As Christmas approaches, children across the nation are asking Santa for toy guns. But after two recent shootings in our home state of Ohio, toy guns no longer seem so innocent.
Both incidents involved African-American youths who were killed by white police officers. And in both cases, the police thought the young men carried lethal firearms – when in fact they were pellet guns, which posed little threat. Hardly equal to the death sentences they incited.
Frankly, as a little kid in South Dakota I owned cute little cap guns and blew away countless cousins and playmates with joy (all of them are walking around and still breathing, some 60 years later). If a toy pistol was not available, a pistol-shaped fist and index finger served just as well, accompanied by percussive sounds that I was pissed off about because I never mastered them.
But times were far different then. I knew no one who owned a handgun or the equivalent of an AK-47. The idea of owning anything like a tommygun (like an AK-49) was what criminals, gangsters, did. People had not been sermonized by a religious-nut gun organization, NRA, into worshiping guns absolutely.
If Charlton Heston had then said about ripping guns “From my cold, dead hands!” to any of us we would have laughed ourselves silly and called him a damned fool.
Radical changes since, intertwining gun madness and Republican refusal to deal with mental illness, below the fold:
I now live on the Left Coast, after some years in Alburquerque, New Mexico, where the city police have a brutal record:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, police officers killed a 19-year-old as he "lay motionless on his back," an unarmed drugstore robber who was walking away from officers and a 25-year-old veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who threatened to shoot himself in the head.
If you wanted a handy-dandy way to commit suicide, mess with an Alburquerque cop. That's why, when years later on the Left Coast, I spotted a weapon of some sort that appeared to have been tossed, I was afraid to pick it up. I could not determine if it was a toy or the actual thing, toymakers had gotten very good at imitating the real thing, and I could have determined what it was by lifting it and ascertaining its heft. But, I was afraid to touch the damned thing because of the memory of the trigger-happy cops of Alburquerque.
I don't have a cell phone and it took me forever to get a message to the police to come pick the damned thing up. I was deathly afraid, in the meantime, that an innocent kid might pick it up and, if the cops spotted him, get blown away, or if it were real, might playfully blow away some of his playmates.
It was not a handgun. It required the use of two hands and it definitely was not a hunting weapon like a rifle or shotgun.
NRA gun culture has utterly permeated American culture. I briefly entertained the idea of connecting with a couple of dudes, but they parroted Charlton Heston's words and they were instantly tossed into the SA bin (Stupid A-Hole).
We have come a long way, Baby, from the days when we had sensible ideas about guns and Ronnie Reagan had not had his evil way with American mental health:
One month prior to the election, President Carter had signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which had proposed to continue the federal community mental health centers program, although with some additional state involvement. Consistent with the report of the Carter Commission, the act also included a provision for federal grants “for projects for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of positive mental health,” an indication of how little learning had taken place among the Carter Commission members and professionals at NIMH. With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states. The CMHC program had not only died but been buried as well. An autopsy could have listed the cause of death as naiveté complicated by grandiosity.
President Reagan never understood mental illness. Like Richard Nixon, he was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism.
PTSD, the legacy of Republican President George Walker Bush. Untreated mental illness, the legacy of Republican President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Gun madness, the legacy of conniving Republicans and cowardly Democrats.
Yes, I remember when cops were not so frightened, because we were sensible about guns then, and we did not have government-hating militias (another Reagan legacy), pervasive mental illness, the insane idea that everyone should have a gun, and most Americans were gainfully employed and relatively economically secure. BR (Before Reagan).