From the Edge of Darkness 12: Gun Gal 5, Abnormal

Trashcan, Charley Freiberg photo

 This is what’s wrong with the plans to reduce gun violence: it’s the use of that little word “reduce” that should be replaced with “end.”

 

This is what’s wrong with any plans to arm teachers: besides the obvious: if you arm a bunch of teachers, you’ll end up with teachers shooting students and other teachers, teachers being shot by students and other teachers and police, and teachers who discover they can’t actually shoot whoever’s shooting at them but endangering the police who would be able to deal with the shooter if there weren’t a bunch of armed civilians in the way. 

Besides that – what’s wrong with you people who suggest such a thing? Do you not remember being a kid? Do you really think an armed teacher is going to stop a kid who’s determined to shoot up a school – if that kid even considers the possibility of meeting a teacher who’s armed, which probably won’t cross their minds, picking off armed teachers when you’re planning to shoot as many of your fellow students as you can just adds to the insane thrill. Anyone – kid or adult – who goes hunting at schools isn’t worried about getting shot. They know they’re going to get shot. Police will come and shoot them. They aren’t weighing the possibility of personal danger when they decide to go hunting humans.  Get real. Arming teachers won’t solve the problem, and it compounds the problem of ending an on-going attack by putting weapons in the hands of even more civilians who shouldn’t have them and encouraging them to shoot at other civilians.

Stop shouting for a minute, rabid gun nuts, and let me remind you of a few things we’ve all known for a very long time: The threat of the death penalty or personal harm doesn’t stop people from committing acts of violence activated by passion, anger, religious fervor, fear, insanity, or the drive to make any kind of an emotion-driven political point.  The only people committing crimes who actually first consider the relative personal risks associated with the method and tools and weapons they might use during their crime are professional criminals. Professionals want to live to be bad another day, and they don’t shoot up schools, or churches, or concert goers, or movie patrons, or club patrons…  People who are shooting other people don’t care whether they live or die – if they think about it at all, they expect they’ll die in the process and have decided it’s worth it. If they’re kids shooting up other people, we know they don’t really understand the consequences, we know they don’t think it through carefully, we can expect that taking out a few armed teachers will simply mean to them that they’ve earned bigger points, better revenge, more glory. Arm teachers and you’ll make the problem worse.

This is what’s wrong with these plans: they make no sense except in a deranged fantasy world – a world in which school shootings are common, and the people in that world talk about reducing the violence, not ending it forever.

This is what’s wrong with people who say, it’s not the guns; who say, having and carrying guns is our right; who say, it’s our right to be able to defend ourselves and our loved ones; who say, the second amendment is a form of free speech. What’s wrong is – listen to yourselves, for heaven’s sake! 

We aren’t in the Wild West anymore – or, we weren’t, until you who have manipulated and bribed our politicians to create the opportunity for anyone to own and carry as many guns, as many kinds of guns, in as many places in public as possible, have made it so. You don’t have enemies from whom you need to protect yourselves 24/7. If you actually do, you need to make some serious life changes, starting with who you hang out with and how you’re interacting with them.  And if you don’t have real enemies, but you’re wasting money on more and more guns and carrying them around with you everywhere in order to scare the living daylights out of the rest of us, you’re either beset with paranoid delusions and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a gun, or you’ve become the person you imagine you’re protecting yourself from.

It isn’t normal to think you’re at risk of being shot at every time you go out in public. It isn’t normal to think you need to carry a firearm in public. It isn’t normal to believe you’re going to have to fend off a home invasion. It isn’t normal to think you need loaded firearms at the ready in your car and houses, in your places of work and your places of leisure. It isn’t normal to plan to shoot at fellow citizens, and it’s really, really not normal to be ready and willing to do so at any moment. 

We aren’t under attack from insidious enemies. We aren’t in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. We aren’t at war with our government, and if we were, your piddling guns wouldn’t do you any good against modern weapons of war, anyway. You aren’t a secret hero who will save the mindless masses from a sudden evil attack. You aren’t. You don’t need those guns you’re so fond of. And every time you go out of your house armed, you’re seriously offending the rest of us, and worse, you’ve become the enemy – you’ve become the insane person we need to fear. It isn’t normal to walk around armed.

This is what’s wrong with allowing unrestricted, liberal access to weapons and ammunition and  freedom to carry: It isn’t normal to encourage insane and dangerous behavior. It isn’t normal for people to carry guns in the grocery store, the restaurant, the movie theater. It isn’t normal to believe that the average Joe requires weapons to live and work safely. 

We’ve let a paranoid delusion become something we take seriously. We’ve let the inmates take over the psychiatric ward. And just one example is that we’re actually tolerating a discussion about arming teachers as a way to make schools safe for children. That we’re discussing it as if it were actually a reasonable suggestion. That we’re coddling our delusional fellow citizens and trying to live with and not judge their paranoid fantasy. That we haven’t wrested the discussion out of the hands of the deluded.

This is what’s wrong with this scenario: It is the guns. And it’s also the people who own the guns, hoard the guns, sell the guns, leave the guns lying around loaded, carry the guns in public. It takes a long time to cure mass delusion. It takes a lot less time to remove the guns.

This is what’s wrong with this scenario: If the NRA talking heads and its radicalized members aren’t controlled by its sensible, responsible members and the many responsible and still sane gun owners who aren’t NRA members, the rest of us are going to have to force the only real solution – an end to private gun ownership. You gun owners who aren’t scary and who aren’t deluded and who still live in the real world and are alarmed and offended by the insanity the gun nuts have perpetrated need to stand up now and loudly and actively become proponents of true and effective restrictions on gun ownership, sales, carry, and type of guns and gun gear that may be procured and by whom. Otherwise, you’ll have shot yourself in the foot, become hoist by your own petard. And the rest of us will have to force our politicians to turn their backs on all gun owners and do the ultimate, right thing.

And you NH Republican state legislators who refused this week  to hear gun control legislation on prohibiting people under 21 from buying weapons and banning bump stocks and devices like them: SHAME, SHAME, SHAME  on all of you! We are all Witnesses, and we won’t forget.

For the blog, 9 March 2018.