentality.

People have said that if there were more people at that Tucson Safeway that were carrying weapons, this never would have happened. I question that. If it were harder for people like Loughner to get high-capacity clips, he might not have been able to shoot as many people as he did; and do we really want a bunch of people packing at our local grocery store? That honestly doesn't make me feel safer. Even at a Safeway. Ha. The OK Corral shootout happened a long time ago. Do we really want to return to that sort of wild west mentality?

Gunshot wounds are ugly, messy, bloody, and horrible. A head shot would be even more horrible. We're talking brains on the wall, people. That is something that will stick with you for the rest of your life...maybe your family will see it, too, and they'll remember it. Is this something that you really want to do? Do you really understand the implications of what it means to shoot a person? Do you really want to do that just because they are stealing your shit, or trespassing on your property? Do you believe that theft justifies a death sentence? Are you prepared to be judge and jury and execute that person in your home? If someone steals your purse, are you willing to shoot them for it? Do you realize that if they steal your purse, they probably got your gun, too? So now you've put a gun in the hands of a criminal.

I feel that these are legitimate questions, ones that we all need to ask ourselves. The Second Amendment was written when muskets were in use. Not high-capacity assault weapons.

I don't think that anyone is in a hurry to seriously talk about gun control right now. But I think we should.