Category Archives: Guns

Guns

I Am So Angry

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Several years ago my daughter texted me to tell me there was an active shooter on her college campus. I wrote about the experience on this blog.

I immediately texted her back.  And called, but realized that was probably a mistake.  What if she were hiding and her phone vibrated or rang and that gave her away. She was in a safe location, and let me know that, but still, I told her to stay there until she saw someone with a badge telling her it was safe to exit. 

No shooter menaced the Loyola Marymount University Campus.  It was a false alarm. But the experience left me rattled. I was terrified. And angry. I was so angry that evening that I could not speak.

I have listened to politicians speak in the aftermath of the slaughter at a Buffalo supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and that anger has resurfaced again. Republicans, and a few feckless Democrats, have suggested that tougher gun laws are not the answer.  You may want your representatives to enact legislation to regulate the use of weapons in the United States, they say. You may want your representatives to enact a law “attacking the 2nd Amendment.”  But you won’t win. From Ted Cruz to Lauren Boebert, our leaders say that your laws will not do any good.  You are powerless to stop this, they said.  Evil people do evil things. You would be better off agitating for better mental health care, because the guys who slaughtered the kids in Texas and the elderly in Buffalo were bullied and picked on.  The problem is not us, Cruz said, and it is not the guns. He spoke cynically of “American Exceptionalism,” of how great this country is.  The guns are not the problem. You are better off buying a gun of your own, to protect you from, you know, the criminals, and the Mexicans and the Terrorists and Antifa.  The NRA, we must remember, is a trade group.

Your fear is good for their bottom line.

In the days after the massacre in Uvalde, I have heard pro-death, conservative lawmakers and religious leaders suggest that the shooting might not have happened if there were prayer in schools, even though Texas has a moment of silence at the beginning of the day and prayers at school functions like sporting events.   Others have trotted out equally spurious, but predictable explanations for the carnage:  violent movies, violent video games, homosexuality and the presence of transgendered people, broken families, and Critical Race Theory (somehow). 

I do not think any of these explanations are funny.  They are either dishonest or dangerously and obscenely stupid.  They are blood-drenched and dangerous.  I do not care why you want to kill. It does not matter to me in the slightest.   A white nationalist and a racist? An “Incel”? A Nazi, or a revolutionary or an End-of-Timer or a sullen kid or a sociopath? I could not care less.  Because no matter who you are, and no matter who you hate, I do not believe you should have a weapon of war at your disposal.  You have no right to kill, and no matter your irrational fears, your macho fantasies, your martial cosplay, or your fevered dreams, there is nothing you can say to convince me that there is a place for killing machines in a civil society.  Some of you will trot out the 2nd Amendment, but bearing arms does not mean what you think it does. It never has. Some of you will invoke your Christianity.  Show me if you can one line, from the first verse of the first chapter of Matthew to the last line of Revelation, that in any way justifies violence.

Look around the world. There are violent video games and violent movies all over the place.  There are many countries where almost nobody prays, where far more people identify as Atheists than in the United States.  They do not have mass killings.  40,000 people die from gunshot wounds in the United States each year, whether from suicide, accident, or homicide.  Many thousands more have their bodies torn, lacerated, chewed up and spit out by these weapons that have one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. How many more crimes are committed with these weapons, or people threatened and frightened? It boggles the mind. To those who say nothing needs to be done, that your rights are sacred, and that guns are not the problem, I ask you how many more deaths will it take before you concede that this is wrong.  50,000? 100,000? A million? When and where will it end? If murdered children will not get you to act, maybe there is no hope.

Guns end conversation. They end debate.  The create a climate of fear.  Guns are inconsistent with freedom, whatever the death-dealers at the National Rifle Association tell you, because they force us to live in fear.  They menace. They threaten, they frighten, and they kill.  They were invented only to kill. Ours is a country steeped in racism, built on stolen land with labor from stolen and enslaved black bodies.  The better angels of our nature have appeared from time to time, but they have never banished the fundamental evil at the heart of our history.   We cannot make claims about this country’s greatness when every fourteen minutes another American dies from a gunshot wound.  We need to choose to live our lives free from fear.  And we need to rid our communities of the killing machines that are too readily available to too many people, even in states with the toughest of gun regulations.

So many political leaders have offered their thoughts and prayers.  They tell us that they hold in their hearts the victims of Buffalo, Uvalde, and on and on and on. Thoughts and prayers.  The words of Isaiah come to me, as he confronted the hypocrites whose empty prayers, he said, meant nothing to an angry God. 

When you spread forth your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

correct oppression;

defend the fatherless,

plead for the widow.

Ours is a broken, amoral, and violent society.  Our leaders have chosen this, either through their actions or their complicit cowardice. I have no faith in their ability to fix us.

Guns

When my daughter texted me last night to tell me there was an Active Shooter on her campus…

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…it provided me with a new perspective on our nation’s unique and unending history of mass violence.  When the murders at a bar in Thousand Oaks took place just a couple of days earlier, at the other end of the county where I grew up, in a part of the world I know very well, it hit home as well.  A couple of weeks ago, an armed man was headed for the school where my wife teaches.  They went on lockdown and lockout.  He wanted to murder his children.  The police stopped him a couple of blocks away.

