By now all of America is aware of the horror of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Seventeen innocent students lost their lives, and an entire community was traumatized, all because a mentally unstable 19-year old was able to legally purchase an assault rifle.
There are many things that can be said about the shooter, Nikolas Cruz. He was depressed. He was deranged. He was a bad seed. All of this may or may not be true. But the fact remains, he wouldn’t have been able to inflict the mass carnage that he did had America not made firearms so readily accessible to its citizens.
Think of it this way. If Cruz had used a hunting knife for the attack, perhaps he might have been able to injure or kill a few people before some brave souls jumped in to stop him. At worst, he wouldn’t have been able to roam several floors of Parkland High shooting students at random, because they could have just run away.
I mean the NRA always says guns don’t kill, people do. But the cold, hard truth is that guns do kill, in a way that no other weapon can.
And just to be clear, if mass knife attacks somehow became a plague in American society, I would be all for banning your local Ginsu dealer from hawking his wares in your neighborhood. But it’s not knives. It’s guns, plain and simple.
Some of the gun control regulations being talked about now include enhanced background checks that reference mental illness history, as well as raising the legal age to buy assault weapons from 18 to 21.
These are all good measures, and I support them. Shockingly, just today President Trump told lawmakers in a closed door meeting that he supported some of these measures too, which is a complete about face from his previous total fealty to the NRA and the gun lobby. So if he really is sincere, and that’s an open question, then good for him.
But it’s not enough. Not now, and not ever. Because what’s really the difference between an 18-year old being prohibited from buying an assault rifle, but a 21-year old being allowed to purchase one? Are we actually safer with the gun in the 21-year old’s hand? I call BS. Because psychologists have said for years that the brain is still growing and developing up until at least age 25. So impulse control may not be better at 21 than 18.
But that’s not my main point. What I’m arguing for is a complete and total ban on all guns, from assault rifles to handguns to hunting rifles. That’s what’s in place in most of the industrialized world, and consequently they have only a tiny fraction of the gun deaths that we have in the US. Civilized, is what I’d call their gun laws and regulations.
Now obviously it’s going to be tough, because the US was founded on violence and aggression, first by stealing Native Americans’ land and nearly completely exterminating them, and then by bringing untold millions of black African slaves to suffer in servitude for the cause of American nation-building. So we have violence in our DNA.
In fact, it’s estimated that today there are nearly 300 million guns in the hands of private citizens in America. So it would be a tall order to get all those guns back into armories, or even better to destroy them.
But we can try. In developing countries that go through horrible civil wars, such as Congo or Sierra Leone, the UN implements what are called DDR programs when the war concludes. DDR stands for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. Former combatants are encouraged to turn in their weapons in exchange for cash, or jobs, or some other positive benefit.
And we even have a form of that program here in the US, where gang members are given incentives to hand in their guns in exchange for cash. So why can’t we extend this to the entire population at large?
At base, what I’m saying is that we’re long past the point where we need to have an armed citizenry to protect against government tyranny, and a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to the security of a free state. That’s what the 2nd Amendment enshrines, and what gun enthusiasts constantly refer to when defending their gun ownership.
But today we have police officers. And soldiers. And the national guard. And the FBI. And the Department of Homeland Security. We have enough well-trained, professionally armed men and women to protect all of us.
And if you live in a rural state, and your home is isolated, and you worry about safety, you can either talk to your local sheriff about increased patrols, or better yet you can take comfort in the fact that your neighbor in the next property over no longer has a gun either. So you’re safe.
But what about hunting, you may say. And that’s a tricky one. Because Southern and Western states do have a tradition of hunting that’s been handed down for generations, and from all evidence most of these hunters use their weapons responsibly.
But enough is enough, to use the Parkland students’ slogan. I think it’s time to say, in the name of securing our citizenry, our children, and our schools, that in the era of mass commercial food production, hunting is no longer necessary. Boom! That’s it. Turn in your guns, hunters. And maybe someday, after we get all this gun craziness under control, we can allow limited hunting again. Maybe. But not now. We just can’t afford to take the risk that a hunter’s gun will end up in the hands of a killer of humans instead of a killer of animals.
