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| Photo: Charley Freiberg |
Gun
Gal
OK, I admit it: I grew up shooting guns.
My grandfather (the one next door; the other, Irish one, briefly
kept bird-hunting dogs, but as far as I know, he never actually shot anything
more lethal than a golf ball) always had a rifle and a shotgun, as most rural
men did, back in the dark ages. He only used them once, however; shortly after
he came of age, he went hunting and shot a deer, came back, cleaned his gun,
locked it all away and never took it
out again, ever, because killing that deer was such a traumatic experience.
Never - even to shoot at the fox and raccoons that would regularly find a way
into the hen house and cause chaos; never for any reason, at all. If you weren’t
hunting for food, Gramp believed, there was no reason to have a ready gun, and
watching that gorgeous deer die at his hands caused him to vow it was the last
damage he ever wanted to personally inflict on another living creature. He’d
cuss at the fox and raccoons and skunks that caused him grief, instead.
Back in the dark ages, those were the only things anyone would have a gun for – hunting
for food, and to deal with pests. “Pests” meant critters like woodchucks who
eluded trapping and were trashing your garden, which meant your winter food
supply would be significantly reduced; raccoons who kept stealing your corn and dumping your trashcan –
though mostly folks would shoot a BB gun at these, to scare them off rather
than kill them; ditto the crows who might be yanking up your new-sprouted crops, the fox or skunk determined to get into
the henhouse, the rats causing destruction in the barn, and the unlikely, but
not impossible, time one might need to dispatch a rabid wild critter. If you made the mistake of actually shooting
and killing a skunk, for weeks to come
you and all the neighbors would remember the lesson that not all pests should
be shot. Guns stayed in their places unless they were being used for a job –
they were tools, and you didn’t leave your tools hanging about.
The other thing a gun might be used for was target shooting.
Target shooting was how every dad (back then, around here, it was always a dad)
would introduce gun safety to their children. The local Fish and Game club had
a target range – an outdoors bare spot out in the puckerbrush, with a sand bank
and many hay bales for safety in front of which the targets (usually a used tin
can) were arrayed. We happened to have our own good private target practice
spot, because there was a sand-bank hill behind Gramp’s garage. At a certain
age, when we were physically big enough and emotionally and mentally calm
enough, fathers would decide it was time to teach their kids about safe
gun-handling practices, and an important part of that was learning to target
shoot. You can’t learn to use a saw if you never cut something with one, and
you can’t learn to use a gun if you never shoot something with it.
However, besides our dads’ homeschooling about how to care
for, respect, and use that tool, if there was any chance we might also want to go hunting some day – and even if
we didn’t, just to reinforce the home lessons - we’d all sign up for Hunter Safety classes,
wherein we learned to never, ever, ever point a gun, loaded or unloaded, at
anything you didn’t intend to shoot; and not to ever point the gun at something
you couldn’t see clearly; and to not just take pot-shots at game, but to
attempt only a clean, clear shot; as well as how to load and unload a rifle or
shotgun safely, endless lectures on the use of the safety catch and endlessly
repeated cautions not to rely on it; lectures about not loading a gun until
ready to use it; and lessons in how to safely clean a gun, which meant
solitude, uninterrupted focus, and
never, ever, ever, ever pointing the gun at anything you didn’t intend to
shoot, even after carefully checking that it was unloaded – because that’s how
tragic errors were made. And finally, to
lock the unloaded, cleaned gun in a gun safe, the ammunition locked in its own,
separate safe, and the keys stored elsewhere. A gun was a dangerous tool,
though a useful tool, but you didn’t leave it “on” any more than you’d leave
your table saw running or your cookstove boiling water while you went to the
store or took a nap.
