In early June of 2016, everybody was pissed because a rich kid named Brock the Rapist somehow avoided taking responsibility for his own actions.
A week later a bad guy shot up a nightclub full of innocents in Florida and nobody was willing to just assign blame to the guy responsible. Look, when a guy rapes a girl behind a dumpster it’s not the girl’s fault, or the dumpster’s, or even the guy’s wang’s fault, it’s the guy’s fault for being a bad person. Period.
When a drunk driver kills somebody, it’s not the car’s fault, or the alcohol’s fault, or the dead guy’s fault, or the road’s fault, it’s the fault of the guy who made the piss-poor decision to drive while drunk.
Part of being a free society means having to accept individual responsibility for our lives, and that includes holding people responsible when they act in reprehensible ways. It really is exactly as simple as that. So I have found myself frustrated every time there’s another mass shooting and the conversation turns to gun control. Not because it isn’t a natural talking point of the subject at hand, but because it has the rather pointed effect of taking the focus off of the perpetrator of the crime.
I get that in the case of the Orlando shooting, the obfuscation was because Omar Mateen was a Muslim man and even though he claimed some connection to ISIS, he wasn’t acting at their behest and the media didn’t want to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment or create the impression of an organized terror attack. It also speaks to a deeper need to connect the dots of all the mass killings we’ve seen in this country in recent years, with an ever-increasing frequency. The problem is you’re treating symptoms. It’s clear that there’s a problem when we have this many mass shootings, but I’m more interested in the root of the problem, which isn’t the guns themselves. Guns are a tool. A tool of death and destruction, certainly, but still a tool.
Now I’ll admit it: I’m a conservative who doesn’t own a gun. I never want to own a gun, but what’s going on in this country is bigger than gun control. And to boil it down to that issue and act as if there’s a law you can pass that’s going to stop this madness overnight is naive and disingenuous.
If making a thing illegal in this country made it go away nobody would be addicted to cocaine. Somebody wants something bad enough they’ll get it. That’s why crime exists. That’s basically the exact definition of crime.
Now obviously I’m in favor of cocaine remaining illegal, and for the same reason I’m in favor of reasonable restrictions on firearms, but to act like we can pass a law and go out for shawarma and a couple of beers, job done, mission accomplished, is silly.
I’m in favor of reasonable restrictions not because some guns are more dangerous than others, but because some people are more dangerous than others. Any gun can kill. Any gun in the hands of an unstable or ill-intentioned person is a terrifying prospect. Omar Mateen once threatened to murder all of his classmates over a hamburger. That’s just a fact. He’d been investigated by the FBI. Somebody like that shouldn’t have been able to buy so much as a Daisy bb gun. Period. He was mentally unstable, he was an Islamic fundamentalist, and he was a closeted homosexual. That’s a cocktail just one good shake away from disaster. Then somebody shook the cocktail.
But that separates Mateen from the majority of mass-shooters, who typically are not known to have any mental disorders or diagnosed emotional problems. Nobody’s even sure why most of them do it. So regulations on firearms wouldn’t likely keep guns out of their hands.
Here’s the thing: you can argue that assault weapons should be banned, but how do you define an “assault weapon”? Technically, shooting at somebody with any kind of firearm could be fairly labeled “assault.” Every weapon is a weapon of war. Men fought with clubs and spears before they learned to forge blades from bronze and steel. Technology changes over time, weapons become more efficient and more deadly. So that begs the question, where the Second Amendment is concerned, did the Founders intend that the people should be able to own weapons of war?
I think the answer is absolutely yes. The Second Amendment reads as follows:
“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
So, yes, it says “militia.” It also says, “the right of the people,” not “the right of the militia” or “the right of the army” or “the right of like six guys we chose in a back room.” Remember that when the Revolutionary war was fought, the majority of actors on both sides were British Subjects. The point was that some of them didn’t want to be any longer.
Who fought the first battles of the revolution, before the Continental Army was formed? Who made up a significant portion of that army even after it was formed? Who fought at Lexington and Concord?
Militiamen. Citizen soldiers. Because until the revolution was fully organized, there was no official army. They had to make one. To fight the army controlled by the government to which they had previously owed their allegiance.
In other words, there is a reasonable case to be made that the militia referred to in the Second Amendment is the citizen soldier, the free man and woman with a conscience, a backbone, and the will to remain free.
