When Jan. 1 rolled around, I thought I’d make a list: How many shootings take place in the Concord area every week? Barely into January, there were more than 10. And then there was a school shooting elsewhere. And now, six weeks into a year that’s new enough that folks are still sometimes writing the wrong date on their checks, there have been a whole lot more local shootings – and four school shootings around the country.
I can’t tell you how many people have been shot in New Hampshire so far this year. I found that I couldn’t bring myself to write them down. I don’t have the constitutional or emotional capacity to do it every single day. I can tell you that during the short time I tried, there was at least one shooting reported at least every other day, and those were only the ones that happened in the Concord area – not in our bigger cities, not up north, not on the coast or in the western part of the state. And I can also tell you that the shootings weren’t part of a bigger crime, like robberies or kidnappings. They were people who knew each other shooting at each other because, apparently, that’s how many gun owners solve disagreements. One struggles not to wish they were better shots to start solving the problem through attrition.
This past week, once again, we had to listen to our clueless leader intone “we all grieve with you” words at the families who lost loved ones in the latest school shooting. “We’re all one family in the U.S., united in our grief,” he said, or some such thing. Once again, he’s wrong. We aren’t one big family, and we aren’t all grieving with the families whose child or spouse or friend was murdered. We’re two families, and we’re of two completely different minds about the gun violence that’s tearing us apart. We’re families at war with each other, and it’s a war that’s literally killing us.
Members of one of those families, hearing about the latest massacre, wants more fire power, more easily acquired, faster, more deadly, with fewer and fewer limitations on who can own it and where they can wield it and what kinds of weapons are available – the better to get the bad guy before the bad guy gets them is the disingenuous justification. You can be pretty sure that many members of that family spent the weekend in gun shops and online buying more weapons while funerals for murder victims in Florida were taking place. The other family tries vainly to batten down the hatches, to make our public buildings more impervious to attack – which of course is impossible – the equivalent of buttressing up the fort during an extended siege by an enemy that is not only armed to the teeth, but is mostly invisible and living among us with its arsenals undetected. Besides that, we keep our fingers crossed tightly and knock on wood a lot – haven’t been shot at yet!
I don’t want to hear any more about how this latest shooter is insane. Of course he’s insane – sane people don’t pick up a gun and start shooting at people. The same can be said about all the local gun nuts who shoot at each other or other people they know – they’re out of their right minds, too, sometimes caused by too much alcohol, or too many drugs, or too many out-of-control hormones, or too-easily-fired-up tempers. We don’t need to talk about what anyone knew or didn’t know, or suspected or didn’t suspect about the most recent shooter(s). It doesn’t help to know, and it doesn’t change anything. Shoot someone else on purpose and it’s a given – you aren’t mentally competent, and you shouldn’t have had access to a gun. Maybe you were sane yesterday, but the day you went hunting humans, you definitely weren’t. Maybe it makes people feel better if they think someone else recognized the insanity but didn’t say anything about it before people were murdered, but it shouldn’t. The whole nation is culpable every time someone shoots up other people, because we’ve allowed it to happen, over and over again. And we do nothing – nothing – to put an end to it.
The insanity we need to talk about is our own. The insidious insanity that enables us to make mouth noises about the horror of it all, and not actually do something about the problem. The group insanity that allows us to no longer be shocked that only six weeks into a new year we’ve already had four school shootings, and all we’ve done is pledge to make schools harder to get into – more locks, more bullet-proof glass, more metal detectors, more emergency drills. The incomprehensible insanity that keeps us from putting some serious hurt on our other family’s ability to get and hoard more weapons, that doesn’t do something big and terrible to people who own guns and don’t keep them well locked up. The insanity of encouraging commerce and manufacture of weapons for private citizens without any requirements for safety and competence. The insanity that lets us go along with the status quo when we know for a fact that there are many more of us than there are of them, and we all agree we want to make it stop, and yet, we don’t make it stop. How many more years, how many more politicians, how many more payoffs, how many more threats, how many more dead children, dead neighbors, dead family members, dead friends and neighbors, before we snap out of it and act like sane people?
Are we totally stupid? Have we forgotten that there are some things about which we shouldn’t compromise? Have we lost the ability to weigh a human life against the right to own any and every gun one likes, and see that the human life is far, far more precious and worthier of preserving?
Our respect and value for human beings has been seriously eroded, replaced by an undefined we. We have the right to own guns; we are being threatened by Muslims/Mexicans/foreigners/gays/liberals/you name it. We need to hold onto every little bit of what we’ve got, and the individual who is consequently being terrorized and damaged beyond repair be damned.
We need to snap out of it, before it’s too late. I was reminded recently of a line from Angels in America by Tony Kushner: The Angel says, “Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible/ It will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”
We’re there, in most areas of our national experiment. And if we continue to act like the fixes are impossible, we’re going to exist for a very, very long time in the completely unbearable. We need to howl like wolves, drowning out the snapping and snarling of the dogs who shout about gun ownership rights. We need to be loud and we need to howl daily and publicly, with letters and votes and money and public shaming, until we force a change. Putting serious restrictions on weapons owned by just folks isn’t going to make any of those people’s lives impossible, but it will cut down on how many other lives have been made unbearable.
Thank you, from the heart, to the gun-owner in Florida who voluntarily surrendered his semi-automatic weapon to the police and encouraged other gun owners to follow his lead, saying that he enjoyed his gun, but that no civilian needs to own such a thing. That man is a true American hero, and possibly the most sane among us. Now, how about the rest of the gun owners. Are you sane enough to man up and follow his lead?
(Debra Marshall lives in Wilmot. She blogs at herondragonwrites.blogspot.com.)