The massacre of twenty children and eight adults (teachers, the mother of the shooter, and the shooter) is a tragedy.  In other similar tragedies, gun enthusiasts have warned us about getting too emotional and tampering with a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment…so they say.  The NRA, well-heeled lobbyist organization that it is, often leads the charge.  “Not over my dead body….”  Yes, I’m emotional.  This time the stats are against the NRA.  Twenty children.  I repeat: twenty little, helpless, and defenseless children.

The “fundamental right” these right-wing gun nuts talk about is the “right to bear arms.”  The Second Amendment says:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  That opening phrase is key:  “A well regulated Militia….”  The whole amendment has become twisted to the point where certain states have returned to the days of Dodge City and allow concealed carry “for protection,” meaning that people like George Zimmerman can shoot an unarmed black kid and claim self-defense.  It has become twisted to the point where anyone can go to a gun show and arm themselves better than SWAT members on a police force, as seen a few years back in an armed robbery in LA (a recent news report on ABC news quoted an FBI statistic: they performed background checks and registered more than 150,000 guns that were sold on Black Friday this year—c’mon people, that’s paranoid, perverse, and obscene!).

It has become twisted because courts, especially the right-wing dominated pseudo-jurists and political hacks at the Supreme Court, led by strict constitutionalists (but only when convenient), allow the twisting by ignoring that first phrase in the amendment; and Congress, consistently inept, does nothing about gun control.  I remember when Reagan was attacked and Press Secretary Brady had most of his brain blown away.  The attack on Reagan, that darling of conservatives everywhere, was not enough to quiet the gun enthusiasts, who still need their automatic weapons, bullet-proof vests, and body-destroying bullets for (wink, wink) self-protection, hunting, and target practice.

Constitutionalists have their heads up you-know-where on this one.  The Constitution doesn’t give an individual a right to bear arms.  It gives citizens the right to arm their militias.  Let me rephrase the amendment:  A well regulated militia is necessary to the security of the free State, so we have to arm it.  In those days, there were no official militias—barely even an army, in fact.  They were rag-tag outfits comprised of private citizens.  The concept of militia has evolved and we do arm their members today.  They’re called National Guards.  Each state has one.  Many of them provide help in national disasters as well as contributing to national defense overseas. Individual gun ownership must be seen in today’s context, not the context of 250 years ago.

Two reasons are given for private gun ownership, protection and sport.  For the second, maybe firing ranges are like golf courses.  Dunno.  I don’t see shooting as a sport.  I’ve always been against the marksmanship events in the Olympics.  Does it take skill?  Yes, indeed.  So does making a good soufflé, but that’s no reason to make cooking one an Olympic event.  Most people don’t go to firing ranges for the sport anyway—they’re there to learn how to be lethal.  If you can put bullets in the center of a paper target on a bale of hay, you can efficiently kill little children and their teachers.  (There was only one six-year-old who survived the Newtown shooting.  She played dead.  Two children were taken to the hospital and declared DOA.  All the other victims died on the spot, most with multiple bullet wounds.  More would have died if the shooter hadn’t heard the sirens of first responders and shot himself.  He was a trained marksman, with semi-automatic weapons and enough rounds to kill everyone in the school.)

There is some justification to hunting, but very little in 2012.  We can control animal populations in more humane ways.  Ranchers or others can capture wolves and return them to national parks instead of killing them.  We have a yearly bear hunt in NJ.  I even heard one guy on TV say that one bear can feed his family for a year.  Bear meat?  Venison?  Antelope?  Bighorn sheep?  Dunno.  People eat stranger things.  French eat snails.  I lived in Colombia for a long time—people in the eastern part think roasted ant-butts are a delicacy.  Most of us don’t need to hunt to feed our families, though.  We have a marvelous, modern invention called the supermarket.  Beyond feeding your family, though, how can hunting be justified?  It’s not sport.  If you want a sport, play one in your neighborhood playground or park—like football, basketball, baseball, or Frisbee.

I have studied many gun buyers and gun enthusiasts.  Some of them are just the guys and gals next door—neighbors and fellow city folk.  Some even seem like normal people in other respects.  But too many male gun owners, those you see cruising the aisles at gun shows with dewy-eyed glee and avarice, see their guns as an extension of their penises.  Who has the biggest gun that can squirt the most bullets?  Me, me!  The gun dealers cater to them.  Of course, there are women gun enthusiasts too.  They often seem to be either married to macho, blustering, and beer-drinking bullies, or legitimately afraid of being mugged or raped by the same.  Or, maybe they just have penis envy.  Dunno.  Gun owners are strange.  I inherited my grandfather’s Winchester shotgun and possessed a 22 single shot rifle as a kid.  They were antiques and I gave them away to an antiques dealer.  Made him happy.  I didn’t want guns in the house.

The point is, in other things, gun owners appear normal and they are often law-abiding citizens.  But we have a gun culture in the U.S.—some estimates say more than 200 million guns.  People go mental.  They snap.  Over work.  Over finances.  Over responsibilities.  Isaac Asimov in The Naked Sun has a robot give a gun to a person who goes mental.  In the U.S., that’s not necessary—these people can buy one at a gun show if they have no previous record, use a parent’s or relative’s gun, or just steal one from a neighbor.  200 million.  Arming a crazy person usually leads to trouble, as the VTech massacre shows.  Corollary: you can never know who’s going to go crazy, so most people just shouldn’t have guns around.  Even in a gun case or a safe.  Cases and safes have locks.  Crazies can find the keys or the combinations.  Moreover, every parent who has a kid who accidentally kills himself playing with Daddy’s gun has no right to grieve—unlike the Newtown parents, Daddy caused that death by having a gun in his house.  I’ll grieve for Daddy’s kid; he has no right.