Advanced Hunter Safety included practical – that means doing
it for real – lessons in how to safely carry a gun in the field, over uneven
terrain, across streams, over fences and walls, in a boat, and how to do those
things if hunting alone, or how to do it
differently if hunting with a partner. We learned that we always, always,
always followed game we’d wounded to humanely dispatch the beast, no matter how
unpleasant the weather, how far we had to walk, how dark it was getting. We
learned some very basic first aid. We learned that safety, and caution, always
took precedence over making a shot; and we learned to respect the game we were
hunting, and to play fair with them. We took these classes several years
running for reinforcement; and each year, we got a certificate saying whether we’d
passed; and in-between times, our fathers took us target shooting and taught us
how to care for our tools – once again how to safely clean them, and that they
should be locked up always and the key stored somewhere else, and what kind of
a recoil a .22 rifle packs compared to a 16-guage shotgun, for example, and
which would be appropriate for deer hunting, and which for bird hunting, or
just target shooting.
We became pretty good shots over the years; I can remember
worrying, when I started driving and got my first pair of glasses, that the
glasses would mess up my accuracy, and being thrilled to find I adapted rapidly
– I could still hit the tomato paste can dead on from the same distance. Target
shooting was entertainment, constrained by how expensive the ammunition was,
how often our fathers were willing to let us borrow their guns, and how taken
we became with the sport. I had a t’ai chi student once who took it up as an
adult, and became very, very good at it. He spent many happy weekends traveling
to meets around the country and winning membership in higher and higher
categories of sharp-shooting. That kind of target shooting is very specialized
– always practiced outdoors, and there are contests from lying position,
kneeling position, standing position, different distances, and so on, national
standings, and contests all over the country. We, however, just shot at tin
cans, and had fun doing it.
Dad gave up hunting in much the same manner his father did –
he instilled in us the understanding that if we weren’t going to eat it – and
he didn’t like wild meat, so he wasn’t going to eat it – we shouldn’t shoot it.
Even so, he made sure his children had a good education and thorough experience
handling guns, because a gun is a tool, a very dangerous tool – at least as
dangerous as a car, even more so because it’s so portable – and back here, back
then, many people owned at least one of those tools. We were going to
understand and respect those tools no matter whose house we encountered them
in, and our training was sufficient that we could judge for ourselves whether
the guns in other houses we entered were safely handled.
I never had any interest in hunting, and didn’t like the
bang of the recoil of a shotgun against my tender shoulder; Brother, on the
other hand, became a hunter, and a trapper. Dead heads hang from his living room
walls, elk and venison reside in the deep chest freezer in his cellar, and
Niece, having grown up under the watchful eye of past game, is very fond of
those old heads – enough to take one to her own, grown-up home. Brother eats
what he hunts, and I sometimes do, as well. In the dark ages when we were growing up,
hunted meat still made up a reasonable percentage of rural people’s diets –
often a necessary percentage. I believe this to be much less true in our modern
dark ages, and I know that many rural folks – probably most – haven’t received
anything like the gun training we received as a matter of course, hunters or
not, if they’ve received any at all.
Tools vs Weapons
When I was a teenager Dad became a policeman, and from that
time onwards owned a revolver. That revolver started a new cycle of our
education about guns. He made sure we each got one opportunity to shoot his
revolver: he wanted us to understand, viscerally, how powerful it was, how hard
to control because of its weight and its recoil; he wanted us to see for
ourselves that it was nothing we ever, ever, would want to handle. He explained
carefully about how a revolver, as opposed to a rifle or shotgun, worked; and
how anyone casually handling one could accidentally shoot something they didn’t
mean to, because there would be a bullet you couldn’t see in the live chamber,
even after you’d removed the rest of the bullets. Making certain that hidden bullet
was removed before doing anything else with the gun – like cleaning it - was a
deadly responsibility, and took extra care to remember and a certain amount of
knowledge to accomplish.
For police and military, guns are weapons, and the mind-set
required to use that weapon is very different from the one that can hunt or
loves target practice. Because our training had been so careful, we got that – there were gun tools that
were appropriate for regular folks, and there were gun weapons that regular
folks would never need, and should not play with, lest they get burned.