To reiterate, I do believe some restrictions on firearms are necessary. But the language we use to describe these weapons and the way in which we choose to regulate them, absolutely matters. The framers knew exactly what they were doing when they chose the language in the Bill of Rights. Let us be equally as careful. Because the most dangerous thing in the world would be to give up the people’s right to defend themselves from enslavement, abuse, and oppression, by a government that the majority of Americans already believe is corrupt.
You all know the Lord Acton quote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
We all quote it so often we seem to accept it as true without really considering what it means. But this is a principle that the founders clearly understood, and they built our system of government with the intent to spread the power around, and temper it always with checks and balances so that nobody could thoroughly abuse their position or the power it afforded them, without consequence. Our system of government is meant to protect us, by empowering us, by making the government work for us.
Now then, returning to the original point, how do we deal with mass shooters? Well, first of all, if we accept that they are responsible for their own actions, then we have to ask what is driving them to act. As I said before, nobody really seems to know, but I see a few options. One is that they are people who just want notoriety, who want to leave a mark. Another is that they are unhappy in their lives, unhappy with their situation, with the culture or the world into which they are born. In either case I can see only one real case for how we work toward preventing these things. We must become a more principled society, more willing to listen to ideas, to discuss them, more willing to disagree. To understand that our differences don’t determine our worth.
The thing that would make our country, hell our WORLD a better place today would be if people would talk a little less and listen a little more. It’s true with politics, it’s true with race relations, it’s true with the police, it’s just a simple, universal truth.
One of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is to listen to them. You want to understand women better, listen to them. You want to understand black folks, listen to them. You want to understand conservatives, listen to them. Liberals, listen to them. Poor people, rich people, men, children… just shut your mouth and LISTEN to them.
Shutting your cake hole and opening your ears has two effects. First, it makes you a better friend to the people you love, and second, it makes you wiser. I know this from experience. And the thing is, it wasn’t my choice. I stutter, everybody who knows me knows that. It got easier, as a kid, just to not talk to anybody in school. Just not try because it kept me from getting laughed at and kept me from getting bullied as much, and while I wouldn’t wish THAT on anybody, it also taught me patience… it taught me to listen, it taught me to think, it taught me to analyze.
Anyone who has a clue how we ended up living in an America where Donald J. Trump is the President-Elect, understands that there’s been too little listening and too much talking, bullying, and shaming of people who have different experiences, different points of view, and different ideas to bring to a discussion. That’s how we got there. That’s how racial tensions get ratcheted up. It’s why riot cops get sent to hose down peaceful Native protesters. Because everybody is so goddamn sure that they’re right and everybody else is wrong. If you don’t live with the pervasive feeling that you might possibly be full of shit, then you cannot truly be said to have an open mind.
Problems of the kind we face in our world today don’t just happen because we didn’t regulate something. They happen because our society has grown seriously sick. And if you want to fix it, ladies and gentlemen, the first step is to quit using it to leverage political agendas. Left, right, liberal, conservative, whatever you are, whatever you want to call yourself, put that crap aside and just deal with it as an American, or better yet as a compassionate human being. You say it’s not the time for understanding or compassion? I call bullshit. We won’t solve our problems by clinging dogmatically to narrow, pre-programmed perceptions. We won’t solve them by sharing fake news articles. You cannot hold others accountable for their actions until you accept responsibility for your own.
Sane people don’t walk into a school and shoot everybody if they feel connected to them. Sane people don’t shoot people who respect them, or whom they respect. Since we’ve established that the majority of the mass shooters don’t appear to be clinically crazy, then we must assume that the fault is in the other half of the equation: that mass shootings happen because people do not feel empowered, do not feel heard, do not feel seen. Noticed. Cared for. Respected. Appreciated. Loved. They feel cut off from the people around them. The human spirit needs nourishing, and you do not get that nourishing through a computer screen. You do not get it through likes. You do not get it through working harder. You do not get it through law. Congress cannot ratify a nourishing of the spirit. The president cannot sign an executive order saying that you will henceforth be happy and healthy.
You get that through communion. You can find it in pretty much any church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. But you can also find it around a table with your friends and family, and as we stumble forward into another Thanksgiving holiday, we should remember to be thankful for the time spent with one another. What’s missing in our society these days is pretty much right there at the Thanksgiving table. Just a little human decency, and some good old-fashioned awkward conversation.
