Guns

America’s mad love affair with guns needs to end. Infatuation is an amazing feeling but, at some point, a suitor has to ask whether the object of his love is loving him back.

America is saturated with guns. Roughly 35-40% of households own guns, and they own 300 million of them. That’s enough for every man, woman, and child to be outfitted for guerrilla warfare, should we ever be invaded by Canada, for example. Canada has only 36 million people, though, with .31 guns per capita. That adds up to a bit over 11 million guns. Maybe we should worry about Mexico—it has 128 million people. Let’s see, at .15 guns per capita that works out to a little over 19 million guns. So if Canada and Mexico invaded us at the same time, hoping, perhaps, to capture the Budweiser Beer factories, we would still outgun them 10-to-1. I think the beer is safe.

Are we afraid of invasions from an enemy that is actually dangerous? North Korea is, no doubt, dangerous. But let’s be honest. If they start a fight, it is South Korea, Japan, and, possibly China that will be damaged (even as North Korea is left as a moonscape). Scratch North Korea.

But what if, say, China invaded and, miraculously, nuclear weapons had not obliterated the planet? What if our country was suddenly swarming with Chinese? How do you suppose the civilian population would hold up with assault rifles and Bowie knives bought from Cabela’s? Would the assault rifles fend off a tank? Would hand-held missile overcome the drones? Civilians cannot stand up to organized armies. Camouflage gear and face paint have their limits.

Some people just don’t feel safe walking the streets, so they “pack”. Now there’s a plan for promoting safety. Some character, in a rage, starts shooting up downtown. Two other mindful citizens, both carrying guns, happen to be on the scene. They leap to protect the crowd, adding to the barrage of bullets, now zinging from three directions. Factor in the ricochets and suddenly no one has a clue about who is shooting whom, or where to go to hide. It’s blood and mayhem. I don’t know why this scene hasn’t played out more often but, let’s face it, the more good guys strolling about protecting the innocent, the more the innocent will end up maimed or dead.

All right, but what about the bad guys? We all know there are monsters out there who have no consciences. There are desperate junkies who will break into houses, stealing everything they can get their hands on. These home invaders can be rapists and murderers. Should we not protect our own homes? Maybe we should. There is no question there are sharks in the water.

And there are sharks out there peddling fear. I recently received an unsolicited magazine at my home. On the cover was a square-jawed blond, sporting stylish tattoos and black fingernails. She wore a holster designed to hold a 3/4-length shotgun, a pistol, and a belt of shotgun shells. The caption? WHEN IT ALL GOES DOWN BE READY FOR ANYTHING. Odds are much higher that this woman’s guns are used on her, or on her husband, or are picked up by one of her kids who, experimenting as kids do, puts a hole in the kid next door.

I can understand the impulse for self protection, though, or the desire to provide protection for one’s family. There was a movement a while back to make schools and universities “no gun zones”. That idea didn’t fare well, since the posted signs seemed to work as invitations to the malicious. (“Here’s a place I can go with my gun and do pretty much whatever I want.”) Guns are a deterrent against the brutal. Sometimes force must be answered with force. This is, more or less, the idea behind police force. However much I would like to live in a society that had no need of police, in this world, police are crucial for maintaining the peace. There are always people who have an abundance of power but who are impoverished as far as sympathy and justice are concerned. These people must be restrained. I cannot blame people for wanting to protect themselves against such as these.

But there are limits. You do not need a bazooka to keep intruders out of your house. You do not need an assault rifle. You may need a heavy gauge gun to stop a bear (though few of us encounter dangerous bears), but you do not need the ability to shoot the bear 100 times. (The bump stock used in Las Vegas allowed Stephen Paddock to shoot 90 rounds per minute.) Where assault rifles are used, collateral damage is fairly certain. The shooter, also, seems to almost always end up dead.

We imagine we can contain mass murder by keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable. This is a fool’s errand. There is not a person alive who does not have the potential to snap and lash out with destruction. There are very few people who never get depressed or extremely angry about something. The more guns we spread around, the more opportunities there are for the disturbed to find guns at hand. Should we keep guns out of the hands of those who have demonstrated unstable and violent behavior? Of course. But such efforts will address only a small percentage of the hazard.

You don’t hand your toddlers kitchen knives and expect it will go well. The same is true with guns and the general populace. We don’t want to throw away our kitchen knives or our toddlers but there must be reasonable actions taken to keep them apart.