When Dad retired from the police force, he kept a revolver,
and had a permit for concealed carry. Whether realistic or not, Dad was, as
many retired cops are, a little paranoid about his past occupation. No matter
how good a cop you are, people carry chips on their shoulders from interactions
they’ve had with even small town police, about even small-potatoes offenses –
give me a speeding ticket, will ya? We’ll see about that! Do you have any idea
who I am?!
From the time he
first became a cop, until the decades later when he retired, regular folks had
started acquiring weapon guns, even in rural, small towns, for reasons that had
nothing to do with them being a tool. Guns, in too many minds, had become a way
of acquiring power; of addressing injustices, real or imagined; of comforting a
feeling of fearfulness – fear of other people whose intentions one doesn’t
know, fear of imagined bogey-men, fear that one is weak and at risk, and feelings
of desperation. The guns that we debate, most often, and that cause most
damage, are no longer tools – guns are weapons. And a weapon is designed, and
intended, to kill another human being.
Dad’s post-retirement revolver was, in his mind, a way of
protecting himself from someone who might choose to use a weapon to correct
some injustice that person had suffered at the hands of my father, the cop. He
had a concealed carry permit and his revolver traveled with him under his car
seat; it lived in his bedside set of drawers when he slept. He didn’t carry it about wherever he went,
only to places where he felt uncertain; he kept it carefully put away at home. I
have to admit, the farther in time he lived past retirement, the more uncertain
I became about his need for weaponized security.
I don’t believe he would ever have actually used his
revolver; he was too well trained, and would have used every other means
available to him first. But as he grew older, and then after he became ill, he
didn’t always have his weapon under perfect control – and by that I mean that
he neglected, twice at least, to bring
it indoors with him when he arrived home, leaving it under the seat of his
locked car, and then sending me out to fetch it when he remembered; I may even
have driven that revolver unknowingly around town once when I used his car to
run errands for him – I don’t know and can’t know, because at the time, I
didn’t think about it often enough to realize I should check for it, which was,
in retrospect, a foolish error on my part. I trusted my Dad too much, even
though I knew he could not be perfect. I knew he had a gun, and it was my
responsibility – as he’d trained me – to be cognizant of the whereabouts and
condition of that gun at all times when I was in his space. I dropped the ball.
As he moved closer to the end of his life, Dad’s disease
began to play tricks on his mind. One night, he hallucinated a woman standing
in his bedroom, staring at him; another time, he “saw” a truck pulled up on his
second floor porch. At this time he kept his revolver in the drawer of his
bedside table, and, not as soon as I should have, it occurred to me that
leaving it there was very, very dangerous. I snuck into his room when he was
asleep – another foolish thing to do, when there is a weapon at the ready to
deal with intruders – and took it from its drawer. I called a policeman I know
to come remove the bullets – I remembered my early training, and knew it had
been far too long for me to do safely or completely. We hid the gun where Dad couldn’t possibly
get at it – a dangerous assumption, I note, as even people weak with
Alzheimer’s or cancer or other debilitating conditions can unexpectedly muster
the strength that enables them to do things we never believed possible – and
the policeman took away the ammo. Next day, I located the rest of the ammo and
it, too, left the building with someone who knew how to keep it safe. I had my
own brief flashback to when my father removed his father’s decades-unused guns from his house, during Gramp’s
last illness.
The First Threat
There are still hunters who are well-trained and who hunt
responsibly and ethically. There are target-shooters who are well-trained and extraordinarily
careful with their guns. These people understand that their guns are dangerous
tools, and they are, to a large extent, people about whom I don’t worry about
their gun ownership. They generally have a clarity about what their guns are, and
know precisely what they will use them for, what unplanned damage they can do, and
they know how to be extraordinarily careful and mitigate the likelihood of them
causing damage.
