Still Not The Time To Talk About It

There was another mass shooting today in the U.S. Actually, no wait…there were two. The San Bernardino shooting was #355 on day #336 of 2015. We’re averaging just over one mass shooting per day this year.

I’m getting sick of this bullshit. Here are some ideas. (This is an opinion piece, so I’m not going to do any research. Sorry.)

State & Local Governments

State and local governments need to put on their big kid pants by ignoring the NRA and getting busy plugging loopholes and stopping leaks in existing gun laws and their enforcement. We should never allow a gun to be sold to someone without a background check. We should never allow a gun to be sold to someone who’s a felon or has a history of mental illness.

Objection: But criminals don’t follow the law!

Laws never stop crime. Homicides will always happen, but that doesn’t stop us from having laws that make it illegal to commit homicide. Laws just define what crime is and is not – and it should be a crime to purchase a gun without a background check. It should be a crime for felons and the mentally ill to acquire (or be sold) guns. It’ll still happen, but if we catch you doing it there will be consequences.

Objection: How do you define who’s mentally ill?

Good question. Off the top of my head, I’d say an inpatient stay at a mental health facility counts. Let’s call this an implementation detail and have some meetings to iron it out. But let’s do something and get the conversation started. Throwing up our hands and saying “It’s hopeless, there’s nothing we can do” is what got us into this mess.

Objection: You’re infringing on the constitutional rights of felons and the mentally ill!

Shut up. Also, I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know felons give up certain rights when they choose to commit felonies. We don’t let the mentally ill drive semis or fly commercial aircraft either, in the interest of public safety. Sometimes, depending on factors, they don’t even get to live on their own.

The NRA is fond of saying that we don’t need any new gun legislation, because there are plenty of gun laws already on the books and we should just enforce those. I agree. Let’s get after it. Let’s find those loopholes and plug them. This means legislators need to brace themselves to flip off the NRA, which will fight tooth and nail to obstruct any legislation that has a chance of impacting the firearm manufacturers’ bottom lines. They’ve been the sole voice in the discussion for far too long, though. It’s time for politicians to tell them to sit down and STFU.

The NRA and Firearms Manufacturers

Unless they want to end up royally goat-fucked like big tobacco did in the 1990s, the NRA and firearms manufacturers need to come to table like adults and be a partner in this discussion. The tide is turning, and it’ll go worse for them if they continue their tradition of shouting down the conversation every time it comes up.

The NRA ought to stop stoking the fires of paranoia in their membership for political and financial gain. Nobody is coming to take anybody’s guns, and civilians don’t need assault rifles or high-capacity magazines. The profit margin on “tacticool” is enormous. That’s the real reason behind the NRA’s constant obstructionism and lobbying.

Objection: What about that Nancy Pelosi/Barbara Boxer/Dianne Feinstein?

What about them? Yes, they’re anti-gun. Yes, they’re liberal Democrats. Yes, they’re from California. Yes, California’s full of lefty wingnuts. So what? Did you know that Dianne Feinstein survived an office shooting? True story. Do you think if that happened to you it might traumatize you and possibly determine your opinion on guns if you were otherwise unfamiliar with them? I think it might.

Objection: What about tyranny?

Oh please. Middle aged, balding, pudgy suburban man with the mortgage, don’t kid yourself. You aren’t going to do a goddamn thing about tyranny, least of all pick up your AR-15 and successfully fight off trained soldiers. Tyranny isn’t going to come marching down your street in formation anyway – it’ll come quietly in the form of universal surveillance and in the name of safety. Besides, the military’s got tanks and bombers and shit you ain’t got and won’t even see until it’s too late, so don’t make me laugh.

Objection: But the [city name] shooting didn’t involve an assault weapon!

Maybe not, but the overheated rhetoric, incessant fearmongering from the gun lobby, and very basic marketing tactics applied to firearms (buy this and you’ll be one of the cool kids!) aren’t helping, and we need to start doing anything we can to cool things down. If the NRA and manufacturers take some proactive steps in this direction, it would go a long way toward tamping down public anger over the ever-increasing body count…and I believe the body count would go down too.

John and Jane Q. Public Need to Be Honest About the Problem

After the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, President Obama released a written statement saying “This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal.” I guess I see where he’s coming from, because he can’t really say “this is normal” without maybe actually doing something about it, but…horseshit. It’s very normal. Very very normal. It happens, on average, every goddamn day. I take a shit every day too, and I’d say that’s pretty normal. How are mass shootings not normal? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. We’ll never successfully address the problem if we’re going around spouting and swallowing patently false platitudes. (Yes, that includes “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” Congratulations, you did and said nothing, but at least you feel better and that’s what counts, right?)

Guns, by themselves, aren’t actually the problem. Switzerland, I’m told, is armed to the teeth. There’s at least one gun in every household, and yet they have very low violent crime rates. Japan is a study in contrast. Almost no civilian in Japan has access to a firearm, and yet they also have a very low violent crime rate. So what gives? It’s the guns, stupid…well, that plus our violent-ass culture: the news media, movies, and video games all glorify and promote violence for our voyeuristic pleasure. A violent culture is a difficult, difficult problem to address, though – so we argue non-stop about guns instead.

Objection: Don’t blame video games, you asshole!

See? It’s tough to address a violent culture. Also, shut up.

Objection: It’s not the guns, it’s a mental health issue!

