Part the Second
Liebling said:
It's not about the guns, it's about the people holding them.
Depends on who you ask. For some gun owners, it's always about the guns because that's the only thing it can ever be about; that's why they jump to the defense of guns whenever there is a question that might tread onto whether or not any given individual should have had access to a firearm or how that person got hold of one. It is childish, excremental rhetoric.
Because it's never "my kid", or "my brother", or "my friend" who is going to do it, right? It's always someone else. And then one day it
is "my kid", "my friend", and so on.
And up here there are some things we are "politely" not saying right now in my corner of the Universe, and I put the word in quotes because we are trading future risk in order to be "polite", and that is the sort of thing that, proverbially speaking, can come back and bite us in the ass.
I don't care how nice and well adjusted we think our kids are. I don't care if they are destined constricted to community leadership in their adult life. The reason it is so easy for a kid to pick up a gun when they reach their breaking point is that it's
right fucking there for the taking.
If Jaylen Fryberg had chosen to
beat his friends to death, how many of them would be dead?
You have to be faster than the person with the knife. If that person has a gun you have to outrun a bullet.
You can pick up
anything and try to make it into a weapon, but guns are designed for one thing, and one thing only. In the history of guns nobody picked up this tool and said, "What happens if I do
this with it?" and become the first person to weaponize the gun. That is to say, the gun was designed as a weapon.
It is easier to convict someone of negligently allowing their child to steal the car than negligently allowing their child to steal a gun.
What would it be like if we charged DUIs like we charged gun crime?
Who the hell else but a gun owner gets the excuse, "Well, sure, he was negiligent while illegally possessing this thing, but since it's his own kid he killed through negligence with an illegally possessed something let's not charge him, because, hey, he's suffered enough"?
No, really, who the hell else gets that escape route?
And yet none of this can be discussed because it always comes back to the number one windmill:
"... but the idea that banning guns is going to somehow prevent tragic events like this from happening is not really getting to the root of the problems."
Do you think there are no murders or that the crime rate overall is really that much lower in countries that have gun bans?
Do you really think the presence of guns within the crime rate has no relationship to mortality rates of crime victims?
Think of the fact that the U.S. just went through its ebola "crisis" without a Surgeon General.
Do you know why we don't have a Surgeon General?
Because just like pro bono work for criminal defendants is okay if you're a Republican-nominated Supreme Court justice but isn't acceptable of a Democratic-nominated judge for lower federal court, Dr. Vivek Murthy's nomination is currently on hold because as an emergency room physician he came to accept that many of the firearm injuries he worked on could be addressed through public health avenues. That is to say, some Republican in the Senate° is doing the NRA's bidding on the grounds that the poor, defenseless guns apparently cannot withstand a PSA campaign reminding people to know where there guns are, store them safely, and for heaven's sake have some clue whether the damn thing is loaded or not. That's pretty much all the Surgeon General can do, and such notions are so anathema that Vivek Murthy should not be Surgeon General. Public discourse isn't going to convince the criminals in Chicago; should it be so useless among "responsible" gun owners?
Because they're all "responsible" gun owners until one day they just couldn't imagine their popular, well-adjusted kid destined for great things in life would pick up that gun and kill his best friends over something having to do with a girl. And they're all "responsible" gun owners until one day they
swear the thing was unloaded. And some of them are "responsible" gun owners until they become one of the people who put thirty-eight percent of the guns in the hands of the criminals who get the firearms they use from friends and family.
And we can't talk about these issues,
why?
"School shootings are awful, but the idea that banning guns is going to somehow prevent tragic events like this from happening is not really getting to the root of the problems."
Because this, apparently, is where the discussion must stay.
The roots of the problems? Right.
for a=0 to ∞
if a=a then print "but the idea that banning guns is going to somehow prevent tragic events like this from happening is not really getting to the root of the problems"
next a
Does the day end in "y"?
Right now gun owners wouldn't know who does or doesn't want to "ban all guns" because they don't care. It is similar in its hypocritical cowardice to the idea of going to war and then sanitizing the images back home in order to hide the actual human costs of warfare "out of respect for the soldiers and their families".
One of the drivers of certain political labels is actually functional; historically,
conservatism seeks to retain and augment existing and former outcomes. Now, the idea of liberal and conservative is less important here than the effect. In myriad, unrelated issues, this attempt to retain and even revert generally visits its negative effects
on other people, not the ones who advocate the outcome. And, yes, we can split the hair that says all political outcomes do this, but there is an observable difference between, say, not getting to keep a health insurance plan that shouldn't have been legal in the first place for being generally useless to you, and, say, being dead because BillyBob was negligent with his gun. But it's the same process, large or small. Slavery sounded great to some people who would never be slaves and coincidentally had a financial stake in maintaining the existing way. Do you realize that women are not people under the U.S. Constitution, which is why we have a Nineteenth Amendment when the Fourteenth should have sufficed? Yet even today, in the twenty-first century we still argue about issues wherein a woman's human rights are subject to someone else's comfort of privilege. And look at people like Dick Black, the former military prosecutor who considers spousal rape impossible; he's never going to be on the receiving end of that. Or newly-elected Congressman Ken Buck (R-CO4); he's never going to be on the receiving end of his philosophy, either. Look at the heterosupremacists in the twenty-first century; their heterosexual marriages are
never going on the ballot. Never have, never will. Listen to the rich tell the poor how to live; they imagine themselves immune to that sort of outcome.
And it's never that gun owner, either. It's never "my kid" or "my spouse" or "my whoever or whatever".
And, you know, maybe those people sincerely believe it's not them or theirs. But they're afraid of PSAs talking to the people who need to hear it? Because, quite obviously, there are some "responsible" gun owners who need to hear it.
But we're better off tilting windmills, because another unnecessary death by firearm is just the price we have to pay in order for "responsible" gun owners to be comfortable.
That's why I find it offensive.
And I think that you, within the context of a psychoanalytic meaning of history—the
human aspects from which the names and dates and places and death tolls derive—already
know this.
____________________
Notes:
° Actually, I believe that is Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), but ... er ... okay, no reason to not look it up, and yes, it's Sen. Paul who has a hold on Dr. Murthy's nomination.
Fin