Some of the guns folks now hunt with however are no longer
tools, but weapons turned upon game animals, which would have horrified the
Hunter Safety instructors of my youth. Besides being totally unnecessary – like
using an axe to cut a bouquet of spring flowers, or a flame-thrower to light
your woodstove – the amount of power and destructive capability in these guns
was never originally intended for hunters.
Gun manufacturers have found a busy market and great profits, however, amongst
– well – I can’t easily call them sportsmen.
I have no problem with folks who can otherwise afford to eat well who
also want to hunt game to eat, or who donate their game to soup kitchens to
help feed the hungry; but jeez, guys, let’s at least keep it sporting. Your
manhood doesn’t suffer if you don’t get your limit every year; in fact, if you
really want to prove your skill, take up muzzle-loaders or bow and arrow
hunting. Those hunters are real hunters.
I’ll admit right now that the commentary I just made on
modern hunters isn’t fact written in stone, and an argument that I might even
eventually agree with could possibly be made to support
technologically-advanced hunting equipment. Possibly. But what is fact, is that
these technologically-advanced guns are no longer tools – they straddle the
divide between tool and weapon, perhaps remaining a tool in the minds of some
users, but in physical reality are absolutely weapons, and were originally
designed by the manufacturers to be weapons. Not admitting that fact – and not
being willing to make use – and enthusiastically promote the use - of
technology that can render the weapons harmless or unusable in the hands of the
untrained, or the foolish, or in those who have acquired illicit possession of
them – renders the hunters and target shooters who own such weapons dangerous.
Their arguments against standardizing such technology lack credibility, and the
owners themselves lose, not only a sympathetic hearing, but make me afraid.
Denying the danger posed by the wide-spread use and ownership of such weapons
solves nothing, but certainly expands a great cultural – and humanitarian -
divide.
I worry about those hunters – I don’t hear the clarity and
precision in their viewpoint that makes me feel comfortable. I don’t hear them
talking about Hunter Safety courses and carefully stored guns, about children
carefully schooled in gun safety, about passing on a careful, precise heritage.
What I hear, instead, is that acquisition of power has become the most
important thing, and that me, mine, what I want, now, now, NOW is more
important than everything else. I don’t hear caution, or safety, or respect for
life, or even reason. What I hear is a person with a weapon with a twitchy
finger on the safety – if the safety’s even on.
And I can’t even see if the catch is on or off, because these guys
bounce around so much, jumping and dodging and shouting, that I can’t make
sense of whether they understand – or care about - what’s truly at stake.
There are easily accessible solutions that, if deployed, could
make me content to keep my nose out of the business of these sportsmen, if they
would embrace the safety features, implement them on their own, and were joined
in this by the whole-hearted, vigorous support of state Fish and Game
departments, shooting clubs, and the sportsmen’s clubs that used to be in the
forefront of promoting safety measures. Technology can make it impossible to
use a gun if you aren’t its legal owner. Technology can be retrofitted to most,
if not all, these weapons. Technology that is safer than the old safety
catches, that would make it unlikely that a child could accidentally shoot a
gun that someone’s error let them get their hands on, that would make it
difficult if not impossible for an angry teenager hell-bent on destruction to
make use of his grandfather’s guns to prove some immature brain’s point, and
that wouldn’t create an unreasonable burden on the sportsman, exists. It’s
there. It won’t negate the need for
careful training and care in use and handling, but it would take a lot of the
scary out of these weapons. The Hunter Safety instructors, and Game wardens,
and fathers of my day – and even the NRA – would have been the first to welcome
and promote the use of these safety devices. That they don’t now – what does
this mean? Does it mean they enjoy all the unnecessary killings? Have they all
gone mad? I see no other reasonable interpretation, because surely a human
being, faced with a simple solution that could save other human lives, would
embrace that solution – wouldn’t they? They would put life on a higher plane
than temporary inconvenience, right?