What are some reasonable limits? One limiter is to require all guns to be “smart”. There’s been push-back from the NRA (of course) and many gun owners, fearing that smart guns that read finger prints, for example, would not work in a muddy or messy shoot-up. There are newer models out now, promoted by such gun luminaries as Ernst Mauch, that are enabled by a nearby “key” similar to those used in many newer car models. The gun owner could wear the key on his wrist or on a chain around his neck. With such technology guns can only be used by authorized personnel. This would go far in preventing accidental shootings. It also is a strong deterrent to gun theft, as guns become useless without their authorizing keys.

Another limit should be the banishment of all automatic weaponry (machine guns), or modifications that result in similar action (bump stocks). What’s the practical application of these guns (outside of gang warfare and warfare warfare?) Why do we permit armor-piercing bullets? Why do we permit scopes, or sniper paraphernalia of any sort? Why should we permit silencers? We should limit the number of guns anyone can own. People who stockpile guns are looking for fights. Those who look for fights find them. Can there be exceptions for collectors? Sure. There just needs to be a method for assuring the guns are artifacts, not weapons. There are ways to disable them without damaging them. Finally, all pistols should be outlawed, period.

The process of arms de-escalation could begin by outlawing the manufacture of any of the guns or paraphernalia mentioned above. Additionally, the import of any such guns into the country would be outlawed. After a period of time, say, two years, the sale of any of the guns, etc. should also be outlawed. After another period of time, say, two years again, the transportation of any of these items should be made illegal. Such weaponry would no longer be permitted off owner’s private property. Where these conditions are not met, guns would be subject to immediate confiscation by the police, with intent of destruction.

I would not suggest that currently owned guns be confiscated from people’s dwellings. The hazard presented to America’s police force is entirely too great for such a venture. However, the government should set up a national buy-back program for all such weapons, where people could voluntarily turn them in for fair exchange. It would, no doubt, take decades, if not a century to effectively purge the nation of such guns, but each year would bring increased safety for American citizens.

Anyone brainwashed with NRA propaganda will be strongly (if not violently) opposed to any legislation of the sort I am recommending. There would also be many who would cry out that this is an abridgment of American citizen rights, and an attack on basic freedom. This is just nonsense. Our society, and any fair society, is full of laws that limit one person’s freedom when that freedom becomes a means of taking away the freedoms of others. I consider having my life poached a serious infringement of my freedom.

An individual’s right to own a gun was affirmed in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2008. In the Heller decision, the court’s majority opinion said that the Second Amendment protects “the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”

However, in delivering the majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the Second Amendment does not signify unlimited rights. He maintained that it is not a right to keep and carry any weapon in any manner and for whatever purpose. For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion is not intended to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

The NRA strongly opposes most restrictions on gun and gun accessory sales. The NRA is a powerful lobby that represents five million or more members, and there is no question that the U.S. includes many citizens who consider themselves gun enthusiasts. However, it is naive to imagine that the driving force behind the NRA is a collection of gun enthusiasts. The driving force is the gun manufacturing and sales business. Making money is not necessarily a bad thing, but the pursuit of money has a tendency to blunt other impulses, such as conscience. Big Money strongly promotes the idea that weaponry limits are contrary to the American ideal of freedom. These big business interests are no more looking out for common folk than the cigarette industry is…or are the State Lottery systems, for that matter.

“Today’s NRA is a virtual subsidiary of the gun industry,” said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center. “While the NRA portrays itself as protecting the ‘freedom’ of individual gun owners, it’s actually working to protect the freedom of the gun industry to manufacture and sell virtually any weapon or accessory.”

There is a certain madness to the positions espoused by the NRA (or the business interests that have imposed themselves on the NRA). They imagine that the gun policies they espouse will not come back to harm them. If you consider those killed in the mass shootings below, most victims were middle class Americans. The most heartbreaking event of all these was the murder of 20 6&7 year-olds, along with 6 school personnel at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This area of Connecticut is an outer suburb of New York City. The students there are 85% Caucasian and the community is upper middle class. Those who pedal guns put middle Americans at risk…they put their own children and grandchildren at risk.

