There
doesn’t seem to be a news day anymore that doesn’t include another example of
gun violence, nut cases who want to take out as many random people as possible
before taking themselves out, or someone with a real or imagined grudge against
an employer or an entire company, or a disappointed lover getting even with the
disappointer, or a political protester using a gun to do his protesting. Another
school shooting, a synagogue, a church, a rock concert, anywhere that people
might gather and become easy targets for someone looking to set a new record
for numbers killed. Back and forth go the arguments—gun lovers and Second Amendment
supporters against those who argue for more stringent laws about who may own
guns and what kind of guns they may own. What follows is a compilation of my
thoughts over the last decade regarding our ever growing need to address this
issue. If the paragraphs seem to be a little disjointed, that’s because I wrote
them at different times about different news stories.
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It’s
time to talk about guns again. In light of the twenty children and six adults
shot and killed in Newtown, Connecticut, it’s way past time to talk about guns
again. I’m not opposed to the Second Amendment; I’m opposed to its application
in a modern society. The Founding Fathers correctly protected the rights of
individuals to own guns—rifles, shotguns, handguns—weapons they needed to hunt
game for the family table, needed to fend off varmints both animal and human
(sometimes one and the same) that threatened them and their families. This was
a time when there was little police presence to protect them. And, the Founding
Fathers thought it might again be necessary for a civilian army to rise up to
battle invaders from Britain or Mexico or even Canada who threatened our
borders. That was then. This is now. Why is it now necessary to protect the
rights of individuals who want to own assault weapons with high capacity
magazines, or even weapons more lethal than that—grenade launchers and mortars
and bazookas, maybe even a tank or two? We now have armed police forces all
around us to protect us from most varmints. We have military forces to guard
our borders. We have National Guard units to protect us. We have militia groups
(heaven help us!) to supposedly guard us from invaders within. Sportsmen and
hunters and gun collectors don’t need fully-automatic or semi-automatic weapons
that fire as many or more than thirty rounds in fifteen seconds. Jared Loughner
fired 31 shots in about fifteen seconds in Tucson from his Glock 19. James
Holmes in July of this year had a 100-round drum magazine in that Colorado
theater, killing twelve and wounding fifty-eight. Why would Nancy Lanza, ardent
gun collector, not have kept her “collection” more safely locked up, knowing
she had a son with mental issues? Where is the sport in having such weapons?
What hunter needs such weapons to bring down a deer or moose or elk or bear? Or
even an elephant, for that matter? Why did we allow the 1994 law against
high-capacity magazines to expire in 2004 and not renew it? Let’s keep the
right to bear rifles and shotguns and handguns. Let’s renew a ban against
high-capacity magazines. Let’s require background security checks for anyone
wanting to buy such weapons. Let’s tighten controls over gun sales at gun
shows. Good God, let’s stop the mass killings in our country.
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Gun violence in Chicago.
How can NRA people still maintain their position on gun control? Would all
those deaths in Chicago, recent as well as in the past, have happened if guns
weren’t so easily obtained? Without a gun, murder would have to be up close and
personal, strangling or beating on a head with a hammer or sticking someone
countless times with a knife, none of which would be accidental. Guns make it
too easy from an impersonal distance. Up close and personal, not so easy. Yes,
people would still die but it wouldn’t be in such numbers.
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In Ed McBain’s Mischief,
written in 1993, the author, tongue in cheek, had this to say, “Sixty-one
percent of all the murders in this city were committed by firearms, but that
was no reason to take guns away from people, was it? After all, in eight
percent of this city’s murders, feet or fists were the weapons, but did anyone
suggest amputation as a means of control? Of course not.” That sounds
like the sort of skewed logic Wayne LaPierre, NRA lobbyist, might make.
"If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our
schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," he said recently.
Well, Wayne, then you’re crazy. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,”
they constantly say. But people who kill people find it way more difficult to
complete that act if they had only fists or feet or a knife or a rope or a
baseball bat, or even a vial of strychnine. And that could only be done one at
a time, slowly, not twenty or twenty-six at a time, rapidly, as with those
damned weapons capable of firing multiple bullets in only a few seconds. Here’s
what the Second Amendment says: “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.” Where, in that statement, does it suggest that our
citizenry needs to bear automatic weapons? Nowhere. It’s now way past time to
tighten our controls over what arms we people have the right to bear.
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Why
does anyone need a rifle designed to fire 100 rounds per minute? Why do we still
allow people to buy such a weapon? What are the NRA gun nuts thinking? Do they
really feel the need to go hunting with this thing and what kind of game would
require that sort of firepower? Or do they feel the need to have one for
self-defense? If the latter, then please don't let me get anywhere near such a
self-defensive crackpot. Why don't our laws prevent anyone from buying 6,000
rounds of ammunition? Or at least have such a purchase send out a red flag to
law enforcement? Too many questions, too few answers.
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In
the wake of the shooting in Aurora, gun sales are spiking, not only in Colorado
but all over the country. I guess OK Corral isn’t that far off. Are those now
buying guns first-time gun owners or are they just building up their arsenals?
If they’re first-timers, what do they plan to do with their new purchases?
Carry them all the time, keeping a wary eye over shoulders in case some
gun-wielding bad guy is creeping up on them? That’s a scary scenario. Are those
who already own guns simply adding more in case they have to flee to some
deep-woods hideaway?
# # # # # #
The
gun supporters in Tucson, after the Gabby Giffords shooting, argued that if
everyone in that crowd listening to Giffords had been carrying, Jared Loughner
would have been toast after his first shot. Of course, there may have been
fifteen or twenty dead from collateral damage, but that’s the price we have to
pay to put an end to the M-15 crazies.
Loughner’s guilty plea
comes after twenty months of legal maneuvering and courtroom antics. He’ll
serve life with no probation. Free room and board, clothing, medical treatment,
television, movies, books—all the amenities of lazy living. Granted, he won’t
have his freedom, but life for him will be mainly carefree. And the cost to the
public for keeping him? Depending on the state, the annual cost varies from
around $50,000 (California) to $13,000 (Louisiana) for an average around
$30,000. Arizona averages $25,000. Assuming Loughner will live into his
eighties, that’s around sixty years at $25,000 a year, a total of about a
million and a half bucks for a man described at his early booking as "smirking
and creepy, with hollow eyes ablaze." In most cases, I’m not a proponent
of the death penalty. I know the threat of execution doesn’t deter people from
committing murder. But some murders are more heinous than others. And Jared
Loughner in Tucson and James Holmes in Aurora and Wade Michael Page in
Wisconsin and Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and all the others who commit such
senseless acts all fit the heinous label. I say, just kill them. I don’t think
that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Storing them in tiny, cold,
windowless cells would be cruel. Daily waterboarding would be cruel and
spiteful. Stretching them daily on a rack would be cruel and barbaric. Bamboo
spikes under the nails would be cruel and silly. But a lethal injection would be
just and satisfying. One eye for the numerous eyes each took. That would be
Biblically just.
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