Yes. Absolutely. So what can we do about it? There are lots of people with mental problems that can’t afford help. Maybe something like Medicare/Obamacare could help with that. Maybe we need to work to reduce the stigma associated with seeking help by encouraging people to seek help rather than mocking them for it and/or gossiping about them. Maybe we need to be more diligent about saying “Hey man, cool it” when someone near us starts making “idle” threats. Maybe we need to be more diligent about reporting these people so they can get the help they need.

Finally, as much as I loathe the NRA, they’re right about one thing: the second amendment protects our right to bear arms. Confiscation will never, ever work, so we should forget about that and stop considering it an option. Hey, up above I suggested the NRA and firearms manufacturers should come to the table and take voluntary steps to help address the problem – gun control advocates need to do the same. Unwillingness to compromise is why we’re stuck at this impasse. Americans are going to keep their guns, and that’s that.

Objection: The second amendment only applies to well-regulated militias!

That wording is in there, and often minimized/left out by the pro-gun lobby, it’s true but…shit, I don’t know. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but Americans have privately owned guns since we were still British colonists. I think this particular train sailed before the second amendment was even inked.

Objection: The founding fathers never intended us to own assault rifles!

Never mind what the founding fathers “intended.” They didn’t intend for us to use the Internet either. How could they know? This is a particularly smelly red herring.

Conclusion

It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m tired of writing so I’m going to wrap this up in very short order: You may not like my ideas. That’s okay. Throw out a few of your own. What would you do to address the problem? Let’s have a conversation. It’s way, way past time to talk about it.

 

Calderas, Catastrophes…and Gun Control

I have a volcano for a next-door neighbor. A super-volcano, actually. I live well within the blast radius of Yellowstone National Park. It’s a neat place. If you’ve never been, you should go. There are scenic lakes, grizzly bears, wilderness, moose and elk, crazy geysers and an absolute metric shitload of magma below ground.

From time to time, the super-volcano super-erupts, which pretty much ruins an otherwise nice day if you’re anywhere in mid-North America. The last time this happened was about 640,000 years ago. The good news is that scientists don’t expect the next super-eruption to be an extinction event. The bad news is that the good news is “extinction’s off the table.” If you’re anywhere near it, you’re most likely dead meat, entombed in an ash coffin so the archaeologists of 6489 can study your bones.

Most of the park’s area is a caldera that pretty constantly rises and falls as magma moves around underground. That’s comforting, and by “comforting,” what I really mean is “spooky.” The super-volcano is not dead, it’s just resting. It’s sleeping, and the rhythmic rise and fall of the caldera floor is its respiration.

Is it going to erupt again? Yep. When? We’re not really sure. There are a lot of variables in play. Soon? Probably not. I hope not. I just bought a house here in 2005, and what about my property values? Super-eruptions are hard on property values. The volcano fascinates us. We study it, measure it, discuss the possible implications of an eruption, but on a day-to-day basis we don’t really worry about it too much. It’s been dormant lo these 640,000 years, it’s probably not going to erupt this week.

Dammit Bobby boy, what in the hell, what in the heaven, what in the Earth? What does this have to do with gun control?

Earlier this week, I re-shared this pic on Facebook:

Which, as near as I can tell, originated from a Facebook page called The Middle Class is Drowning. One of my friends who’s an avid shooter/hunter/NRA member replied to this with

“I bet the first reaction by Obama and many liberals was ‘We get to take away their guns!'”

I don’t know if he was serious or not. I hate to say that, because I don’t want to disrespect his convictions, but it sounds ridiculous to me, and he’s a smart guy. So I don’t know. I’m pretty liberal, and when I first hear the news of the latest mass shooting, my first two thoughts are

1. Those poor bastards. Please, if you can, confer severe confusion on the shooter and clarity on everyone else that’s in the area.
2. This keeps happening, over and over and over. What on earth can we do to prevent the next one and the one after that?

We can’t restrict the sale of firearms. The NRA’s pretty decisively won that battle. Besides, we’re being constantly reassured that won’t work – killers will still kill, just with a different weapon. A nine-iron maybe. (Do you know how hard it would be to kill 20 people with a nine-iron?) We can’t institute background checks at the point of sale in an attempt to keep weapons out of the hands of mentally unstable people, because who’s to say what “mentally unstable” means and blah blah blah. We can’t make healthcare (including mental healthcare) more accessible to the poor because ZOMG socialism!1! The cops can’t even stop and question people carrying assault rifles at farmer’s markets without an uproar.

No seriously, what can we do? Are we doomed to endure more and more mass shootings until the end of time? If we’re not willing to accept that, there must be something we can do. Personally, I’m convinced America’s violent culture is to blame. Switzerland is pretty much awash in guns. Japan has next-to-none. Neither country has anywhere near the number of gun deaths that the U.S. does. So no, I don’t think it’s the guns, necessarily. (Though you have to admit, it’s pretty tough to kill 13 people with a knife, even if it’s a big sharp one specifically designed for combat. Like the USMC Ka-Bar. Still tough.)

I have to conclude that people who respond to a mass shooting by thinking either “Now we get to take away their guns!” or “Now they’re gonna come for our guns!” simply aren’t very smart. Nobody has taken anyone’s guns away in the U.S. in a very long time. Access to guns has not been restricted at the federal level for a very long time. If anything, U.S. gun laws have gotten more permissive of late: the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, and President Obama signed a bill into law in 2010 that allowed carrying guns in national parks.

So no…the super-volcano is not going to erupt anytime soon just because the caldera floor is constantly moving. We can figure this out when it comes to geology, but emotions cloud our judgment when it comes to our guns.

mjw