The Gods Are Not Accountable

“Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.“
                                                                                                                       – Democritus.

In a time of horrible tragedy, it is customary to speak polite phrases, to utter soft words of comfort, to offer a pint of Ben & Jerry’s “Chocolate Therapy” instead of saying what needs to be said even if it tastes like a mouthful of “Ass in the Tub of Armageddon Special Reserve Hot Sauce.” There have been 250 major incidents in schools alone since Columbine, not counting malls, churches, movie theaters, strip clubs, hospital emergency rooms, and urban street corners. A major incident is classified as a shooting in which two or more people are injured or killed. There have been more than sixty mass murder events since 1982 involving firearms and almost a third of those have happened this year. So, unfortunately for you, dear readers, my thoughts in the aftermath of the latest mass murder will drive my language more toward peppery heat than sweet ice cream.

Raise your eyes and read the epigraph above my words again, carefully. Democritus wrote this long before anyone thought of gunpowder, much less rifles that fire thirty rounds in less than fifteen seconds even if it doesn’t have a selector switch and is a semi-automatic. Every time some maniac decides to go off on a room full of people to get attention, we offer up platitudes to the families of the victims and logical fallacies to ourselves as a way to salve our own consciences without ever addressing the real issue. Somewhere, deep down inside, those of us that have any humanity left understand exactly what this ancient Greek meant. These horrible acts continue and multiply exponentially every few years, not because fate has decreed that certain people should die at a certain time or because nature requires the sacrifice of innocent children. No, these events have become an “echo of our character” as a nation.

Of the firearms used in the all mass shootings since 1982, 75% were purchased legally. What happens to the argument that I hear frequently from the semi-literate fools who have managed to co-opt the once respectable and viable organization that used to be the NRA – “We don’t need more laws to control our guns. Pretty soon the government will take all our guns away” Is this the only truth we should consider even if it was possible?

First of all, let’s look at the language people with actual sense are using. Control and eliminate are not synonyms. I own several guns and I have never heard anyone threaten to take them away. I have never seen any major movement to ratify the Constitution with a new amendment that renders the second one moot. Even if someone in Congress brought it up, even if someone passed a bill and sent it out to the states, do you really believe there are enough voters to provide 38 states with the majority votes necessary to change the 2^ndAmendment? If you do, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll sell you – cheap.

How about this argument? “We got background checks so criminals and crazies can’t buy no weapons.” Check this fact out, people. Some 40% of the legally owned guns in this country get sold on the internet and at traveling gun shows. Guess what you don’t have to pass to buy a gun from these venues. Yep, you guessed correctly, a background check. Let me translate that for you. Four out of every ten legally sold firearms may have been sold to felons or psychos, and if so, we wouldn’t know it.

Do you think I’m finished with my little rant? Not hardly. Here’s a sterling piece of logic I always enjoy hearing. “If everybody had a gun these things wouldn’t happen.” I heard it after Aurora, Colorado, as they carted the bodies away from the movie theater. Having engaged in several night fire fights at close range with high powered assault rifles handled by expertly trained users, I thought to myself – Brilliant! Wouldn’t it have been fantastic for dozens of untrained and terrified people to be firing weapons in a darkened theater? One of our esteemed congressmen, the gentleman from Texas (where else?), the right honorable Louie Gomert stated that if only the principal at Sandy Hook was gifted with her own assault rifle she could have “taken the shooter’s head off.” This genius who helps run our government managed to spit these words out while the blood of babies was still warm on classroom floors, and they are repeated ad nauseum after every slaughter. Never mind the training and mental discipline required to walk at someone firing a weapon and fire back with enough accuracy to hit a target. Never mind the fact that this whole event ended in two minutes, barely time for the principal to unlock a drawer, remove a rifle, load a magazine, and chamber a round. Maybe Republicans expect our teachers to patrol classrooms lock and loaded, selectors set on full auto.

