As part of my ongoing effort to write diaries that attract little or no interest I decide to write one about why I am no longer anti-gun. Doing this while KO is the topic of conversation and publishing it late at night will continue to ensure the success of that effort. Please note, I’m really not pro-gun either. But I will no longer fall into the trap of having a knee-jerk response of fear as my means to deal with the questions of guns, gun ownership, and gun deaths.
And a one, and a two, and a jump!
<Oof!> I’ve really got to lose some weight, those are getting harder, even virtually.
In an RKBA diary earlier I mentioned two encounters I’ve had with guns. Both negative, i.e. facing the ‘business’ end of them. That’s not entirely true. I used to go target shooting on our farm. We had 80 acres and plenty of cans with inadequate ventilation and bottles that were in too few pieces. But in February of ’78 that changed. I was 15 going on 35, a teenager with a severe know-it-all attitude, a mother with a severe religious addiction, and a father who just didn’t give a damn. I don’t remember who started the yelling or how it escalated but at some point my father got that rifle. And then I was running down the driveway with only socks on my feet and making Jesse Owens look like a slug. A mile down the road I came to a car pulling out of a driveway. It was one of my teachers. I stayed at his place that night. The next day the sheriff took me home, had some words with my parents and that was that.
With that stellar parental upbringing my next encounter with the same said end of the gun might come as no surprise. I wound up living on the streets. It was February of ’82 and I wasn’t much wiser than I had been four years earlier. But lacking a roof over my head and food on my plate I was also a lot hungrier and found ways to get by. One of those was food taken from vending machines. Did you know if your 6’2" and 200lbs of muscle from being raised on a farm you could turn one of those things upside down and food would fall out when you turned it back upright? Neither did I until I tried it. Manna from heaven, or at least from Hostess (they’re pretty much the same thing when you’re starving and trying to live by selling plasma and committing petty crimes). Anyway, at some point the vending service people decided they didn’t like contributing to my foraging activities and rigged a few of the machines with silent alarms. Hearing the command, "Freeze" and seeing multiple firearms pointed at you and your friends is something I hope you’ll never have to face.
Nearly three decades have passed since then. I’ve changed my political views a lot. Heck, I was a Republican that voted for Reagan in ’80 since it was all I knew. My parents may have been miserable but they were still an influence on me and they were, pardon the expression, die-hard Republicans. So that’s what I was. And until a few months ago I thought I was staunchly anti-gun. But that changed as well.
Despite the comment from kestrel9000 it wasn’t a single thing, an epiphany, rather it was a growing revelation that I was still afraid of the guns I had personally encountered. Willing to let that fear of them dictate my response to them, the people that have them, and explain the tragedies that occur because a gun is involved in those tragedies.
I still don’t like guns, if you come away from reading this and that point isn’t clear then I failed and I apologize. The first phase of my change was realizing that dead is dead. How and why someone dies really doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they’re dead. My father, the bastard who was willing to shoot his only son, died in November of last year. He died largely from not caring in the least about himself or anyone else but still, dead is dead. It made me think a lot about life and death. Few people want to die sooner than rather than later. Yes, there are people who choose suicide for personal reasons. Great suffering from pain physical or mental, but they choose it.
And victims of deadly crime don’t choose their fate. I can be certain that Christina-Taylor Green didn’t choose death at age nine. But I can also be certain there was another nine year old girl that has died since then without making the choice either. Perhaps she died from hunger. Perhaps she died from a disease her parents couldn’t afford to treat. Perhaps she died when she was hit by a drunk driver. But she, too, is now just as dead.
And unlike Christina-Taylor Green, we’ll never know her name. Or see her face on the TV while politicians weep and make grand promises about making the world a better place. But we know they won’t. Oh, they might get reduction in clip sizes. They might manage to limit or ban semi-automatic weapons like the one used in Arizona. They might do all those things. But they won’t do much, if anything, to really decrease gun deaths in America.
