Gun culture

There was a school shooting yesterday. Again. Four dead.

There was a dude firing a gun along Interstate 5 and wounding six people, at least one critically.

Four people were shot dead on a Chicago El train.

Five people were shot at a parade in Brooklyn.

A guy broke into a Birmingham, Alabama, apartment and shot four people playing cards, killing one.

Someone opened fire in a parking lot outside a bar in Nashville and wounded several people.

Two mass shootings in Ohio on the same day, one in Cleveland and one in Dayton.

All this since September first. A span of four days.

And yet nothing will be done about it.

Oh, suspects will be arrested, victims will be treated or eulogized, families will grieve. That stuff will "be done" about it. But nothing will happen to address the causes of this uniquely American problem of gun violence.

I know nothing will be done because nothing has been done. We've been living with this situation for decades—correction, most of us have been living with it, some very much not—and all we get from the people empowered to take action are meaningless "thoughts and prayers" and completely nonsensical, idiotic comments like this one, from Georgia governor Brian Kemp after yesterday's murders: "Today is not the day for politics or policy." Screw you, BK, this is precisely the day for policy. That's, you know, your actual job.

Some people in leadership positions want to do something. Assault weapon bans, stricter background checks, restricting access to firearms in various ways, these have been proposed in legislation but never with any real chance of passage because (a) Republicans, and (b) ingrained gun culture.

We have a real chance at getting something passed in the nearish future if we elect enough Democrats in November and can then bypass (a). So those of us who survive the inevitable shootings to come in the next couple of years or so might see progress. But I'm concerned about (b) being an insurmountable problem, at least for the foreseeable future.

Gun culture is everywhere in this country. It's in our historical touchstones, it's in our entertainment, it's in our language. It's in so many idioms we don't even notice it. We're basically inured to the idea of guns whether we want to be or not.

Just last night, while I was umpiring, I used the phrase "bang-bang play," which is baseball-speak for a super-close safe/out situation or split-second call made by an umpire. I'd never really considered the origins of the phrase until that exchange, which went like this:

Me (umpire): OUT!

Player: I don't know, man, are you sure?

Me: It was bang-bang, they got him.

It was the joining of "got him" with "bang-bang" that clicked it for me, this is a gun metaphor. I know, should have been obvious, but having heard it so many times in the context of a play on the bases it wasn't.

When estimating a timeframe, we say we're "shooting for" a date. We "shoot from the hip" or "shoot our mouths off" or "shoot ourselves in the foot." The passenger seat in a car is for "riding shotgun." We use "bullet points" in memos. If we're confident about the outcome of something, it's a "surefire bet." Someone who's extra gregarious might be called "a real pistol." We implore recipients of bad news, "don't shoot the messenger." If someone is criticized, they've "come under fire." A quickly-fading fad is a "flash in the pan." If we're on a tight deadline we're "under the gun." If you put off a decision or act cautiously in a dilemma, you might be "keeping your powder dry." If you change your expectations or goals you might be "raising/lowering your sights."

And those are just off the top of my head (an idiom which, so far as I know, has no firearm connotations). Even when there are no guns around, there are guns everywhere. I don't know how we get past that.

Of course, making the real guns a whole hell of a lot harder to come by would be a great first step.

Regarding the latest school shooting in Georgia, I leave it to Jeff Tiedrich to lambast the political "leadership" from that state and their useless "thoughts and prayers."

Tagged Politics, Society, Guns   |   Posted on September 5, 2024 at 7:27pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Guns are bad, m'kay?

Guess what. America had another school shooting. Because it's a regular week on Earth.

I realize that this is just screaming into the void (and apologies in advance, this post will probably have more swearing in it than is typical). The Nashville incident this week that resulted in seven deaths barely registers a blip on the societal consciousness because we are so goddamned used to it.

There have been 38 mass shootings in the US just this month. There were 40 last month. 53 in January. A lot of media types are reporting on the specifics of the Nashville case—because it's the newest, it's fresh—looking for motive and details and insights into the perpetrator as an individual, which is, OK, fine, I guess, but that's not what I want to see coverage of. I want to see journalists, protesters, people in general badgering Congress and state legislatures to regulate the fucking guns.

Reporters did approach Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett on the subject on Monday, which is good. Burchett is a Republican, though, so his response was not helpful. It was, however, relatively honest, which is notable in and of itself for an elected representative identifying with that party. He said, "We're not gonna fix it."

Whether he says that because he believes it's pointless to try or because he doesn't care about gun deaths or because he's too deeply in the thrall of the National Rifle Association's profit motive is up to interpretation, but the bottom line is right there. Burchett elaborated (if you can even apply that word) with, "I don’t think a criminal is going to stop from guns [sic], you know … I don’t think you’re going to stop the gun violence." By which he means, he doesn't think you, the empathetic concerned citizenry, can stop it because we, the Republican party, have enough power to ensure it keeps happening and that suits us just fine.