But many people are fearful and want some protection, knowing that local police and state and federal authorities, suffering continuous budget cuts, are outmanned and unequipped to keep the public safe.  On my HD screen, I was able to see that the Newtown shooter’s aunt had burning fanaticism in her eyes when she spoke about the shooter’s mother wanting protection, just like many people in the U.S., she says, hence the stash of guns.  Obviously, the mother didn’t know how to protect herself from her own kid.  (In fact, with their visits to the firing range, she taught him how to be an efficient killer.)  Maybe the lesson is that the law of unintended consequences can become lethal?  It happens too often in our gun culture.

We are a nation of technological and fundamentalist savages in many ways.  Our gun culture is a reflection of that.  Idiots pour into stores to buy their wide screen TVs so they can lie on their couches, guzzling beer and watching the latest gladiator matches called pro football games.  No one cares how those TVs work or what kind of technology goes into a smart phone.  The wonder is lost.  Same with automatic weapons, hence the Black Friday sales figures on guns.  Gun manufacturers keep improving them, adding laser sights, improved cartridges with increased capacity, and bullets with more stopping power.  People buy them without thinking what such guns and bullets can do to a little child’s body.  Instead of spears and poisoned arrows, your next-door neighbor can mount an insurrection with the firepower available to him.  It takes only one mentally deranged person to create a massacre.  We terrorize ourselves and our kids—we don’t even need al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh.

Other countries are more civilized (or, should I say, other countries are civilized and we are not?).  For example, gun ownership in Canada and the E.U. is limited compared to the U.S.  47% of houses in the U.S. have guns in them, so those 200 million plus guns are spread across only half the homes.  Interesting.  The rush on Black Friday to buy guns (Christmas shopping, mind you; should we put an automatic rifle in the manger with Christ?) is an indictment of a crazy nation.  These figures are startling.  Does everyone think his next-door neighbor is a member of a Mexican cartel?  Consider the home of the mother of the Newtown shooter.  These are 3000-4000 square foot abodes—in other words, she lived in an affluent community.  What was the mother fearing that she had to have all those guns?  If the aunt is any indication, the mother was as crazy as her son, and paid the ultimate price for her mental disease.  In any case, that part of Connecticut, home to financiers and Wall Street bankers, doesn’t have a reputation for violence—well, maybe the financial kind.

I suppose a gun enthusiast will counter, “Newtown just proves it can happen anywhere and we have to be prepared.”  I agree with the first part.  It can happen anywhere.  But chances are good that even an armed SEAL at the door of that school would have been caught by surprise, mowed down before he had time to inquire about the gunman’s business there.  The shooter didn’t bother to check in.  He blew the front windows out.  You see, the real problem lies with the right to bear arms.  That deranged twenty-year-old had no right to have those guns.  Not in my book.  The only right he had was to get help from a psychiatrist or psychologist, a professional who could detect deviant behavior and do something about it.  A mother’s neglect–she knew she was losing control.  Even with detection, a professional’s hands are often tied, or she’s hesitant, with the Supreme Court and the NRA looking over her shoulder.  That’s what happened in VTech and Colorado.

Possessing guns might not even be the problem.  The problem might really reside in the violent gun culture that seems to be so prevalent in the national psyche.  I don’t want to defend the NRA—as far as I’m concerned, the dead bodies of twenty innocent children are just as much their responsibility as if they had pulled the multiple triggers of the guns the Newtown shooter used.  (That their Twitter account and Facebook page are silent is telling—they know they share the blame.)  They share the responsibility of Columbine, VTech, Oregon, Colorado, Trayvon Martin, and other senseless killings that have shocked the country.  Yes, the NRA is indefensible.  Hopefully, one day, intelligent justices in the Supreme Court will come to their senses and correct the NRA’s lobbying position on the Second Amendment.

But the NRA does make one valid point: these incidents stem from an irresponsible use of guns.  Duh!  That’s a statement that is too mild and banal, of course, because it ignores the lethal nature of our gun culture.  It’s an irresponsible statement on their part.  The only responsible use of a gun is by the police, National Guardsmen, or federal authorities in their role to protect the citizenry.  This extends to overseas to our armed forces, of course.  These are the only exceptions I would allow.  Ordinary citizens shouldn’t have guns.  Period.  I can go to a driving range and rent clubs.  Firing ranges should operate in a similar fashion, if you must get your fix of violence.  But I don’t have enough money to buck the NRA.  Who does?  So, the whacked-out gun enthusiasts can go on and on, and people will continue to die, on and on, even little six-year-old first-graders.

Gun control need not be a black and white issue—there are shades of gray.  Even the E.U. countries, especially Britain, show that societies with strict gun control can still be dangerous.  But that 47% is telling.  Those 200 million guns are telling.  I don’t know the stats, but I’d bet that even within the criminal dregs of society, London has fewer gun deaths than American cities of comparable size.  There is a reason why Mayor Bloomberg of New York City and other big city mayors speak out for gun control.  I just wish the GOP, that party of Reagan, would take a guns-off-the-street pledge instead of a no-tax pledge.  And Dems, who pander to the NRA, should get some real cajones and stand up to the NRA.  Congress people in general should stop listening to NRA lobbyists and work out a compromise on gun control.  The present situation is untenable, harmful to too many innocent victims, and immoral.  They don’t seem to care, not even when one of their own goes down in a hail of automatic weapons fire, as in the case of Gabby Giffords.

And so it goes…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 at 4:00 am and is filed under Fundamentalism, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.