	Year	# Killed	Location	Setting	Killer(s)	Result for Killer
1	2017	58	Las Vegas, NV	Rt 91 Harvest Music Festival	Stephen Paddock	suicide
2	2016	49	Orlando, FL	Pulse, gay nightclub	Omar Saddiqui Mateem	killed by police
3	2007	32	Blacksburg, VA	Virginia Tech campus	Seung-Hui Cho	suicide
4	2012	28	Sandy Hook, CT	Sandy Hook Elementary School	Adam Lanza	suicide
5	2017	26	Sutherland Springs, TX	First Baptist Church service	Devin Patrick Kelley	killed or suicide
6	1991	23	Killeen, TX	Luby’s cafeteria	George Hennard	suicide
7	2015	14	San Bernardino, CA	Xmas party, county public health dept.	Syed Rizwan Farook & Tashfeen Malik	killed by police
8	2009	13	Fort Hood, TX	Fort Hood Military Base	Nidal Hassan	wounded; given death sentence
9	1999	13	Columbine, CO	Columbine High School	Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold	suicide
10	2013	12	Washington, D.C.	Washington Naval Yard	Aaron Alexis	killed by police

Conclusions that can be drawn from the chart:
1. Mass shootings can take place anywhere. The ten events listed took place all over the country.
2. Targets are random. There are targets against the Right (Harvest Music, Washington Naval Yard), against the Left (Pulse), against the religious (First Baptist), against the privileged (Virginia Tech), and against the most innocent (Sandy Hook). Anyone can be the target of hate and violence.
3. The killings are expressed against the defenseless. This selection is of mass killings, so it is obvious the killers were aiming at causing as much carnage as possible. While the motivations vary, in every case there is the intention of getting publicity and attention.
4. The killers were all greatly disturbed individuals. Of the 12 killers in the list above, 7 committed suicide. Four others were killed, which suggests they had no intention of giving up. The only one captured was wounded first. They each imagined that mass murder would somehow address the rage they felt. And, yet, at the same time, they felt incapable of continuing with life. It is not far-fetched to suggest that these mass murders are essentially suicides, either for the sake of gaining sympathy or for martyrdom, which is a way of gaining admiration. The murderers justified their actions, even as they, ironically, could not live with them.

This brings us to another little known fact about guns in America. While the mass killings understandably receive most of the media attention, the number of people killed by guns in this way is relatively small. In 2014, for example, there were 33,594 shooting deaths in the U.S. Of this number 11, 008 were homicides (14 in mass shootings), and 21,386 were suicides. I doubt even Dr. Kevorkian would be pleased about this. At least he believed he was helping people end inescapable suffering. The gun business is ending the lives of tens of thousands who simply are in need of help. Societal apathy about this phenomenon is a kind of social Darwinism, which is to say, a beast mindset.

Here’s another interesting factoid: Gunfire deaths in the U.S. from 1968-2011: approximately 1.4 million people (about 32,500 per year). American deaths through military conflicts, Revolution-through-Iraq: 1.2 million. As Walt Kelly put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Here’s another interesting factoid: U.S. homicide deaths, 2001-2011: average of 11,101. U.S. deaths from terrorists, 2001-2011: average of 17.

Here’s another interesting factoid: The U.S. firearm murder rate is approximately 15 times that of the average for all developed nations.

Here’s another interesting factoid: More than 87% of violent crimes are committed with handguns.

Here’s another interesting factoid: About 80% of murder victims knew their murderers. This suggests that if someone comes after you in order to kill you, four times out of five, it’s not going to be some foreign invader and it’s not going to be a cold-blooded killer from the bad part of town. It’s going to be someone you mistreated. This is not to suggest the victim is at fault for being murdered. What it does suggest, though, is that if you want to protect yourself, you will have a great deal more success by being kind and respectful than you will by purchasing a gun.

Guns are not making us safer. You may say that it is not guns that kill, it’s people that kill. True. Cain killed Abel and he didn’t use a gun. But guns are the weapon of choice, and it is much easier to kill with guns than any other way. (Well, maybe cars, but at least killing is not the purpose of cars.)

The manufacturers of guns are using big money to buy congress, and they are using big money to push alarmist propaganda on the American people. They are lying to the American people and they are stealing justice by means of bribes. We need to stop listening to them. We need to demand substantial disarmament.

I will not threaten anyone with the wrath of God, nor will I rage about doomsday scenarios. What I will say is that if there is no dramatic change to American laws regarding guns, what we will get is what we have.

What we have is carnage. What we have is a numb nation playing a very literal Russian Roulette…and losing at the game on a regular basis. We have tossed the kitchen knives in the living room for our children to play with, while we relax on the back porch with a couple of cold ones.