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| 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 2nd 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 2nd Amendment rights?
They aren’t 2nd 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
For the blog alone, 25 March 2018
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