The public outcry over the most recent massacre at the hands of the gun lobby should be heartening. Unfortunately, the NRA is most likely correct in its belief the whole thing will blow over soon enough. As a recent candidate for Vice President declared, we’re locked and loaded and ready for more game (as she trained bull’s eye targets on Democratic candidates). Indeed, as we know, mass killings are always good for the gun business and for the gun lobby. If you are a gun nut, the answer to every question is always “more guns”. Yes, arm the teachers. Arm the parents. Arm the preschoolers! Get your AK-47 today. Make those schools safe by ensuring Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. Let’s have bloody gun fights in the O-K(indergarten) Corral.
Even the advocates of gun control are afraid of suggesting anything drastic. Let’s toughen the background checks. Don’t let criminals and especially the criminally insane buy guns. Right. Does anyone read the newspaper? The boy’s mother was the gun nut and was killed with her own apparently legally purchased weapon. Our nation is swimming in them. Force open a window of any randomly chosen house and you’ve got a better than even chance that you’ll find guns. With luck, military-style automatic assault rifles designed to massacre whole villages of Afghans.
Oh, but we cannot do anything about that because our ForeSighted ForeFathers gave us the Constitutional right to own any type of weapon, up through assault rifles and laser-guided missiles and on to nukes.
Actually they were talking about ownership of muskets by well-organized state militias. But no matter. When it comes to guns, the strict interpretation of the Constitution is broad enough to include private ownership of assault rifles with magazines that hold a hundred rounds. Put several in every home.
We must protect the rights of hunters. How could any hunter be expected to stand his ground against a gaggle of geese or a herd of deer without such firepower?
Look, like many Americans I grew up with guns. And there was a period in which I hunted like my idol Daniel Boone. Not that we needed the meat—we raised our own, and truth be told no one likes deer or bear. And the shooting itch can be satisfied by killing clay pigeons. Apparently today most hunters—or at least the most prominent ones in the Republican party—go to special hunting preserves where guides release cage-raised game right under their noses to maximize killing efficiency. The well-heeled hunters still occasionally miss and shoot their hunting companions (Dick! Cheney!)—much to the glee of the game that escape in the ensuing confusion.
Most gun owners don’t hunt anything. The guns are for personal protection. That’s why Adam Lanza’s mom had accumulated lots of them, including the BushMaster her son used to hunt little kids.
Yes, you need at least a hundred rounds of firepower to defend your castle. If you happen to live in Afghanistan. I may have missed some news, but I have not read about many American households being attacked by small armies of well-armed and determined Taliban. (Yes, OK, the World Trade Towers were attacked, but I’m not sure how much good even a very well-armed citizen would have done against on-coming aircraft).
What do you really need to defend your household? Well, a double-barreled shotgun dialed to a wide spread would be a good deterrent. For those who really worry about sustained attacks, maybe two of those per household would do the trick. Make the shotguns big and heavy and obvious and loud. You don’t need to carry them into classrooms. You don’t need to hide them in your pants. You want them at home, handy and visible to deter potential intruders.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Yes, right. Try it this way: Nukes Don’t Kill People, People Kill People. Then why don’t we let Iran have nukes? Because we fear that if they had them, they might be tempted to use them. And those hundreds of millions of guns in American homes? Might they not tempt some use? Even if not criminal or insane? How about just a wee bit ticked off about something?
I’ve been relatively surprised that no one is talking about America’s real gun problem. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, very few Americans had guns. Too expensive. That’s why they were for the militias that needed to defend Americans from rampaging Brits and French.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War that they became common accouterments to many homes. Two reasons. First, the manufacturers who made out like bandits during the war needed to keep the profits flowing. And they had perfected production techniques while producing more efficient killing weapons. Second, and probably more importantly, white folks thought they needed to protect their homes from the (imagined) soon-to-be marauding freed slaves.
Yes, it came down to fear of black Americans. Still does. That is why gun ownership rates are so much higher in the South. It is the unspoken American exceptionalism. It is why we insist on being so well-armed and why we tolerate murder by guns at rates that no nation ever experiences outside civil war. And, truthfully (one could say ironically but that doesn’t put it quite right) blacks were and still are the victims of the American love affair with guns and its tolerance for murder. And, again one could note the irony, black Americans are much more likely to support tighter gun control.
But we won’t go far down that path. The gun lobby will continue to whip up the fear (remember George Bush, Sr’s disgusting racist ads that invoked Willie Horton) in the interest of profits. They need to sell those excess military-style assault rifles to American households. School kids are collateral damage.