Here’s a number that’s been repeated a lot, but I think it bears mentioning again. There are 12,000 gun homicides per year in the United States. That’s right, 12,000. In 2013, in Japan, there were 12 gun homicides. That’s right, 12. And that’s because Japan has some of the strictest gun laws in the industrialized world. And the number of gun homicides in the UK, Australia, and other developed countries in similarly low, because their gun laws are equally stringent.
In fact, Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than citizens in other developed countries. 25 freaking times. So clearly these other countries are doing something right in terms of protecting their citizens that we’re just not doing.
But there are a couple more aspects to the story that bear mentioning. Of the 12,000 yearly gun homicides in the US, most are not mass or school shootings. Instead they are everyday crime killings, or jilted lovers killing their spouses, or the whole range of human vengeance possibilities that motivate someone to pull the trigger for good on someone else.
And a lot of people are suffering due to all this gun violence, but one of the biggest communities is minorities who live in inner cities. Because while I fully support the Parkland students’ brave mobilization in favor of gun control, minority communities have been crying out for years for greater gun control to end the plague of violence in the inner cities. But no one is listening, because they don’t have the resources that the Parkland students do, or the requisite skin tone.
And there’s one other aspect that bears mentioning. Along with the 12,000 gun homicides, there are over 20,000 gun suicides in the United States each year. That’s right, 20,000 sad and desperate people who are in so much emotional or physical pain that they see no other option but to take their own life. And guns make it easy for them to do so.
The numbers also reveal that when a person tries to commit suicide by overdosing on pills, or using some other method, they are way less successful than the person who uses a gun. It’s just simple logic. A pill may or may not work, or maybe you take some pills, but you’re not totally sure you want to die, so you leave a little breathing room to survive. By contrast, squeezing the trigger on a gun pointed at one’s chest or temple is usually a forever choice.
I grew up in New York City in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and gun violence was a plague on the city during that time. Homicides peaked at over 2,200 per year in 1990. But a combination of stricter gun law enforcement, enhanced policing, as well as external factors like the waning of the crack epidemic led to a rapid decrease in NYC gun deaths. In fact, in 2017, there were 290 homicides, mostly by gun, which was the lowest rate since the 1940’s.
So if New York, the largest city in America, can do it, so can the rest of the country. I mean, we read about the horrors of gang violence and gun deaths on Chicago’s South and West Sides, and it’s like a bad rerun of New York in the 70’s and 80’s. A bad, but preventable, rerun.
I had a gun pulled on me once. I was 14, and I was roaming Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I grew up, with a pack of teenage boys. The Upper West Side was a generally safe neighborhood, but some of the boys I was with were only friends of friends of friends, and I didn’t really know them all.
So one of these kids, who was walking about twenty paces behind myself and a few other friends, yelled out “yo, stop, motherf*****s!”, and when we turned around, he was pointing a handgun at us.
It turned out he was just being a punk and showing off, and my friend Johnny told him to “put that crap away.” But it scared me, more than I care to remember. I was only 14 at the time, so I had plenty of youthful aggression and braggadocio in me, and the incident didn’t really traumatize me or anything.
But I remember thinking, what a punk this loser is, pointing a gun at us. I mean, my motto is, if you really have a problem with someone, so much so that you feel the need to inflict bodily harm on them, then give them an ultimatum, and if that doesn’t work, be a man and challenge them to a fight.
Now I hate to use the expression “be a man,” because I feel like it’s mostly BS, and it’s wrapped up in toxic masculinity and lots of other stuff. But using a gun on someone is the ultimate cowardly act. It says that you couldn’t reason with them to work out your problems, and you were too afraid to challenge them physically, so you took the easy route and just, what, pulled a gun on them and shot them? Where’s the bravery in that?
And let me be clear, I’m not advocating fighting, not in the least. But there was a time, back in the earlier part of the 20th century, where intractable disputes among men — and the occasional woman — were settled with fists, not a 60-round high capacity magazine attached to an AR-15. And that seems like a more reasonable outcome, it really does.
So in the end, I believe it all comes down to choices. Will America finally do something about guns, and I mean really do something, by banning them completely except for trained professionals, the military and law enforcement? Because that seems like the only way we’ll truly be delivered from this mass shooting hell we find ourselves locked into. I, for one, hope we find the courage to do the right thing.
But I guess only time will tell. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take too long, because there are a lot of kids who will wake up tomorrow and go to school, and their parents will expect them home safe at the end of the day. And that’s just how it should be in a civilized society.
