Gunslingers and Goodbyes: From the Edge of Darkness 16

Water on window screen; Charley Freiberg photo

 Gunslingers and Goodbyes

It’s September. Schoolkids have been sweltering in the classroom for a week or longer, The Old Farmer’s Almanac is out on the newsstands, the fall raspberries are in full flower and keeping the bees busy, and my winter squashes are starting to color up. Buzzy Boy is still here – or at least, he was yesterday, taking time out from patrolling the scarlet runner bean flowers to hover near me in the garden, then chase me back to the house at dusk. Whether that was his pre-migration seasonal farewell I’ll know only when I don’t see him anymore.

We’ve said farewell to others, lately: sadly to Mom’s cat, last Monday, and to Aretha Franklin; not so sadly to a number of summer folks who disappear around this time of year, then magically reappear on Columbus Day weekend, then fade away again until the black flies arrive in the spring. I’ve wondered if they’re hidden away in a burrow someplace out back in the woods until snow melt, early hibernators. 

We also said farewell to John McCain last week. He inhabits a strange and kind of bumpy place in my mind, and I was surprised to find myself sniffling a little bit as I listened to part of his services in Washington on Thursday. 

There seemed to be two John McCains – the good one, who, though a member of a different party and a champion of some political ideas I couldn’t swallow, still was clearly a man who had the good of the whole nation at heart, and believed in fair play and justice; the same man who came back from his sickbed to cast the meaningful “no” vote when the Republicans tried to blow up the ACA, because he wouldn’t tolerate the partisan shenanigans that were going on in this administration; the man about whom, when he ran for Republican presidential candidate against George Dub-ya , I thought, “Well, if he wins, and then wins the election, at least I don’t worry that we won’t be safe.” The good John was someone that someone like me could disagree with but not fear; the world wasn’t going to come to an end when he was involved. 

But then there was the evil John, who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, and who during that run for president too often bent away from his best instincts to appeal to the rabid part of the Republican party. Sarah Palin, we can see now, was the door that opened politics to the scummy shenanigans and self-serving characters we’re saddled with now. She was ignorant, crass, aligned herself with guns and violence, and lied without shame; and yet, because “she said what she was thinking,” some people loved her beyond all reason. I believe that had we not had Sarah Palin, Donald the Chump would have had a much harder time gaining a foothold. Sarah opened minds to the possibilities of bad behavior and gave people their first taste of feeling empowered and justified by the unimaginable. The evil John brought us with that mistake, which engendered a bigger and more dangerous mistake, left us in serious danger; and though he regretted it later, and did what he could to mitigate the error, even so, It’s a bitter irony.

And yet, I sniffled a little. John McCain’s passing may mean that the last – or nearly last – true public servant in what was once the Grand Old Party has fallen. And without John, the unquestionable true patriot, to point out the ongoing nastiness and dirty tricks, there’s no one left in that party who has a chance in hell of shaming the remains into good behavior. Just listening to the opening of the Senate hearings on Brett Kavanaugh proved that unfortunate truth.

Here in New Hampshire, we’ve also been presented during the past two weeks of a near-miss gun-slinging tragedy. Newspaper reports tell us that on the coast, some teenager went into the wrong house in the middle of the night looking for a party he’d been told was there, but that wasn’t there. Like an idiot, which teenagers mostly are, when he went into the dark house and didn’t hear partying, or see partiers, instead of saying, “Oops!” and sneaking quietly back out before he disturbed anyone, he went upstairs looking for the party, and opened the bedroom door of a pair of adult idiots who think that a gun is the proper solution to a weird situation. When the teen heard a woman say to the man, “Get the gun,” he hightailed it out of the house. In the meantime, the woman apparently took a more direct route out and was reported to be standing by the kid’s vehicle taking down license info when the kid finally made it to his car, and her gun-slinging man arrived in time to blast away at the kid as he bashed his way out of the area.

Why, one wonders, when the gun-slinger saw his woman standing by the vehicle taking down info, did he feel it necessary to shoot at the kid? Did he not notice it was a kid? Even if it had been an adult, did he not think that calling the police would be a better response? Why did the woman not say, “Whoa, baby, I got this under control!”? And why did she not ask the kid what the hell he thought he was doing wandering around her dark house in the middle of the night?

What would they have said had they managed to kill the kid? Which the gunslinger was, clearly, trying to do. “Oops” just doesn’t cover it. These are two more people who should lose their privilege to own or use a gun forever. The man was arrested – he broke all sorts of laws (it isn’t legal to shoot at a fleeing person outside your house, in probably any state, although there are a few I wonder about) - but, more importantly – what was in that idiot’s mind? If he hadn’t had a gun, he would have done the right thing, the thing any right-minded person would have done in that or any similar situation – flipped on some lights so they could see who was in their house, got the phone and called the police, made some loud noises to scare the intruder off, then seen if they could safely take down license numbers . Maybe even asked the kid what he thought he was doing, when he found his way out of the house and to his car.

That the woman was standing outside next to the vehicle while the kid was trying to get back to it makes it hard to believe that either of them really believed they were in mortal danger.  And that’s the danger with people owning guns and having guns in their homes (or cars, or under their armpits, or in their purses, or down their pants) – if you’ve got one in your hand, it takes a lot of training and mental and emotional discipline not to use it. 

And a good part of the problem with that is, the person who has a gun in their house or about their person for protection really believes that they’re really, truly going to need to protect themselves from some other person at some point. You don’t spend thousands of dollars on a gun for a hobby collection and then haul it around with you, or shoot at someone with it. These gun owners believe they’re in danger; and in some ways, the opportunity to prove it, and fire their weapon, is going to sway them away from asking the right questions, making the right calls, taking the time to soberly suss out a situation first – they become very likely to shoot it at someone who’s acting oddly around them: the confused teen who mistakenly enters an unlocked house, a drunk neighbor who stumbles into the wrong house, a stranger going door-to-door taking a poll, or soliciting for a good cause, say; or someone approaching them on the street who they don’t know and feel is scary – and when you have a gun for protection, it doesn’t take much to constitute “scary,” because we have the gun because we know there are many scary people out there and every stranger is suspect. Just look at me funny, I might shoot you. 

So, ok, the teenager on the coast was wrong. He was stupid, and in a dark house owned by people he didn’t know, in the middle of the night, and opening doors to closed rooms. Yes, he could have been an armed intruder. But before we say ok, we can understand the reaction of the moll and her gun-slinger, we’ve also got to ask: Was the house locked? How did the kid get in? If these folks felt they were in imminent danger, did they have their house wired to set off an alarm if an intruder entered? If they did, and the kid got in because someone gave him the combination, who had these people given the combination to? Do they have a kid? If so, why would they not assume that if the alarm didn’t go off, it had something to do with their kid? And so on.

Guns have gotta go. And so do the liars, cheats and sneaks in government – state and federal. Please vote, even if you’re sure it won’t make a difference, because you could be wrong – and it never hurts to try.

For the blog, 6 September 2018: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com