The Second Threat
The gun owners I really, really worry about – that we should
all worry about, and by “we” I include other gun owners – are the ones who are
buying guns solely to use as weapons. These folks sometimes claim to have
received instruction, may have spent some time at a target range, and believe
themselves to be well-trained in gun use and gun safety - but they have no idea what proper training in the use of a weapon consists of. A
very few actually are trained. Most aren’t. Most, who think they’re trained,
have had someone show them how to load and fire their weapon, how to unload it
and clean it; and maybe they’ve spent some hours at a shooting range blasting
targets. What more is there, right? Well trained.
Consider the two of our elected state representatives in NH who
have, in the past few years, accidentally dropped their loaded, concealed
(until dropped) weapons onto the floor in the Legislative building, in rooms
filled with other people. These folks, one would think, have several extra,
driving reasons to demonstrate responsible gun ownership: but, Oops, both essentially said. There is no
excuse – none – for such an accident. Those two people are clearly not trained
properly, and are dangerous. They should not be allowed to own a gun. They were
incredibly lucky to have not shot someone, and they shouldn’t be given a second
chance. Ever. Being sternly spoken to by the presiding Republican (as it
happens) is not a sufficient consequence.
How many times does this happen, in homes, in stores, in
cars, one wonders? We know that children have gotten their hands on guns that
were in Mom’s purse, or that Dad left sitting on a table, or that for any
number of reasons weren’t unloaded, and weren’t properly locked up. We know
that every year, someone who wasn’t trained properly, or who wasn’t focused on
their task, shoots themselves – or someone else who shouldn’t have been in the
room – while cleaning their weapon. That list of “accidental shootings” goes
on, and on, and doesn’t even cover the accidents that actual hunters have when
they aren’t well-trained, or let their caution take second place to some
distraction.
People who have bought a weapon have bought something that has just one purpose – to kill
another human being. We all need to assume, very seriously, that anyone who
owns such a thing has every intention of pointing it at another human, and
attempting to kill them. Not maybe; not
only if they have to; but absolutely. And that any person who carries their
weapon around with them intends to do so at any moment, without warning. We
would be fools to think otherwise, and fools to think that we won’t be their target.
One problem with this situation is multi-polar: on the one
hand, the person who buys a weapon somehow believes that the simple act of
having a weapon means they’ll never need to use it. On the other hand, that
person believes themselves to be capable – physically, mentally and
psychologically – to actually shoot another human being if they do need to. On
the third hand, that person believes that they will somehow be capable of
determining when they need to shoot another human being, and which human should
be shot. And on yet another hand – some of these folks are so eager to prove
that they are under threat and capable of acting, that they will indeed shoot
someone, first chance they get – and it’s unlikely to be a bad guy.
Police and military personnel are actually trained to shoot
other human beings. Not only do they have the weapons training, but they have
training in how to identify an actual bad guy, how to decide whether it’s
actually safe to shoot the bad guy, and how to do so without getting shot
themselves or killing innocent bystanders. They’ve been trained to decide when
it’s actually appropriate to shoot
another human being. Outside of an actual war situation, both will tell you
it’s extremely difficult to shoot another human being. And even harder to do it
right – just read the news to see how many times it goes wrong, how many times
these folks – with specialized training – do it wrong; or can’t do it at all.
Specialized training does not consist of taking pot-shots at
a human-outline target in an indoor target shooting range. I don’t care what
the range instructor told you – he lied. If you aren’t a member of a police
force, military unit, or related government
agency with specialized weapons training, you have NOT received the training
you need to be armed with a weapon and for me to be safe anywhere near you.
