I AM FEELING RATHER RAW after yet another school shooting yesterday. Here we are again – AGAIN! – having the same debate. Nothing has changed.
(Much) more on that in a sec. I wasn’t making any friends or changing any minds on social media as I got into it with strangers, and couldn’t think of what else to do, so I went to Five Guys, set on eating my feelings:
And yes, I am aware it isn’t healthy to use food in this way, and I also know I wrote here in January about how I was eating salads and stuff, but what can I say. I’m weak. And I just don’t like salad. Or bananas. Or lots of things that are good for me. So I got a burger and some fries, and it was really delicious, and I am unapologetic.
At least I walked there and back.
So there I sat, a lonely lady at a high-top table, scrolling through my phone, getting angrier and angrier at the fact that THIS HAPPENED AGAIN. A bunch of kids (and their parents, and their teachers, and their community, and their country) have been traumatized again by a guy intent on making some statement – we don’t know what, yet – which was pretty easy for him to do in such a dramatic way, because he had a gun. Which the adults in his home knew about. Oh, it was locked up, they said. That was our rule.
He used a gun.
Please, don’t start by telling me that guns are not, in and of themselves, bad. I understand that. It is condescending to suggest that I might actually think that an inanimate object is capable of killing without it being activated by a human. Plus, that argument breaks down when you realize that guns are designed for the sole purpose of killing other living beings. Or at least, wounding them.
Hey: If you are so fearful that MS-13 gang members or bad hombres are coming to do you harm, or your home is an ideal target for a middle-of-the-night break-in that you feel the need to keep a personal firearm, to be used in the unlikely event something like this actually happens to you, then I trust and expect you are doing so with great care and forethought, in compliance with applicable laws, despite the odds being that your gun won’t actually save you in such situations. But, we all have the right to protect our people and our stuff in the way that makes sense to us. So, you do you.
I don’t want to take *your* guns away. What I and many others want now is called gun “control.” Control means some sort of moderating effort, to ensure people who shouldn’t have guns, can’t get them. It does not mean a total ban on every single gun in the whole world. You can still keep your pistol, if it helps you sleep at night, and you can still hunt deer or whatever. So take a deep breath, Captain Hyperbole.
I do feel strongly that no civilian needs to have access to semi-automatic weapons. Ever. I cannot think of a situation where having one of these handy has made things better, but I can name a dozen off the top of my head where their availability made things unbearably, irreversibly awful.
Seriously: If you can point to a time when a civilian used semi-automatic weapons to make things great, I’d love to hear about it.
I don’t want to hear ever again about how if someone is intent on killing a bunch of people, they’ll use other means if they can’t get a gun. They’ll use fertilizer to build a bomb, maybe, or just drive a car into a crowd. The argument goes, therefore, it doesn’t make sense to regulate gun access because crazy people gonna kill. This argument is a gigantic, oozing, throbbing red herring. It attempts to divert attention away from the fact that a *gun* was used to kill.
To kill. Kids, at school, and people who devoted their lives to educating them.
He used a GUN.
The naysayers reply, well, he was mentally ill. THAT should be our focus! I agree. But I don’t believe any efforts towards improving availability and coverage for mental health conditions need preclude efforts to get semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of civilians. We should be talking about both, simultaneously, right now. And not just talking, but acting.
We are stuck in this insane, nightmarish loop where a mass shooting happens, elected officials offer thoughts and prayers, someone organizes a candlelight vigil, people propose gun control legislation, congress doesn’t act on it, until the next shooting, at which point we lament that nothing ever happens and “thoughts and prayers” again and the whole thing happens over and over. How have we not learned yet? How can we allow our lawmakers to be more beholden to the deep pockets and propaganda machine of the NRA than to the families they were elected to represent?
I had the relative luxury last night to choose to not immerse myself in the news of the day’s mass shooting. I was able to make that choice. A whole bunch of people in Florida were not so fortunate. Reality hit them over the head, hard, and demanded, in the cruelest possible way, they immediately pay attention. Kids live-tweeted and texted their parents while hiding in closets, fearing for their young lives. What if it was your kid? Or your grandchild? Can you even imagine the anguish of receiving those texts? I can’t. And those were the ones who lived! Many died. Because a troubled guy had a gun and decided to use it to kill students at the high school he had attended, there are a bunch of parents who hurried their kids out the door yesterday, urging them on so they wouldn’t be late for school, not knowing that it would be the last time they’d see them alive.
He used a gun.
So, 2A zealots, spare me your fear-driven rhetoric and your false arguments. You have been missing the point this whole time. I want to live in a country that seeks to protect my kids and yours, and not just through a full-term pregnancy, but for the rest of their (hopefully long) lives. It’s time for all of us to do a root-cause analysis to figure out what’s really at the soul of this madness, so we can do something to minimize the risk of it happening again. We may never prevent all mass shootings for the rest of forever. But doing nothing isn’t working. So let’s try doing… something different. Anything. And let’s keep trying till one day, we will shake our heads as we think back to how terrible it was, back in those years when there were all those school shootings, during that dark time in America’s history.
One last thing: As you take measures to protect your property from bad guys, I will take measures to protect my own slice of cyber-real-estate (this blog) from those who would disrespectfully argue with me. I have had unproductive exchanges with too many individuals whose minds were obviously made up, and acknowledge that I’m not likely to change their views, any more than they are to change my mine. However, if you wish to put forth a discussion that suggests new ways we can work together to protect our children from being shot up in places where they should be able to feel safe and protected, that would be a worthwhile conversation to have.
Just as soon as we figure out this gun problem. Because to me, that seems like a logical place to start.
Anyway, lately I’ve been gravitating more towards Facebook than to my blog, which is bad, I know, but it is what it is. I’m still searching for balance. Anyway, I was over on Faceook and my pal Marty posted a link to 