From the Edge of Darkness 13: Gun Gal 6: Only Three Shot This Week

Screen; Charley Freiberg photo

Only three kids shot in school this past week…hardly enough to mention. Oh – and threats to Hanover high school, Kearsarge middle school, Pittsfield schools; and a principal in the Upper Valley told me he’d had to send three kids home this week, not allowed to come back until they’ve had psychological evaluations: two were so scared about all the happy gun news they were having repeated suicidal ideations, and the third threatened to shoot another student. Did I miss anything? Like maybe the two teachers who shot their guns at school, one of them wounding a student – by mistake?

My generation is full of old ladies and old men who, back in the day (and sadly, now in more current days) spent a lot of time demonstrating for peace, for civil rights, against wars. They make signs, they car pool, they bring their backpacks filled with many bottles of water, extra gloves and hats, and wear sensible shoes. On the ride to rallies and marches, they talk about their grandkids, their kids, the last demonstration they went to. This time, getting ready for the March For Our Lives rally in Concord, it was different. One big difference was the pride the older, experienced generation felt in the schoolkids who have taken hold of this life-or-death issue and are on fire with it – woe to the prostituting politician who doesn’t recognize that these kids will be voters in another year, or who believes the passion will fizzle out long before then.

The other difference was in the whispered conversations prior to climbing into the car pool vehicles, on the phone, in the town meeting places, prior to committing to join this protest. “Will it be safe?” was a guilt-ridden question. “Will some nutcase come by and shoot us up? Should we try to find some bulletproof vests?”  We all thought it; we all hated to say it aloud; but we all felt, deep in ourselves, that it was a real possibility. “But we have to be there for the kids,” we decided. “How can we not be there?”

As it happens, no one came by to take potshots at the crowd; and it was a crowded crowd, full of little children, courageous, smart, dedicated almost-adult children, their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and neighbors, old protesters, new rally goers, church people and not church people and lots of well-behaved dogs, and some great, great signs: “You can shoot my kids, but don’t touch my AR-15”; “What part of #NEVER AGAIN don’t you understand?”; “Owning an AR-15 isn’t a  2^nd Amendment right”; “The NRA is a domestic terrorist organization”; a list of how many millions of dollars have been donated by the NRA and accepted by many of the most prominent politicians;  and the saddest -  the names and death dates of individual school kids killed by weapon-wielding gunslingers. 

So many, many poignant signs carried by so many, many angry and courageous people – some of them cautiously wearing bullet-proof vests  under their winter woolies – who, after it was over, made it feel like a typical NH public meeting – some music, some folks dancing a little, some costumes, lots of groups talking, people coming and going and taking photos. It was a warmish and kinda sunny day in New Hampshire near the end of March after a long, horrible winter – how could spirits not be high?

In the very middle of it stood perhaps the most courageous rally-goer of all: a man dressed all in camo, carrying a big sign: I own 5 guns and hunt, and I’m against AR-15s, bump stocks, and in favor of background checks and registration.  I made a point of going over to thank that man and say I wish more gun-owners who felt the same way had the balls to stand up and say so in public. “I don’t think there are too many like me,” he said. I think – I hope – he’s wrong  – I think there are a lot of gun owners who hunt or target shoot who are as horrified by what’s happening as we are: but I think those gun owners are even more afraid of the radicalized, fear-mongering gunslingers than we unarmed folks are.

It’s time for us who are already old enough to vote to stop hoping things will change, and stop waiting to make changes while we try to persuade the radical gunslingers towards reason. We need to take back the streets, our public places, and especially our schools. The first part of doing that is to make our politicians, who have prostituted themselves and their votes to the NRA, understand that we’ve had enough – we need to scare the NRA out of them. Dance with the enemy, and you’re out. No more ducking questions about patronage; no more avoiding direct answers to questions. The kids have shown us how to get into their faces and hold on tight – now we must prove ourselves as tenacious as they are.

Secondly, we need to re-educate ourselves. All those laws that have been passed making ease of acquisition, freedom of carry, lack of regulation of kinds and types of guns and ammo and gear that the NRA has brainwashed us into believing are upholding 2^nd Amendment rights? They aren’t 2^nd Amendment anything – they’re just bad laws that we’ve made, and they can be unmade just as quickly. 

