The Onion has one repeating headline:
"'No Way to Prevent This.' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens."
I worry the "gun issue" is tiresome and repetitive. It goes nowhere. Nothing will change. People have guns. Stuff happens. People die. It's just the way things are in the USA.
I heard Nikki Haley address the issue last night in New Hampshire. She said the problem is mental health. We need armies of mental health professionals fixing Americans, she said. Rick Millward points in another direction. The problem is the ubiquity of guns. With guns everywhere, some get used. It is like we have filled the country with trip-hazards, so of course people trip.
Rick Millward is a music producer, songwriter, and musician. He moved from "Music City" Nashville to Southern Oregon, where he performs at wine venues.
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| Millward |
Imagine a hungry lion crouched in the bushes unseen by his prey. A master of deception, waiting for the moment to leap out from hiding and attack, it knows this tactic from a deep survival instinct. It cannot conceive of any other way.
This society is suffering from an epidemic of gun violence. I would offer that the main reason this is out of control is due to our laws regarding firearms and the politicization of gun ownership. One party has adopted a convoluted reading of the Constitution around the issue of personal weaponry. The conservative view towards the Second Amendment is part of their embrace of increasingly extremist right wing support, which has led to a near surrender by those in opposition, even though a majority are in favor of stricter controls including a ban on military style assault rifles. But the larger problem is the economics of gun manufacture. All the makers sell to the government, which one would hope would provide sufficient profits, but they also market the same ordinance to private citizens. This is allowed because some of those tax dollars they collect are also spent on lobbying legislators, and donating to their campaigns, to ensure there are no restraints on that commerce.
Consider this: A gun never wears out or becomes obsolete. If someone wants a different gun, they either add to their collection or sell the old one. As a result we have a gun for every man, woman, child and parakeet in the country, give or take 450 million. This number has never decreased, and as the chart shows, is increasing at a faster rate. It’s safe to assume that the gross amount of lethality represents an increasing risk of accidental and intentional discharge. But it also shows a fundamental issue; gun makers' only source of profit is to sell more guns. By the way, this is also true of illegal narcotics, and Skittles.
Whether it’s for hunting, recreation, or protection the marketing of guns to civilians has to create a plausible purpose. For the first two, there is some rationale though I will digress here to mention something about the overlap of recreation and personal defense. There are many who collect guns, mostly handguns, for target shooting. (Why this is so much fun, I don’t completely get, but hey, it’s a free country.) They keep their pistols locked and out of reach, and are obsessively careful transporting and using them. Another group, a subset, feel the need to go a step further and carry. I can only assume there is some security they feel from having a gun on their person, or in their purse or glovebox. They want a weapon close at hand for fear that they may need it. All I’d ask is, really? Are they at risk from a lion leaping out of the bushes intent on making them lunch? Has our society degenerated into a dystopian hell-scape, and I’ve just missed it?
Between gun makers' using fear tactics to push sales, aided by lawmakers, mostly of only one party, opposing restrictions, we have more guns and more powerful guns. Many are in the hands of those who should never be in the same room with one, with predictable results. The result is that police need to assume that anyone they encounter in their duties might be armed and trigger-happy.
The solution is actually pretty simple; reduce the number of guns. After all, we ban private ownership of bazookas, and the Republic has managed to stay intact. OK, not so simple, but it's the answer nonetheless. If we don’t, it’s guaranteed to get worse.
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5 comments:
It was 1950. The Korean War had just started. I was four years old. I remember asking my mother why the Chinese’s mommies were letting the Chinese be so bad. I remember not really understanding her answer, but then again, I was four years old.
All we need to do is get rid of the guns, says Rick. Fair enough. The way forward on that is clear: you just need to pass a constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment.
It’s not that I don’t recognize that we have a problem. But the Chinese’s mommies were not what ended the Korean War. “Just get rid of the guns” doesn’t sound like a practical political plan to my grownup self.
It’s obvious the Second Amendment is overdue for clarification. Anybody who seriously believes the Founding Fathers intended for everyone to own rapid-firing guns with large capacity magazines – something they couldn’t have even imagined – is stupid, crazy or both.
I've done a little reading on this. The 2nd Amendment is the subject of a lot of scholarly interpretation. One point of view is that it's an artifact of a time when it was actually possible for a citizen militia to overturn the government. It's apparently what Trump's army thought. Personally, I think it's ok to have some quaint language in a historical document, if only to give us that perspective, and I'm not sure exactly what we'd replace it with. The fundamental question is whether or not it's a right to be armed, a right on par with say, bodily autonomy or voting.
There are many proposals being made to address gun violence. All could have a positive effect, but Republicans refuse to even have a discussion.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no record of speculation by the Founding Fathers on the weapons of the future. Anyone who seriously believes they know what the Founding Fathers thought about this is just making things up.
The Founding Fathers enacted mutiple ways for founding documents to be updated, which demonstrates that they wanted to futureproof an evolving nation.
As Rick points out, paranoia sells.
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