I awoke Friday to news of another mass shooting, this one in Kansas. Three dead, 14 wounded – a small incident as these things go. The news put the story on second, after a preview of the Oscars. That’s where we are in this country.
The details of why it happened weren’t clear at the time. They’re only slightly clearer now. But does it matter? Don’t we already know the answer?
It happened because of guns. It almost always happens because of guns – big guns, small guns, guns with sniper scopes, handguns, assault weapons, guns that spit bullets as fast as a finger can twitch, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.
As a society, you’d think we’d pick up on that common denominator.
But we never do. Instead, we focus on people – crazy people, sad people, lonely people, angry people, suicidal people, people with a grudge, people who just snap, people who were bullied as a child.
Which is maddeningly stupid and obvious. Yes, of course, people are to blame. Guns don’t fire themselves, after all. But it’s also obvious and true that a society with fewer guns is likely to have fewer shooting victims. (Real mind blower there, right?) (And just so you know how gun crazy America is, we have 4.43 percent of the world’s people, but 42 percent of all the guns. Break out the chant: “We’re No. 1 … by a lot! We’re No. 1 … by a lot!”)
And it’s patently, ridiculously, infuriatingly, maddeningly obvious – follow the logic here – that since crazy people, sad people, lonely people, angry people, suicidal people, people with a grudge, people who just snap and people who were bullied as a child are always going to be with us, it makes sense to make it harder for them to take so many others with them when they explode, right?
I keep waiting for that realization to take hold in America but there’s no sign of it yet. Instead, we seem to prefer the current “Woe is me” approach to guns, which is working so well. This approach throws up its hands, shrugs it shoulder and mewls, “Nothing can be done, might as well accept it.”
Aren’t we better than that? This is America. We’re feisty doers, not victims. We fix problems, not shrink from them. We don’t have to accept weekly mass shootings. We don’t have to live in a nation where you automatically check for the exits when you go to the movies. We don’t have to say a silent prayer every morning that a madman doesn’t shoot up our kids’ school. We don’t have to rehearse “active shooter” drills at our jobs.
We just don’t. We can fix this. It’s our country, damn it. There are lots of easy ways to reclaim it.
We can tell the NRA to go to hell, for starters. We could reject their insane view that there’s no such thing as a good gun law.
We could also limit the number and types of guns we allow ourselves to have. We’re big boys and girls. We don’t need the NRA’s permission. We don’t have to meekly accept their extreme interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. We could make it so people have guns for protection and for sport but can’t build arsenals. We could get rid of assault weapons, massive ammo drums and clips and military-grade bullets. We could make it hard to get a gun – very hard, insanely hard if we want to.
We could also vote. Voting is good. We can start by voting those people and parties out of office that actually brag about having a high NRA rating. When politicians do that it means they’ve abandoned free thought and the public good and placed our gun policies in the hands of people who have a direct financial stake in the sale of ever more guns.
Most of all, we could decide to stop playing dumb. By that I mean, we could stop swallowing our own nonsense about how nothing can be done.
Sounds crazy but it just might work.
For a great article and video on America’s gun addiction, see “America’s gun problem, explained.”
Bravo, well said, once again I agree with you 100%.
I too agree with Andy on this one, but what scares me is the nut in Kalamazoo was your everyday joe citizen according to his friends and family. What do you do to stop that? When you have an old west mentality that the NRA has its going to be hard to change anything when it comes to gun control. When you have a Republican Party that supports Donald Trump I think we are in trouble.
Jim, what we have is a genie out of the bottle in the form of copycatters. That’s why Columbine was historic. It changed things. It showed people a template for lashing out: Don’t just kill yourself. Express your rage at society by taking part of it with you. And we enable that with our all guns all the time mentality.
I agree 100%.
Thanks, Andy.
…………we can own a car but only if you say what size engine, tires etc…..
Well said, again. Thank you for having the courage to continue this fight. Why can it seem so clear to some of us, while others feel compelled to go out and buy more and bigger guns?
Why not Andrew Heller for President? You’ve got my vote.
“A sensible approach to issues in America.”
What do you say? On second thought, he wouldn’t have a chance!
Here’s what it’s come to. I regularly photograph local live theater productions. Last week I shot a dress rehearsal of a play for Grand Rapids Community College. When young actors and actresses aren’t properly prepped, they can be thrown off by a photographer roaming around taking photos. So before opening curtain I asked the director if the cast had been forewarned that I would be shooting the show. She said “Yes,” and then went on to remark that “Some of the kids were kind of freaked out when they were told there’d be someone ‘shooting the show’.” The fear that our gun culture has created is painfully sobering. And frightening. Sigh. Thanks for your excellent column and especially for the link to the Vox.com analysis.
Just keep pounding at it Andy. We really have to get rid of guns through elections but we have to get rid of the “corporations are people” ruling first. As long as politicians can be bought by big business, and the NRA and its henchmen ARE big business, it is only going to get worse.
I saw Mark Ruffalo on a recent episode of Bill Maher’s “Real Time.” In the midst of a discussion about Flint’s water and other examples of national environmental racism, Mark half shouted, “We’re a country that doesn’t know how to take care of its people!” Gun deaths–just another example of being a country full of sick people. How to fix that? Make people’s well-being priority #1. How can we be a strong country when our country’s policies/laws/leaders don’t ensure a healthy populace?
Oh, we know how. We just don’t do it. The government is for the 1 percent, by the 1 percent. There’s a reason they call it trickle down economics. We get trickled on.
Amen, Andy. AMEN!!
We talk about guns and gun control.
We talk about crazy people.
What about all the violent video games that people play for hours at a time where points are awarded for killing objects? What is there to
separate reality from games? This starts at very young ages with”innocent” games like laser tag. What about all the murder shows on TV every night? Don’t you think some crazy people would get some ideas from watching them? It is becoming part of our culture because we are bombarded with this crap everyday. Even the daily news spends most of it’s time telling us about murders around the country and the world.
We become what we hear and see. This isn’t rocket science.
Andy, After years of following you I have found a subject upon which we have a profound disagreement. The pros (and cons) of this argument cannot be expressed in just a short comment. (And I am not writing a column.) While I too grieve over the unnecessary violence, that does not mean that I believe the only solution is to “take away the guns.” In fact, the Constitution reminds us that right “shall not be infringed.” Are you proposing a new amendment?
No one is proposing to take away all guns. I’m saying ban ones we don’t need for self protection or sport. And make all guns very difficult to get.
America has lots of problems, but guns is not one of them. Maybe the nature of news coverage is the major problem. We have 20-40 shootings each weekend just in Chicagoland, but we don’t read about that much. Seems to me that the problem in these shooting hotspots is mainly poverty, racism, and gangs. The simple fact is that violent crime overall has been decreasing every year for several years. But the fear of violent crime is increasing, causing increasingly huge numbers of honest, law abiding, people to buy guns for protection.
And then you have the fact that over 80% of people in prison are there because of drugs. Drugs is a major problem.
If you even use the phrase “gun violence” you are prejudging the cause of problems. Blaming guns is oversimplifying and just dumb. Like blaming automobiles for drunk drivers.
So covering mass murderers is responsible for causing them?
The daily slaughter in Chicago is big news there, by the way. But there’s a difference between a mass slaying and a gangbanger murder.