We can expect that someone who is so afraid of other people
that they need to have a gun at hand to feel safe, aren’t going to lock up
their guns, even at home – after all, if you think you’re going to have to
protect yourself at any moment from a home invasion, you aren’t going to want
to go fetch the key to the gun safe, then go open the gun safe, then go get the
key for the ammo, then go get the ammo, then load the gun before you shoot at
the invaders. Those people are going to feel righteously justified keeping
their loaded guns at their sides; or under their beds when they sleep; or maybe
even casually placed on a coffee table or countertop while they run to the
bathroom, or talk on the phone, or take a shower, or change a diaper, or make
supper. And when they enter a situation
they consider dangerous – the local grocery store, for example, or a theater,
or the bank – they’re likely to find it easy to convince themselves that it’s
ok to unbuckle the strap that keeps their hidden gun from launching itself out
of the holster if the wearer moves wrong; or leave their little pistol in their
purse on the shopping cart seat while they read package labels, or talk to the
butcher – aimed at who knows whom? Those seconds it takes to unbuckle, unsnap,
undo the strap, retrieve the gun, could mean the difference between being the
hero and being shot – right? And they won’t drop the gun accidentally - no, of
course they won’t. That never
happens.
Those people wouldn’t do any of those things if they had
been properly trained. And the truth is, if they had been properly trained, they wouldn’t own those guns, because
the training would convince them that they – as civilians, as parents, as
responsible community members - can’t possibly own a weapon for protection, and
safely manage it, much less effectively and safely use it.
I worry about those people. Too many have been hyped-up by
others like them, by gun manufacturers, by target range owners, by the NRA, and
are just itching to demonstrate that they,
actually, can effectively use their weapons and protect themselves and others. They
can’t wait to prove themselves right, which is a very dangerous mind-set. These
people have done – and will continue to – shoot innocents (and sometimes
themselves). Maybe it’ll be the son or daughter away at college who comes home
for a surprise visit and arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the night; maybe
it’ll be a paperboy whose aim was off and is poking around in the bushes near
your front window trying to retrieve the lost newspaper; maybe it’ll be a
stranger who” looks suspicious” but is just taking a walk, or maybe a stranger
who does something unexpected but not at all threatening. A number of these armed citizens will have
their weapons taken from them, as they fumble to get it out and the safety off,
and used against them by someone who might be a threat – but who might not have
shot them, had there been no gun causing a bigger threat. One might almost
consider that ironic justice.
I worry about those people because they get too much encouragement
and they don’t have any common sense. They’re told that sure, they’ll be able
to protect themselves; that sure, they’ll be able to do it without killing
innocents; that they’ll be the hero of the day. You see it in the movies all
the time, right? No one ever tells them that in a shooting situation, there’s
chaos; that it’s often impossible to identify, or even see, the bad guy; that
while they’re fumbling in their purses or under their coats with their shoulder
holsters, or in the waistbands of their pants (an excellent place to store a
loaded weapon if you want to shoot yourself), or under their bed, in a
night-time home invasion, they’re likely to get shot in the head or the balls
before they ever get their weapon out. No one tells them that when they’re
scared to death, their hand will shake, and they won’t be able to get the
safety off, or once they do, they won’t be able to aim accurately, and their
eyes will be full of tears, or smoke, and they’ll be shitting themselves, and
they won’t be able to stand and aim because they’ll be lying on the floor
hiding, or surrounded by people trying to trample them, and they won’t be able
to even raise their heads. No one tells them. No one tells them that policemen
and military who are much better trained, and who receive continual training so
it can’t grow stale, in a similar situation would not be able to do what these
gun owners imagine they can do. And no
one tells them that if they’re unexpectedly successful – that if they somehow,
against all odds, manage to get their weapon out and blast the bad guy and no
one else in the process - that if they’re good people, they’ll be haunted by
that act for the rest of their lives.
And I especially worry about the people who are arming
themselves to protect themselves from the other, seriously deluded people I
worry about. These people will end up dead or horribly traumatized; and they
will spend the rest of their lives trying to make sense of the darkness that
entered their souls long enough to let them go out and buy a weapon.
