Civilian firearms per person: UK: 6.7 per 100 people. US: 101.05 per 100 people. Explaining https://t.co/VOEPBeHJJz @BaggaJack @xxarea83xx
— TruthtoConservatives (@ToConservatives) August 6, 2015
ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
OK, so the above quote is from The Onion, and is of course satirical…except that in this case, the line between reality and satire is so thin as to be virtually indistinguishable. We live in a country in which a mass shooting occurs on average once a week…yet nothing has been done to stem this tide. Why? Because it’s either “TOO SOON” to talk about preventing gun violence in the wake of a mass shooting, or because doing so is deemed by Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © to be tantamount to curtailing their Second Amendment rights.
Our political system has been hanmstrung by politicians bought and paid for by the gun industry and advocacy groups like the NRA and Gun Owners of America. Even when meaningful, common sense gun control is discussed, the incoherent, irrational, and thoroughly self-absorbed screaming heard from Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © makes reasoned discussion impossible. How can one hope to have a rational, dispassionate conversation with people who collectively foam at the mouth with rage whenever common sense gun control is the topic?
When someone feels they have the God-given right to carry any amount of firepower anywhere they choose at any time and for any reason, what you have is the tyranny of assholes. Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © frequently and willfully misinterpret the Second Amendment to suit their agenda…and feel empowered to threaten and intimidate those who dare disagree with their self-interested take on the world.
Life in America requires a lot of advance preparation. For instance, when you’re getting ready for a plane trip you imagine what you’ll do if a problem arises — flight delay, long lines at security. But I bet you haven’t considered the best way to react if the man in front of you on the airport escalator has a gun dangling from his shoulder.
That very thing happened recently in Atlanta, when a Georgia resident named Jim Cooley came strutting through the airport lobby with a loaded assault rifle.
Cooley — who was taping the whole encounter and posted it on YouTube — corrected the police officer who stopped him. (“It’s not an automatic! It’s a semi-automatic!”) Then he declined to respond when she asked if he had a permit. (“Am I being detained? … If you’re detaining me then I’m going to have to file a lawsuit.”) And, in the end, he walked away in triumph.
We’ve moved from the right to bear arms to the right to flaunt arms.
The rights and safety of good and decent Americans- the vast majority of us- who believe that common sense gun control is the best way to protect ourselves from senseless gun violence have been deemed to be less valuable than those of zealots like Cooley, who’s but one example of the Open Carry movement’s unholy devotion to firepower. As Gail Collins points out, we’ve transitioned from the right to bear arms to the “f—k you all” belief in the impunity to flaunt arms. It’s a belief system in which public safety is held to be of far less value than the rights of those who wish to compensate for other shortcomings by parading around in public with an AR-15 or similar weapon slung over their shoulder.
What Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © refuse to recognize is that the difference between someone exercising their Second Amendment rights in a public space and a mass shooting is but a split-second. They will no doubt counter with the easily and often debunked “The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Or “An armed society is a polite society.” First, study after study has disproven the belief that more guns equal more safety. Second, an armed society isn’t a polite society, it’s a paranoid one. It assumes the worst of everyone, and it’s a recipe for significant friendly fire casualties.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, the thinking was that finally something would be done to curb the epidemic of gun violence. The “Sandy Hook effect” was something discussed by many…but in the end, this tragedy passed into our collective memory with no positive action…indeed, no action of any sort. Few politicians possess the moral courage to stand up to Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © and to the gun lobby that continues to line their campaign coffers.
We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.
The truth is, we DO live in such a city…except that, in this case, the “ravaging infection” is gun violence. While we have the means available to curb the epidemic, we refuse to act…even though the innocent continue to suffer. As long as it’s someone else burying a loved one, gun violence remains an abstract concept to Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, who hold their “rights” to be of far greater importance than human life. To Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, the deaths of innocents (and the loved ones of others) is merely the cost of freedom, an abstract calculus that doesn’t impact them directly.
As much as I hate to think in this terms, I believe it will take a mass shooting that claims the loved ones of the likes of Jim Cooley and Kory Watkins for Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © to recognize and admit that we have a problem.
Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.
There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.
The laws differ from place to place. In some jurisdictions, like Scotland, it is essentially impossible to own a gun; in others, like Canada, it is merely very, very difficult. The precise legislation that makes gun-owning hard in a certain sense doesn’t really matter—and that should give hope to all of those who feel that, with several hundred million guns in private hands, there’s no point in trying to make America a gun-sane country.
The point here is that there are many different approaches which could be considered to reduce the epidemic of gun violence in America. It doesn’t have to be about “gun grabbing;” nor does it have to be about taking away guns. Perhaps it could be about making it more onerous for the mentally ill and career criminals to obtain a gun. Perhaps it could be about strengthening laws requiring background checks in order to make such laws meaningful.
There are things that can be done…but the problem today is that these ideas can’t even be discussed and considered because Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © scream like banshees whenever the possibility is raised. Because of this, nothing is done…because politicians have long since been bought and paid for by the gun lobby. Thus the rights of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © are elevated and considered to be of greater value than the public’s right to be safe from random, senseless slaughter.
Doing nothing and expecting things to change may not be the traditional definition of insanity, but it holds true in this case. Until and unless good and decent Americans stand up and demand change, nothing will…and more innocent Americans will continue to be slaughtered in order that a small minority of self-absorbed Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © be allowed to continue defining their rights according to their own agenda and self-interest.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
