Today in the news, a story recounted a man in Michigan who shot and killed his two young children and wife, then took his own life. He was found in his car in a parking lot with weapons presumably used to kill his family and then himself. There was no history of criminal behavior or even official reports of domestic violence. There was some indication of financial difficulties and a potential impending divorce. This follows on the heels of the shooting massacre in Tucson that garnered national attention because a Congresswoman and a Federal Judge were shot, along with bystanders in a calculated rampage by a young man with a semi-automatic assault weapon with high capacity ammunition clips that he easily obtained despite a history of anti-social behavior.
Unfortunately, the majority of the public seems too shortsighted, self centered and egotistical to look beyond the surface and consider implications. The common belief is that: “I would never do anything like that, so it is not necessary to consider that such tragedies happen or why they happen –conditions that make them more likely rather than less likely.” Because the individualist thinks that he or she is totally responsible with guns at all time, the belief is that guns should be readily available to everyone under all circumstances. In truth, most people do not really know or understand [or perhaps even care] what depression can do to a person. If an analogy is needed, consider the mudslides being experienced in Brazil and Haiti. The landscape was denuded so the conditions were ripe for disaster in the event of a heavy rain. No one person takes responsibility; it is just the deteriorated environment that everyone accepts. In the same way, the widespread possession of handguns creates an environment that makes disaster more likely when a bad spell occurs.
It is doubtful that we will or even should know the intimate details that led this man to crisis and the murder of his children and spouse. What is evident, however, is that most of these tragedies do involve shootings. It is conceivable that he might have strangled or stabbed the victims, but shooting was apparently more convenient and the method of choice. But the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the man as a “madman” which is also too convenient. It is true that he is to blame, but to fail to ask whether the ubiquitous presence of firearms made the event more likely and more feasible is socially irresponsible.
There are two directions that the debate can go. In the first instance, the basic position is that having firearms in the possession of so many people and so readily available is a social norm that is more important than the thousands of deaths each year from events like this family in Michigan and the massacre in Tucson. In this case, we rationalize the actions of the shooter and crazy and ignore the conditions that facilitated the event. The second direction is to question what type of society we want to live in and whether conditions that facilitate, if not promote, gun violence are socially acceptable. In this case, we seek to balance the freedom to own guns for legitimate sporting and true defense protection against the danger to society that having too many guns so readily available will result in too many deaths from abuse of those rights. In my view, carrying a gun around just in case someone might offend you is not legitimate protection need. The first argument seems to hold sway in the US, despite the weekly or daily deaths that result from the permissive and indiscriminate possession and use of handguns.
Thus, it is hard to accept as sincere the expressions of dismay or even surprise that such deaths occur. It would be like expressing surprise that a person who walks in a snake pit gets bitten by a snake. The death would be regrettable, but in no way should it seem surprising that the result flowed from the conditions. We buy into phony arguments and rationalizations. We make false and insincere expressions of sadness and regret, knowing that the conditions that facilitated the tragedy are ones we would fight to maintain despite also knowing that such tragedies will be repeated.
The gloss that the Supreme Court has layered on the Second Amendment to turn a provision initially intended to enable militia to be formed to protect against a foreign threat, when a national army was not fully established or readily available, into a supposed right of every person to own and carry automatic weapons in public is fait accompli. Despite its lunacy and historical inaccuracy, it has passed into the normative culture of US society. The question that we all should now consider is whether to continue to follow an irrational dogma or to consider the implications of too many guns. Having shotguns in the hands of licensed hunters for use during regulated seasons in regulated areas for purposes of duck and pheasant hunting is not the same as carrying a Glock 19 in an urban parking lot. That is a dangerously silly false equivalency. Yet preserving the former is used as an excuse for the latter. And the gun lobby is not even consistent in its lunacy. By its simplistic logic, there is no reason why every individual ought not to be able to own and carry incendiary grenades or even nuclear devices if they could be miniaturized so that a person could carry them. Yet the NRA would probably [note the uncertainty] that permitting such conceal and carry freedom would not be a good idea.
It is time, if there is a sincere concern about the recent shooting injuries and death, to start thinking about what can be done to begin the process of disarmament of the country. The cold war mentality that says that there are crooks and robbers out there with guns, so I must be armed, is a false goal. It leads to the next step of saying that the crook has a bigger gun, so I need a more powerful weapon, until everyone is armed with weapons they do not need for purposes that they will never face. And thus we find ourselves in the veritable “snake pit” in which the present of so many guns creates a danger in and of itself. When someone loses a temper, it becomes easier to take a gun than to just punch a fist into a wall or some other relatively harmless method of letting off steam. When that anger is directed toward a specific person, the potential of a shooting then becomes far more likely than if there were no guns readily lying about. That is the environment that we now have. The challenge is whether we want it to continue and to worsen, or do we want it to get better and less lethal.
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