The Third Branch of Threats
People seem to forget that what we see in the movies isn’t
actually real – real life scenarios don’t play out like movie scripts, and
there’s no cameraman directing our attention to the proper areas of
danger. People today – ordinary people -
are irritable – very, very irritable, and often rude, and impatient, and don’t
have filters or checks on their emotions, and often don’t see any reason to
have such when dealing with strangers. Pair that with our speed of travel, and
our almost complete lack of control over who is carrying a weapon and where
they’re carrying it, and an imagined or real conflict that in the old days
would have exhausted itself before something bad happened, doesn’t have time to
exhaust itself – summary, emotion-driven, thoughtless resolutions are too easy
to accomplish. If I had a grudge with the town officers and had to stomp 5
miles back home, or ride the horse back, or even drive the old car back, get my
gun out and load it, then stomp all the way back to town, chances are good that
I’d have cooled off before I got there and not actually shot someone. Today all
I have to do is reach into my purse and pull a trigger. I don’t even have to
pull it out.
We, some of us, also have an irrational idea that we’re
always in imminent danger. We aren’t. Though - with the trend towards letting
anyone and everyone own any kind of weapon they like and carry it hidden
anywhere they choose to go – maybe we are.
Our current politicians have encouraged violent reactions to
political opponents; our current president has incited violence, surrounded
himself with minions who also do so, and has implied that righteous violence is
ok, won’t be punished. Our current governor and state legislature have also
encouraged the mind-set that being armed is good. This understandably gives comfort and
encouragement to the lunatic fringe in our society, which seems to be growing
bigger by the moment. The people who, in the past, we could rely on to protect
us from our lesser selves, are now eagerly promoting bad behavior.
There are also people whose mental conditions don’t preclude
them from owing a gun – someone with untreated mental illness, untreated PTSD
especially from a war-time situation, anger management issues, and chronic
illness, or even advanced age, that can unexpectedly cause that person to act
in unpredictable ways. All these people, in our current world, can and do have
weapons.
And then there are the people who are stockpiling weapons,
certain that one or another politician or government is going to need to be
opposed – by an untrained militia of yahoos who have no tanks, no bombs, no
sense. These people are more than slightly insane, and so, scary and
dangerous. Put into this category also
the people who are preparing for the zombie apocalypse, or the end of days, and
determined to protect themselves and their stuff from the rest of us – to what
end, exactly? What kind of a world would remain for them to live in?
What Next?
I don’t know, honestly. I do know I’ve heard more than
enough about the threat to the Second Amendment. At this point in time, the
threat to all our lives should take precedence. The folks who wrote the 2nd
Amendment lived in a world of mainly muskets, which couldn’t easily be hidden
(and also weren’t very accurate). They lived in a time when most everyone had a
gun because they needed it to acquire food, and it was a useful tool. They
didn’t live in a time when civilians were trying to kill each other for reasons
that would have made no more sense to them than it does to most of us; they
didn’t live in a time when people received no training in the use of the
extremely deadly tools they owned, and were as likely to shoot at other humans
than not.
They couldn’t have imagined today, nor the firepower
available to the common person, nor the kind of weapons all military have, nor
the kind of weapons terrorists – even our own terrorists – turn against
innocent people. The Framers wanted to be sure the citizenry could form a
militia – but I really doubt that means they would think it ok that today’s citizens
own tanks, and military fire-power, and bombs, and missile launchers, and the
rest of the gear we’d need to actually fight a war or defend ourselves against
an invading military force. They weren’t seers. Sometimes – like now, only
about 250 years after they wrote down the ideas that made good sense in their
time – we’re going to have to adjust our understanding to fit the modern state
of things, and maybe even re-write their words to fit the world today. They
would be the first to say so, and several did, in fact.