No shooter menaced the Loyola Marymount University Campus.  It was a false alarm.  Still, the students must have been frightened.  I immediately texted her back.  And called, but realized that was probably a mistake.  What if she was hiding and her phone vibrated or rang and that gave her away. She was in a safe location, and let me know that, but still, I told her to stay there until she saw someone with a badge telling her it was safe to exit.  I felt fear.  And anger.

One of the young people who died in Thousand Oaks had survived the slaughter in Las Vegas. Think about that.  According to one report I read, nearly a dozen of the young people in that bar attended the concert in Las Vegas when a one-man army opened fire, killing nearly five dozen people and wounding more than 400.

Dana Loesch, the NRA spokesperson and future denizen of the Eighth Circle of Hell, has already pointed out that my home state has tough gun laws.  That did not prevent the shootings so, she suggested, legislation and regulation are not the answer.  What a deeply cynical and self-serving argument.  You might want to regulate us, she says.  You may want your representatives to enact a law attacking 2nd Amendment rights.  But you can’t win.  Your laws will not do any good.  You are powerless to stop this.  You would be better off agitating for better mental health care, because the guy who shot up the bar in Thousand Oaks suffered from PTSD, even though there are many people who suffer the after-effects of trauma who could not hurt a fly.  The problem is not us, she said, and it is not the guns. It is always something else: the video games, the violent culture, the sick society, the heavy metal music.  You are better off buying a gun of your own, to protect you from, you know, the criminals, and the Mexicans and the Terrorists and the crazies.  The NRA is a trade group, after all. Your fear is good for their bottom line.

But there is something that can be done.  We all saw the marches that took place across the country earlier this year, after another one-man army equipped with highly efficient killing machines entered a school in Florida and added to the nation’s growing tally of slaughtered children.  I joined one of those marches.  And I will do so again.  I continue to write op-eds when and where the opportunity presents.  Maybe I will teach a course on the history of guns in America.  As historians, I believe strongly that my colleagues and I should bring our critical and research skills to bear on matters of public importance.  The election results suggest that, in places, there is growing energy behind this movement.  We need to keep the pressure on our elected leaders to act. We need change, and we need it fast.

30,000 people die each year from bullet wounds, whether those are the result of accident, suicide, or murder. That is more than three people an hour, every hour, of every day.  That does not count the many thousands more who are wounded, their bodies mangled and lacerated by devices designed only to destroy human life.  Maybe those who embrace their right to own killing machines should learn more of the experiences of those who are wounded, their lives altered permanently by a bullet.  And then there are many more threatened with these weapons, who live in fear because an abusive spouse or parent or friend has weapons.  Finally, there are those of us who, as this epidemic widens, whipsaws, and afflicts more families, live in fear that in some way we, or those we love,  might be next.  Guns end conversation. They end debate.  The create a climate of fear.  Guns are inconsistent with freedom, whatever the death-dealers at the National Rifle Association tell you, because they force us to live in fear.  They menace. They threaten, they frighten, and they kill.  They were invented only to kill.  We need a community with more compassion.  We need to choose to live our lives free from fear.  And we need to rid our communities of the killing machines that are too readily available to too many people, even in states with the toughest of gun regulations.

Guns

Enough

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It is time, in the wake of yet another school shooting, for a history lesson. One of history’s fundamental lessons, after all, is that if something terrible happens, and those with the power to prevent it from happening do nothing, it will most likely happen again.  The Valentine’s Day Massacre at Parkland happened just over three months ago. And last week, in Texas, a state that fetishizes gun violence like no other, a right-wing terrorist murdered children in their classrooms at Santa Fe High School.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of Paige Curry’s heartbreaking statement.  The Santa Fe student, who survived the shooting, told a reporter that shootings have “been happening everywhere.”  She “always felt it would eventually happen here.”  How could anyone who watches the news disagree? Welcome to the new normal.

My children practice fire drills at their school, just as I did as a child.  They also practice what to do in “active shooter” situations, and I am pleased that their school has policies in place.  The awful pro-gun trolls on Twitter have asserted that school shootings are rare, that the odds of a student experiencing a school shooting are extremely remote.  The active shooter drills, as a result, they say unnecessarily alarm students and parents and gin up anti-gun sentiment.  Of course, these folks do not complain about fire drills, even though students are much, much more likely to get shot at school than they are to be injured in a school fire.  The last time more than ten people died in a fire at an educational institution was 1959.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested, once again, that teachers should arm themselves.  He suggested that schools had too many doorways because easy access to the building made this shooting possible.

Spare me. The time has passed for anyone to take this tendentious rhetoric seriously.   Patrick ignores the one obvious reality, and the one thing that makes the United States different from countries where school shootings and death by gunshot wound do not occur so commonly: the ready access and availability of guns.  Guns are the problem.

“Molon Labe,” the gun-nuts say, “Come and take them.”  That’s what that violent slogan means.  It is a threat.  If you try to take our guns we will resist.  You heard the Parkland survivors. You saw the hundreds of thousands who marched earlier this year in cities across the country, proclaiming, “Enough.”  They are coming, legislatively, at the polls, by building a mass movement, aimed at implementing the effective “regulation” of firearms.  No one fears you any longer.  No one, save for the timorous leaders of the GOP, fears the NRA.  Because until this scourge of weapons is limited and controlled, none of us are safe.