Roughly half of gun deaths are from suicides. Will they fund a nationwide healthcare system with adequate coverage for all with those dealing with mental conditions? No, of course they won’t. Because even if 59 members of the Senate want it the other 41 won’t let a single additional dime of tax money be collected to pay for it. And to that same point will they work to eliminate poverty so people don’t turn to crimes of desperation? No, that would require raising taxes so we know it won’t happen. Will they come to a rational solution to eliminate the war on drugs which would also significantly lower gun crimes? Again, that isn’t likely to happen. But they will talk about talking about having a conversation about discussing the issue of gun violence.
That suicide statistic was a real eye-opener for me and the next phase of the change. It made me realize that while gun deaths occur for different reasons we look at them all the same. If you exclude suicide deaths from the US total then suddenly we drop quite a lot in gun deaths. Interestingly, even with those suicides from guns included, we have a far, far lower suicide rate than many other countries. We have fewer suicides than Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, France, Japan, or South Korea. So please don’t make the claim that a significant change in the suicide rate would occur if we had stricter gun laws. Unless you mean they’d likely go up which data suggests could happen. Either that or stop quoting gun death rates in other countries as a "proof" that we're far more gun crazed then them.
Now we’re down to 7,500 gun deaths a year classified as homicides. Surely these are the crimes that demand a change in the gun laws? Again, I ask you to put this in perspective. There were nearly 12,000 drunk driving deaths last year. No, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the gun deaths, but we need to keep the numbers in perspective. Sure, some of those drunk driving deaths were effectively suicides. A lone driver crashing into a tree or going over a cliff, but half of the deaths are passengers and many pedestrians we killed as well. So gun deaths and deaths from drunk drivers are roughly on the same scale. Where can I tune into to the national news coverage of those funerals? Where are claims that the founders never intended "cars that could hold 8 people and go 120 miles per hour"?
Do I want to just ignore 7,500 gun related homicides a year in this country? Not any more than I want that many drunk driving deaths. As I said, dead is dead. But we still have to talk about the causes of those gun deaths if we’re going to do anything about reducing those numbers. Let’s talk about crime and guns. This is frequently a hot button issue. What is usually ignored is that most of the gun deaths from crime aren’t innocent bystanders or victims but other criminals or gang members which are fighting over "turf" for their lucrative illegal drug sales. Legalizing drugs would eliminate or at the very least severely curtail these types of deaths. Estimates I’ve seen put these types of homicides nationally at around 70% of all gun homicides.
That leaves us with roughly 2,250 gun deaths of victims and bystanders. I can hear the shouts already, "Ha! He just admitted he’s happy killing more than two thousand people every year! What a heartless bastard!" And you’d be right if they were the only preventable deaths we should be trying to eliminate. Remember that healthcare system that still lets tens of thousands die every year. It’s going to get better over the next few years, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and claim it’ll prevent half of the 45,000 deaths from inadequate coverage. That’s still 10 times the number of gun deaths. And by allowing Republicans to use fear and lies about gun control as a Democratic core ideal we’re letting them kill, not with a gun, but with a pen and cries of "Hell, no you can’t!" every one of those people. Need I add in the thousands more that will die from poverty? How many deaths are we willing to trade just so we can feel like we’ve taken the moral high ground on this issue?
And if we worked to reduce crime, not by simply locking people in jails, but by giving them solutions other than turning to crime to get more than a life in a run-down project or rusty trailer then just maybe we can reduce those remaining two thousand deaths as well. But it isn’t going to happen with Republicans (and sadly many of the Conservadems and Blue Dogs) in Congress. So please, stop reacting to fear. And by doing so giving the Republicans those Indepentdents who could vote with us if we didn't treat all gun owners as potential criminals. Start figuring out how to change the society that creates desperation where guns seem like a solution. I know that won’t likely eliminate crimes like the one in Arizona. But maybe, just maybe, if we make this a better country people won’t feel like "2nd Amendemnt" remedies are such a great idea.