We don’t necessarily need to ban guns completely. We do need
to make it impossible for the crazies, the morbidly frightened, the untrained,
the racists, the self-proclaimed heroes, and anyone with a serious impediment
to safe use to have free access to them. We need a stringent national training
program designed to cover specifically the type of gun you want to own, that
must be passed before anyone can own
a gun, of any type – even if you inherited it, Bubba; and repeated every two
years while in possession of a gun. We need a no-forgiveness policy: you do
something dangerous with your gun, you lose all gun privileges forever. And yes – I’ll say it again - everyone who
owns a gun – tool or weapon – needs to prove, immediately, that they can safely
handle that type of gun for the purpose it was designed for – tool or weapon –
or lose possession of it, immediately. No exceptions.
We need to immediately ensure that all weapons are fitted
and remain updated with the most current technology to remain usable only by
the person who has proved they are trained to use it. And we need to eliminate
from that category all persons about whom we have good reason to question their
reasoning capacity or their legal capacities – for example, beat your wife? No
gun for you. Ever killed someone? Unless
it was unquestionably in self-defense, no gun for you. No longer physically or mentally capable of
getting a driver’s license, for example, or have a diagnosis of uncontrolled
depression, PTSD, mental illnesses, etc.? No gun for you. And maybe, in some
circumstances, for some people, you can prove yourself capable of safely
handling a gun, but maybe you shouldn’t be able to have it always about your
person, or in your home. Maybe you store your gun at a secure site, and check
it out when you’re going target shooting, or during hunting season.
Still worried about the Second Amendment? Fine. Let anyone
who wants one have a musket, which is what the framers of the Constitution had
in mind for weaponry when they wrote that.
We need, also, to have a serious national conversation about
why, in past years, we’ve let the incomprehensible demands of incautious
gun-owners and –promoters to take precedence over common sense and human
safety. Why, for even a moment, have we made ease of acquisition of these
dangerous weapons more important that public safety? Why, for even a second,
have we seriously considered making concealed carry legal, and permitting even open
carry in public places? Have we all gone mad? We – most especially the gun
owners and politicians who promote such things – need to seriously, and
soberly, consider what those concepts have done to our humanity, and the safety
of all of us. This isn’t about one person’s preference over another – this is
about basic human standards.
I wrote this not to preach to the choir; I wrote this hoping
that if you’re a gun owner, you read it and don’t react – that you stop, and
listen, and think about it and remember that most of what I’ve said here is
what we all thought, not long ago. If
you’re also an excessively enthusiastic 2nd Amendment promoter, think back and remember – when did you start
to believe that your right to gun ownership was at risk? Because not at all, in
the 60 years I’ve been on this earth, has there been an actual threat to those
rights; and not until gun owners started to insist that their ownership and
easy access to guns and the freedom to carry them everywhere are more important
than the safety of us all, did anyone start to seriously talk about defining
and regulating any part of those rights. Only when your demands became scarily nonsensical
and strident did most of us care. So - when did you decide that your ownership
of any type of gun, and as many guns as you want, was more important than
public safety? When did it become ok
with you that you’re scaring the bejeezus out of the rest of us? Because as it
stands now, your demands about gun ownership are seriously threatening my
Constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the right
to live without fear; the right to feel safe in my home, and in the public and
private spaces of our towns - even if you, too, are there. We can’t have a
discussion until you do some sober contemplation and stop shouting.
We need our politicians to stand up and show some balls,
instead of their concealed weapons. The NRA is only as powerful as you believe
them to be, and there are a lot more of us
than there are of them. And we need to make sure our politicians
hear us – loudly, clearly, over and over and over, until they begin to get it,
and put lives higher on their list of priorities than winning the NRA’s
approbation.
Start in your home state. The national politicians won’t be
able to clearly hear us until we do something they have to pay attention to –
so change the laws locally, first. And toss the bastards who refuse to do so
out of office.
We
are all Witnesses. Written solely for the blog, from the Edge of Darkness, February 25, 2017.
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| Art by Debra Marshall |