Part of this re-education of ourselves is to understand, and state clearly, that we recognize that many of the abhorrent laws we’ve made, and the fear-mongering we’ve permitted, are at base driven by the NRA in order to make money. Commerce and profits drive most of the NRA’s lying propaganda, not a high-minded desire to keep citizens free.

Third, we need to stop being over-precious about our gun-slingers’ sensibilities. The paranoia and fear that drive people to want to be armed at all times, in all places, and to believe that they aren’t safe if they aren’t armed, is a pathology, not a difference of opinion. 

It’s time to call it what it is, and stop letting those people run around in public carrying weapons with which they can kill their boogey-men.  We need to become quite clear that we are the ones they’re planning to kill, and we need to disarm them whenever they’re in any kind of public place. A related pathology is the hero-syndrome that some of them seem to have (“only good men with guns can protect us from bad men with guns”). These are the even more dangerous ones, because they are just waiting, finger on trigger, for a chance to prove their heroism.

Fourth, we need to slap some sense into our politicians, who have become so used to voting the wrong way that they probably no longer recognize the right way even when it punches them in the face.  We had two recent opportunities in NH to start fixing our gunslinger fever, one by making schools gun-free zones. One of the most ridiculous arguments against it was that it would inconvenience any gunslinger who was picking up their kid at school. The proper response to that should have been: Tough. Not relevant.

We also need to recognize that a number of our politicians, local and national, have the same brain-worm pathology as the other radicalized gun owners, and we need to weed them out. It’s not a good idea to let the inmates set the rules for the asylum.

Fifth, we need to reach out to, and embrace, gun owners like the fella with the sign at the rally. There are a bunch of them out there, and they’re afraid to stand up and speak out. The NRA and its radicalized members are scaring them, too; they’re told that if they vote for any gun restriction laws that soon there will be no guns. I’m not going to argue here whether that might not be the best solution, but I will say it’s an unlikely solution for the near future in our country; and I sincerely doubt that most of us would want to completely disarm hunters and target shooters and collectors of old guns who lawfully and responsibly operate under new, safer laws – which I expect will look a lot like the old, safer laws that we had before the NRA and its minions got all our panties in a twist about how people need to protect themselves. Gun owners – the sane, responsible ones – are our allies, and we should be encouraging them to speak up and describe for us what responsible gun ownership, training, sales and use could look like. 

Finally, we need to recognize that most gun deaths come slowly, day by day, hour by hour, when friends shoot friends, depressed children and others commit suicide, accidental gun shootings pick off a person here, another there, disgruntled or violent family members decide to off each other.  We need to immediately do everything we can to stop as many of these deaths as possible, which can include mandatory safety devices retrofitted to old firearms and required on new firearms; limiting sales of ammo and devices that load continuous rounds; making a 30-day wait period mandatory before any sale or inheritance of any firearm and requiring careful health and other safety checks during that time; outlawing sales of firearms and ammo over the internet and outlawing private sales; outlawing sales to any young person – I’d like to see the age set at 30, honestly, as it’s at that age that we know the hormone-ridden minds of men, especially, start to calm down and get more reasonable, and when most folks have acquired families or jobs or social standing  and community ties that will make them less likely to commit mayhem.  We should also immediately ban all assault and semi-automatic weapons, requiring immediate surrender and buy-back of all that are already out there and huge, painful penalties for anyone who doesn’t comply.

And let’s talk about it folks – we really need to. Registering guns themselves, and licensing gun owners, are good ideas. I can hear the NRA gunslingers barking wildly at the mere hint of it, but if we’re serious about ending gun violence, we’re going to have to go there, sooner or later.

This isn’t nearly a comprehensive list, but it’s a start. And once we’ve gotten the nonsense back under control, we can turn our attention to actual, local threats: I heard that a neighbor in a near-by town, last week, went out to their garage to get the car out to go to work, and discovered a newly-wakened and very hungry bear lounging atop it. Apparently the neighbor’s side garage door was open, though the big door was shut; and someone had left some food in the car. First the bear hopped up on the hood and danced all over it, trying unsuccessfully to get in through the windshield; after denting the hood the bear climbed up on the roof and tried to get into the car that way. I imagine it gave up and took a nap in a bear-shaped dent until the surprised car owner arrived.

Big garage door opened from a distance, and the bear soon exited. I’d love to have been an eavesdropper to the conversation between that startled car owner and their insurance agent!

