Where to start? So much has been written about the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut that it is hard to marshal my thoughts and write anything coherent. After the shootings I tried to push the horror into a mental "box" where it was solely an intellectual problem, but it wouldn't stay there. I saw a picture of my lovely grand-niece, old enough to have been in that school, and felt consumed by anger and fear for her safety, and the safety of so many children.
Predictably the debate about guns began almost immediately. Most of the arguments from Littleton, Jonesboro, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, Aurora, Portland were re-hashed. It isn't the guns, it's the video games, the culture, the lack of God in the schools. You knew they were coming.
I am happy to acknowledge that mental illness, and video games and violent television and movies play a part. I also think that corrosive public discourse, in which any disagreement equals "fightin' words" and people who don't get their way at the polls try to deligitimize democratic processes.
One of the more rancid bits of paranoia suggested that the attack was "staged" or organized by the government. This played to NRA Executive Vice president Wayne Lapierre's pre-election predictions that Obama was coming for America's guns if he got reelected. In Wayne's world, President Obama's unwillingness to address gun issues isn't because he is uncomfortable with the Constitutional issues associated with confiscating billions of dollars worth of legal property owned by American citizens. No, it is because Obama was lulling us into a false sense of security. Now that he has been reelected he will come for our guns while black helicopters swoop down on our cities and neighborhoods.
A number of folks have gone on television to decry the "politicization" of the tragedy by suggesting it is time to talk about guns. Fortunately, they were able to exercise their indignation the week before on Bob Costas who pointed out that Jovan Belcher had some serious problems that, when combined with a gun, turned deadly for his girlfriend and himself, and that maybe it was time to talk about the gun part of the equation. The dawn came up like thunder.
If it is politicization to suggest that guns are part of the problem and that we ought to talk about them, is it not also politicization to insist they should be off-limits? Aren't political discussions about limits and compromises by their very nature? If saying something is off-limits isn't politicizing the something, then I don't know what is.
Let's think about what happened a week ago. A disturbed young man named Adam Lanza killed his mother in her house. then he took her guns (2 pistols and a Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic carbine) to a school where his mother worked. He entered the school premises and began shooting people. He killed 20 school children, six adults, and himself. We don't know why he did it. We don't know if he planned it or acted on some sort of impulse. Among all the unknowns, I think it is fair to conjecture that -- if he had not had the guns -- a lot of those children and adults would be alive today.
Some folks have made the argument that it wasn't the guns, per se. They make comparisons to an event in China earlier in the week, in which a man entered a school's premises, armed with a knife, and attacked 22 children; implying some sort of equivalence. None of the children in the attack in China died however.
The argument that if "they" can't get a gun, they'll just use something else like a knife or pipe-bomb, or baseball bat is to be blunt, crap. Using a knife to kill a large animal (including a person) is hard, tiring work. You can slash at your victims, which cause painful lacerations but is likely not going to kill them. But if you do want to kill, you have to close with your victim and drive the knife in deep through bone and muscle and then get it back out again. Again, it is hard work. It takes time and potential victims can either run away or attack you.
The same general conditions apply to baseball bats. They too take a lot of work and give potential victims time to flee or attack you.
Pipe-bombs and other improvised explosive devices could be used for mass-murder but they tend to require an expertise that isn't common in the general population. They also require procurement of specialized ingredients that alert authorities to the danger you may represent. Still, they have factored into the plans of some mass-killers. The Columbine killers planned to set off propane bombs, and the Aurora movie theater killer booby-trapped his apartment with bombs, probably to kill investigators who followed up on his crimes. But pipe-bombs and other IEDs require an element of planning that isn't consistent with what we see in a lot of these instances.
Mass-killers like
guns with rapid rates of fire and large capacity magazines because they are highly effective for doing what the killers want to do. Is it politicizing the issue to acknowledge that reality?
Another ludicrous idea that pops up during these "debates" is that the tragedy in Newtown could have been prevented if only the principal, or a teacher, or maybe the janitor had been armed. As of yesterday, Wayne LaPierre elevated this particularly dystopian vision to the NRA's organizing principle for their "response" to the tragedy, using the pithy equation that "the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
In Wayne's world, every school that wants one, should have an armed guard who is trained to shoot it out with the legions of bad guys that Wayne imagines are waiting in the dark to storm our schools. Of course his proposal won't help the customers in movie theaters or shopping malls, or churches. Wayne thinks more of them should pack heat so they can gun down bad guys on an as-needed basis; such as in a dark movie theater filled with panicked movie-goers and smoke and a shooter who is spraying the audience.
You see, if Wayne has any idea how difficult very experience police and SWAT officers consider that kind of scenario, he isn't letting on. And it is difficult. It is a nightmare to even think about. Or take it out into the light; imagine a shooter in a busy mall (not too hard, since it happened in Portland in the last two weeks). Imagine trying to fix the shooter while the crowd rushes past you in a panic. Imagine also what the police will think of you wielding a weapon as they respond to the site and have to decide (in less than a second) whether you are a threat or not.
Wayne isn't
really interested in armed good guys shooting armed bad guys. He is just interested in armed guys, period. He is interested in putting as many weapons in peoples' hands as he can. In the last two decades, the NRA has gone from an organization that was dedicated to teaching responsible and safe gun use to one that is a lobbying group for gun makers (a transformation I am not sure a lot of NRA members realize has happened) and Wayne LaPierre earns his daily bread.
Well-made guns last a long time, so in Wayne's world the way to sell more guns is to scare people into buying them; by saying that "the government" is going to take your guns (and the rest of your freedom while they're at it). Wayne has been waving this bogey day in and day out for twenty plus years in the finest tribute of imitation ever paid to Josef Goebbels.
Wayne has the perfect bogey-man in Barack Obama. He is a Democrat (bad enough) and he's black, which means he must be the leftiest of the left. The fact that in his first term never indicated the slightest interest in confiscating guns is certain proof of his bad intentions because it means he is going to seize them once he is reelected (see rancid paranoia above).
Yesterday, Wayne shared his vision of the future for those who survive to inherit it. It is a world in which citizens are armed and ready, confident that their guns (as many as they want and can get their hands on) are secure and in which they and their children live in a cross-fire.
It shouldn't be our vision and it sure as hell should not be our future.
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