Two of the most ridiculous bumper stickers printed – “If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” and “Guns don’t kill people, people do” – adorn thousands of vehicles from rusted-out Chevy pickup trucks to Lincoln Navigators. Back to my first point, no one in political power has EVER seriously discussed outlawing guns. I would like the NRA to stop using that as an excuse to try and make tanks and missiles available to the public. For the other half of that phrase, how many outlaws do you know that go around shooting people indiscriminately. To a criminal, a gun is one of the tools he or she uses to accomplish a crime. Felons keep a low profile to avoid arrest. They don’t engage in mass shootings, public displays of brandishing guns, or target random individuals for hate crimes and to make social statements. Maybe they will have guns, but they won’t be the only ones. So will the police, and the police will be targeting them for committing specific crimes. As for the other astute statement, we all know that people kill people with things other than guns. For example, in England where it is extremely difficult to obtain a firearm permit and almost no one owns a handgun there were 564 homicides in 2011, around 60 of those were caused by bullets. During the same period in the U. S. almost 11,000 men, women, and children managed to lose their lives by gunfire. So yeah, people do kill people. They just do it a whole hell of a lot less frequently when they have to work at it rather than simply pull the trigger of a rifle feed by a drum magazine.

I’m not against having a gun in the home. I keep one loaded in a drawer in my bedroom and another one in my office. But I used to make my living with a gun, and I taught pistol marksmanship in the Marine Corps. I’m aware of how to use the pistols I own, and I respect them. I understand as well that guns in the home will account for 22 times more injuries and death by suicide, by accident, and by family argument than through self-defense. This proves to me that a lot of people with guns for protection are not really protected, especially from themselves. Being honest I will tell you that being used to and careful with guns does not always preclude stupidity. I had an negligent discharge from a 9mm semi-auto pistol once while I was cleaning it and blew a hole through a piece of my wife’s antique furniture. To this day, I still don’t know where that round in the chamber came from. My son was sitting next to me at the time, and my carelessness terrifies me when I remember it.

If I seem angry here, it’s because I am. I’m very angry with myself and you, the American public. I feel guilty about Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, and on and on and on and on. These horrible tragedies are my fault and yours, not because we pulled the triggers, not because we have “personality” disorders, but rather because we are apathetic and cowardly. We have allowed ourselves to be bullied and used by corporations that make billions of dollars selling assault style rifles and drum magazines to anyone with enough money to buy them. Rather than research the problem for ourselves, we have allowed propaganda voices in the media like Fox News to create an atmosphere of hate and paranoia that the crazies take for a call to arms. It’s just easier to believe what they say than to actually think about it.

We all sat on our asses and did nothing while greedy politicians closed state run hospitals during the Reagan administration and forced thousands of mentally ill people to be housed in prisons, prisons run by private corporations that needed the head count to keep profits up. Does it seem reasonable that human beings suffering from delusions, hallucinations, and a host of other debilitating disorders will get better by having violent sociopaths for neighbors? Each one of these disturbed people will be given medicine with very little treatment or true help and, at some point when they appear halfway functional, be released back into mainstream society. Maybe you will be standing next to one at a gun show where both of you can legally purchase a Bushmaster rifle without a background check.

I don’t want things to be this way anymore. At my age, I live in the presence of death every day. It’s the paradox of human life. We share the joy of living with the knowledge that one day we will grow old and die. We learn to balance that joy and anguish in our later years so that we are not paralyzed with fear daily. We accept our passing as part of nature. But the human mind doesn’t really begin to face mortality until we are somewhere past middle-age. That’s for our own protection, for our sanity. I don’t want our children to live in the presence of death before puberty. I don’t want them anxious over issues of mortality. I don’t want them terrified to go to school or the movies. It isn’t a fair trade-off just so I can sit legally in my recliner with a six pack of beer and stroke my AK-47 as I watch old Rambo films. I’m tired and ashamed of my own compliance. I’m going to scream, bitch, moan, irritate, aggravate, and vote until somebody listens, until we get better gun control, until we get adequate health care for the mentally ill, until our society re-evaluates its priorities, and until we get back to compassion as the driving force of democracy. We don’t need a lot of new, more severe, gun restrictions. We need to exercise common sense and balance in implementing the ones we have, and maybe tweak some of them so they work better.  After all, it’s our responsibility as citizen. Like Democritus, I can no longer blame nature and fate when my own passions, mistakes, and weaknesses are controlling my destiny.