For the blog alone, 25 March 2018

Equinox

Cabin fever medicine; Deb Marshall photo

Equinox 

20 March: 10 degrees out at noon, and a brisk breeze has blown all the birdseed off the wart rail, onto the well-piled-up snowbanks below.  By 4 pm we’re in a heat-wave: 26 degrees in full sun. Happy Spring – Ha! The weather gods are continuing to have their sport with us. My personal theory is that the awfulness of the weather can be measured in direct proportion to the number of New Englanders traveling south in an attempt to flee the last throes of winter – the more that go, the worse the weather is, and it’ll serve them right if their cars are snowed- and iced-in at the airport when they get back at midnight. They will get no sympathy from me.

At least it doesn’t look like we’re going to get the fourth nor’-easter in three weeks that we’ve been threatened with for the past few days. Good thing, too, because if we had another foot or more of snow dumped on us again, a number of us are just going to go back to bed for the duration – wake us up around this time next month. Or maybe in May. As my mother once said, gazing sadly out the back door at the giant pile of snow covering her garden, “Well, it doesn’t look like that’s going to melt in time to plant anything this year.” 

There’s an old folktale I read about years ago that says that in the norther regions of New England, old folks who can’t face another cold winter lie down sometime in early December and go into deep hibernation. The younger folks wait ‘til the oldsters are stiff and cold, then pile ‘em up in the barn shed and cover ‘em with a tarp for the winter, just like fire wood. Come spring, they haul the bodies back out into the sun and sooner or later the old folks thaw out and get up and go do chores, no worse for wear, and more rested and cheerier than the rest of the population. 

Waiting for a reason to exist; Deb Marshall photo

Even though it’s pretty frosty out today– or, as a schoolmate of mine who grew up in the town I now live in used to say, “It’s chum chilly,” the sun has meandered closer enough to our small ball of flying dirt and water that the snow on the south side of the roof is melting even in the below-freezing temperatures. The moat between the house on the south side and the raised beds has opened up yet again, though the raised beds are again covered with feets of snow. Dirt, and Catmandoo rolling in it, can be seen if you look closely enough.

It’s impossible to get to the compost bins again without wading knee-high through the stuff, but the cold temperatures have tightened up the mudhole we call a driveway enough so that we can drive over and flatten out the highest ridges of snowy mud/muddy snow, and we haven’t lost a car into the icy depths of the driveway pond yet. The UPS fella has taken to leaving our deliveries at the neighbor’s house, even so, and I don’t blame him – I didn’t make it to town meetin’ this year because I was seriously afraid that if I went out again that evening, I’d be trying to extricate my car from the mudhole at midnight, in the dark. Lose hope, all ye who venture here.

My Christmas cactuses are setting buds again – my Christmas cactuses seem to bloom only on Hallowe’en and on Easter, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that. Several of the orchids, which live in the west window of the dining room, far from the woodstove, are also setting buds. My calla lilies are producing some lovely large foliage, but there’s no sign of a flower bud this year. The Historian tells me he has a tomato plant about to blossom in his house, which is just fascinating, and will be even more so if it actually sets fruit. 

Window watchers - see the tall snowbanks in the background? Deb Marshall photo

We’re pretty much in full-blown cabin fever mode here. No one, two-legged or four-legged, is interested in eating anything I cook, and I’m not interested in cooking anything. Nothing we can find to watch on Netflix is interesting, and all books have lost their savor – I actually tossed one out today after reading only 150 pages of it. Sleeping has become a nightly battle – too cold, too hot, too cold, too hot, a constant removing and replacing and rearranging of bed clothes and blankets and not a lot of sleep happening. We snarl and hiss and bark at each other a lot, and at the office, I’ve managed to crack the giant window open an inch even though it’s too cold for it, because I just can’t bear to breathe stale winter air any longer. A few weeks ago, we were feeling pretty confident that the fire wood would take us through the end of the season; today, we’re not so sure. And the oil company just announced we’ve used a lot more of our prepaid oil than we’d contracted for.

And then there’s the news – best not to read it or listen to it unless you’re hoping for a shot of fiery adrenalin to wake you up out of the winter stupor. There hasn’t been another time in my lifetime when being a responsible citizen was so exhausting. Courage! Summer – and, we hope, some sort of sanity – will probably get here eventually.

For the blog alone, 20 March 2018: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com 

Winter menagerie; Deb Marshall photo