Thoughts on Guns

We can decrease the mass shootings – if we all get our heads out of our ideological posteriors.

Listen, Left: yes, increasing mental health services, particularly in schools, is important. Almost all mass shootings are suicides by troubled people whose self-hatred turns outward to whatever group (immigrants, blacks, women, gays, rejecting classmates or co-workers) might be responsible for their misery. (“I’ll take some of those XYZs with me!”)

Listen, Right: of course the easy availability of weapons of war is a factor, and taking steps to impede the easy flow of such weapons, while imperfect, will help.

Lefty: (1) you ain’t getting rid of guns (there are way too many, they have their uses, and the 2^nd Amendment ain’t going away); and (2) racism isn’t the main focus. Some shooters make vile racist proclamations, but their trauma and self-loathing lies deeper than their racism. Plenty of racist jerks live 60-80 years without shooting anyone.

Righty: (1) most of us don’t want to take your guns, and we couldn’t anyway, so jettison that NRA fable; and (2) calling these kids terrorists or “PURE EVIL” is evading the truth. They’re troubled youths who experienced early violence, sexual abuse, or other trauma. That doesn’t excuse their conduct. But calling ‘em evil blinds us to the identifiable causes of their actions.

The day before some kid was pure evil he was another kid in class, maybe troubled, but a kid you talked to. Identifying those seething with self-loathing and anger could help cut down on these tragedies. (I mention mostly youthful mass murderers here, but the same pattern marks almost all shooters.)

We need to make serious therapy easily available to kids in schools. Identify some potential shooters early and help them find another course. Yeah, that’ll cost money, in tough times; but it’s important.

The Right is right that mental health is critical, but that’s no excuse to ignore other critical issues.

Societal problems are complex. “Cars don’t kill people, people do!” sounds absurd. We recognize that keeping drunks or folks with Alzheimer's from driving is important, that laws and insurance help diminish road deaths, and also that we should continue making cars safer.

A popular meme points out that after Jayne Mansfield died driving under a tractor trailer, laws required those vehicles to have DOT bars to prevent that; that seven fatalities from tampered-with Tylenol gave us caps you need a PhD. to open; and that one clown’s failed shoe-bomb attempt has everyone removing shoes in airports.

Guns kill 168 people every two days. (Cars kill about 250.) Our thoughts and prayers aren’t accomplishing much.

The Right is wrong to fight all safety measures, including: expanded background checks; mandatory waiting periods; banning some guns and gun features that make it absurdly easy for anyone to kill dozens of people; upping the age for purchase of some weapons to 21; red flag laws; and mandatory insurance. The facts are clear that (as logic would suggest) states with the weakest gun laws have the most gun fatalities per capita.

If we focused on this issue as on escaping the Depression or building the A-bomb, we’d lick this too, saving lives but respecting law-abiding gun-owners’ rights and needs. What if all citizens worked together?

Ain’t gonna happen. Most people on both sides are reasonably sincere; but a profits-hungry gun industry (and cynical NRA) is scaring the hell out of gun owners, and buying up politicians.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 12 June 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both station’s websites.]

[Friends will chide me (and one Sun-News reader already has chided me) for being unduly kind to gun-owners in this column. Guns are not cars, and their non-murderous uses are more limited. The Second Amendment largely concerned militia’s readiness. (In fact, relatively few citizens in colonial America or the early days of the U.S. bothered to own firearms or could use them proficiently.) The Heller decision, contradicting nearly 200 years of cases and vastly increasing the scope of the Amendment, was wrongly decided; but even Heller did not take us to the level of madness the current crop of yo-yo’s called “justices” may soon take us. I keep wondering what these jackasses would say to Madison and Jefferson to justify their interpretation of the amendment, which would likely say those founders would have been fine with me putting a huge and operable cannon on my lawn, facing City Hall, with a small pile of cannonballs beside it.

But the Second Amendment ain’t goin’ anywhere. Further, we can’t reasonably expect a more accurate interpretation of it any time soon; and we can’t reasonably expect to amend the amendment, either, because small states have such outsized power in that process. The Constitution doesn’t provide for a national referendum.

So, like, what do we do? DO? Seems to me our best choice is to talk across the divide, or try. Gun owners have kids too. Some folks honestly believe we are all trying to take their guns away, ultimately. (A small minority probably are.) Most of us are not; and we couldn’t if we tried; and there are improvements that can be made without impinging on gun owners rights and preferences. We need to get enough NRA members and passionate gun owners to see that truth. Many of them are also passionate in their love for their children.

What’s the alternative, pals?

When I was young, racism was generally accepted among whites, the misguided war in Viet Nam was growing in size, and few folks I knew questioned those aspects of our lives, and those few shrugged and said nothing much could be done about it. A mass movement among youth (plus the desperate dogged resistance of the Vietnamese and the desperate courage of black U.S. citizens!) actually helped change that somewhat. Something similar should swell now, under the pressure of a deteriorating climate, the madness of letting anyone who wants one buy a gun immediately, and economic inequality, and foment change. Until it does, though, I’ll do what I can in the best way I suppose I can.]

[In writing this, I was also much influenced by this study by two professors who profiled mass shooters.  I recommend it.  Folks understandably focused on the madness of our cultural affinity for guns should not reflexively ignore the argument that the problem is really mental health.  As I tried to express above to fellow progressives, there's some reality to the suggestion.  But as I also tried to say, anti-reformists cannot fairly use that as a shield to avoid even looking at the serious issues related to the proliferation of weapons of war and kids' easy access to those.  It'd be like saying we shouldn't have DWI laws because there's a constitutional right to travel and drunks won't pay attention to laws anyway, so we should put that money into treatment and leave non-drunks free to operate their cars freely.]

from "Brothers in Arms"