While a small, paranoid, angry, minority creates ever larger
levels of danger by purchasing more and more and more guns, each year fewer and
fewer Americans own guns. The US has 1% of the world population, but our
citizens own 1/3 of all guns held in private hands. A slim
minority, 1/5 of Americans, own 65% of the 300 million guns circulating
in private hands. Less than one in three of us now own a gun. One can
only assume that a sizable chunk of us that would not have a gun in our own home, feel
strongly that others ought to be allowed to have vast arsenals in theirs.
The most generous thing that can be said of Zimmerman is
that he entered into a situation with a weapon out of his depth. A responsible
gun owner might have thought twice about leaving the car on a dark rainy night
to follow what he perceived to be a suspicious, but clearly unknown
individual. Acquittal aside, Zimmerman’s irresponsibility does not EVEN
cause him to lose his right to carry and so he arms even more to what is now
clearly an absurd level.
Then in Newtown we now know that Adam Lanza was a troubled
kid by any measure. If his mother did not know it can only be because she
refused to see. As a parent I am reluctant to judge too harshly the decisions
that others make. Some days I would grade my own efforts at perhaps no more
than a notch above failure. Even with what is sometimes a pretty sorry record,
I persevere. I strive to learn and improve and most importantly engage with my
teenage son, who thankfully is still willing to hug me, en after I obstruct his
brilliant though often misguided plans. Adam Lanza’s mother appears to
have surrendered to forces she could not understand or control. Some part of me
can understand that, but no part of my will ever forgive her for not removing
the ridiculous amount of weaponry from her home. If she locked it up, but the
kid found the key as the press has reported, then she did a shitty job of
locking it up. Guns should not have been it that particular home with that
particular kid under any circumstances.
Apparently Adam Lanza had little verbal communication with
the mother with whom he shared a home. Forget the video games, a cursory scan
of his room would have indicated many reasons for concern. Instead his mother
seeing that guns were one thing to which they could both relate, perhaps the
only thing, encourages his fetish with guns, and offshoot if his obsessions
with death. Nothing to see here? Holy f***, what are you thinking? Because she
was unwilling to be a parent, she died. If it had stopped there it would
have been a stupid, though tragic, parable, a what-not-to-do lesson. Because
Adam Lanza chose to take his rage out on the lives of 20 children in the
sanctuary of their school it rises to the level of obscenity.
But the real atrocity in the wake of both Newtown and The
Trayvon Martin case is that as a country we remain unmoved. A relative small
minority of gun zealots speak with far more force than the majority. Our
Democracy, designed with good reason to protect the rights of the minority, is
upended by a feverishly committed group outside the mainstream of opinion, but
armed with vast reserves of campaign cash funded by a narrow interest group of
business people, in this case gun manufacturers. This is not news. It’s
what democracy looks like in America in 2013.
So nothing changes. This is so much evidentiary proof that
guns, when made available with such poor oversight and control, have torn us
into shreds of pain and loss, and left unchecked will continue to wreak damage
on the body and soul of our nation, especially in poor minority neighborhoods,
where gun use is at near genocidal levels. Basically, humans are too imperfect
to own guns. I get that those words are blasphemous, perhaps even
revolutionary, across the south and even in some areas of the neo-liberal
north, but that does not make them untrue. As evidence I point to Trayvon
Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, and Adam Lanza’s mother , Nancy. How damaged
does anyone have to before someone says, “You know, maybe not.” Maybe these
people ought not to own a gun. Maybe people on the terrorists watch list
ought to undergo a background check at a gun show???
For if we must measure the value of tens of thousands of
human lives against principled Second Amendment rights, enshrined in a document
more than 200 years old, on a human scale there is no moral equivalence. In
this case the rights of the minority are just completely out of balance to the
lives of the majority. I know this is a howl into the powerful wind of
intransigence, but it is all I have. Our voice is all any of us have.
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