"We're not gonna fix it."

That is but one of the many reasons it is appropriate to label the modern Republican Party as a domestic terrorist organization.

The House Majority Leader, Congressman Steve Scalise, was asked what he thinks should be done about this issue. His response was eminently predictable. "I pray for the victims. I pray for the families. I get really angry when people try to politicize it for their own personal agenda," he said, trying to mask his own politicizing of the problem. The Senate chaplain, Barry Black, wasn't having it. "It's time to move beyond thoughts and prayers," he said in a prayer service he was leading for Senators. "Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous." I suppose that's the chaplain version of "kick these senators and other leaders squarely in the ass and make them act, because they sure as hell won't do it on their own."

Republicans behave as if this is just the normal course of life in America. But when I was growing up, we didn't have active shooter drills in school. We didn't fear that criminals were out there with AR-15 style assault rifles. We have always had a gun-fetishist culture that romanticizes the mistaken idea of the "old west gunslinger," but even in the old west there were, you know, regulations—you show up in town, you had to surrender your guns. The famous gunfight at the OK Corral? It happened because the Clanton gang wouldn't surrender their guns in accordance with the law. Tombstone, Arizona, had more gun control in 1881 that it does now.

I don't know when the NRA managed to convince Republicans that the second amendment to the Constitution didn't actually contain the phrase "well-regulated" or "safety of a free state"—maybe when they trotted out Charlton Heston to speak for them—but at some point the orthodox Republican position became that there should be no laws whatsoever restricting anyone's access to firearms of any kind. Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger said in a 1991 interview that the second amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud [perpetrated] on the American public." Many Republicans know this. Not all of them are insane Alex Jones types, plenty are smart enough to understand what the language of the amendment means and what the intent was with the wording as understood when it was written in the 18th century. But they do not care.

"We're not gonna fix it."

Once, we had a ban on assault rifles. It was effective, so Republicans made sure it went away. Now the assault rifle is a status symbol. Gun fetishists all have to have one. Or two. Or a dozen. Reinstating that ban would be a good start, but it's nowhere near enough.

I've known people that own guns. Most of them were the sort of person I would not trust with one. When I was a teenager I had a friend that lived with her father, a guy I knew to be a drunk and a real piece of shit, and there were multiple guns in her house. I never wanted to be there. I've known people who are not like that, that are basically well-intentioned sorts, that own guns. I had the impression they had them with the perhaps-sublimated hope that they would have an excuse to use them. I've even known a couple of folks who owned one "just for protection" against home invasion or the like. They, I thought, owned their guns out of fear and were far more likely to have the gun used against them or used poorly so that it offered no protection at all.

I have a bias, obviously. I do not support private ownership of firearms at all when it comes to handguns and other guns intended to kill human beings. I find hunting to be revolting, though I respect that it's a different thing and in and of itself can be regulated separately, but mass shootings like this never seem to be carried out with buckshot. Like the Nashville shooter, the perps tend to have assault rifles and handguns. And if we banned those fucking things, I can't help but believe these incidents would decrease dramatically.

They wouldn't completely go away. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that if someone wants to get something illegal, they'll find a way to get it. But it'll take a lot longer, take a lot more effort, and weed out a great many of the prospective perpetrators. Every other developed country on the planet has mental illness among the populace, has media with gratuitous violence, but only the United States has essentially unfettered access to guns and only the United States has dozens of mass shootings every month. Restricting access to guns would prevent many of these incidents, would save lives.

But we can't do anything like that. We can't ban assault rifles, let alone handguns, because Republicans have power and Republicans like violence. Too simplistic? OK, prove me wrong. Republicans like violence. They promote policies that encourage violence. They want criminals to have the very best armaments possible. In fact, they want everyone to be armed to the teeth and settle their problems with a bullet to the head, or at least the threat of one. Why else do they behave the way they do? Give me a convincing argument against that. "We're not gonna fix it" is their doctrine.

Well before this latest mass shooting, Jon Stewart interviewed a state senator in Oklahoma about his efforts to make acquiring and using firearms as simple and uninhibited as possible. It's a great/horrifying interview in which Stewart rams home the hypocrisy of this guy's positions and spotlights just how much this senator in particular and the modern Republican party more generally does not care about gun violence. The whole thing is on his Apple TV+ show, but the bulk of it is available here.

 

Tagged Republicans, Guns, Jon Stewart   |   Posted on March 29, 2023 at 9:38pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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