I'm sure a lot of diaries will be written about today's events. I have two elementary school children, so when I saw the news today, and the profoundly disturbing photo of screaming children being led from the Connecticut school, I was quite affected. Gun tragedies are, unfortunately, not so uncommon nowadays, but this one hit me particularly hard.
Tonight, a friend posted a, "Why is everyone blaming guns, the guy was obviously mentally ill, why wasn't he getting treatment?" thing on Facebook. He's a friend, and I know he is pro-gun and that he owns guns. My first reaction was to insist that it is guns allow killing on this scale, and we need more controls. (Actually, that was my second reaction. My first reaction was, "Really, you are already turning this into a gun rights issue?" Than I realized, Mayor Bloomberg and others had already done so. He was just responding.
But the issues raised, both with guns and mental health are a bit trickier than we might like to admit.
A long time ago, I was a Republican. And I was also pro-gun rights. Not a card-carrying member of the NRA or anything, I was a kid, still in college, and certainly not politically involved enough to ever join a group like the NRA. (That came later, and on the other side of the political spectrum.)
I did believe in the Bill of Rights. My father was an attorney, and a conservative. He was at one time, I think, even something of a Bircher. But he also had a healthy disrespect for authority, and a strong respect for the constitution. And not in the conservative, "what did the founders mean" way. I remember when I was a kid, we had sleepover night at day camp. When I came back I told him how the camp director had police officers search our sleeping bags for fire crackers. He told me never to let a cop do that again without a warrant.
Part of the Bill of Rights was, of course, the Second Amendment, and I believed in that too. When I was younger, I believed the point of the Second Amendment was to allow people to protect themselves against the government. Never mind that the government at this point had tanks, and jet fighters. I don't know what James Madison had in mind when he wrote the Second Amendment. It is not a clear-cut issue, by any means.
Now that I am older, I don't think people having guns would do much good against a tyrannical government. An evil government has overwhelming military power nowadays. It will not be guns in the hands of citizens that overthrow it. So I don't see every gun-control law as a step towards oppression. I honestly might have when I was younger, when I thought gun ownership was a form of insurance against an tyranny government.
Still, I can't completely condemn the idea of guns in the hands of people. There's an expression: "Guns are for cowards." My younger brother heard someone say this (I forget who), and was indignant. "Easy for him to say. He should try being the little guy sometime." I should mention we were basically all 90 pound weaklings when we were kids (and some of us for quite a while longer).
Guns are an equalizer. In a world where "might makes right", might no longer means the biggest guy with the biggest muscles. Now, I understand that this is an awful way to think about things. Guns kill all the time, fists rarely do. But why shouldn't some poor guy who's been beat down all his life have a way to stand up for himself.
This is where culture enters the equation. I think -- I don't truly know -- that what I've just written, about the little guy having a way to stand up for himself, is a distinctly American thing. The whole notion of an individual taking life by the horns and controlling his destiny is an American myth. And guns play a large part in that myth. Is it any wonder that we, as a nation, find it difficult to give up our guns?
This idea of the gun as an equalizer can be very seductive. As a kid, I had a tough time in high school. For boys, it seemed to be a place where we sorted ourselves into a caste system, each level beating on the level below. I was (I think) the lowest level possible. I fantasized about getting revenge. Since this was America, I fantasized about getting revenge with a gun.
Imagine how I felt, years later, when I learned what happened at Columbine. This was my fantasy, and I always knew that I wasn't alone. There were lots of kids like me. You aren't generally very together in adolescence anyway. Throw in some "good-natured" torture and brutalization... For me, it wasn't anything that was likely to happen. I was a kid in the Chicago suburbs. Where was I going to get a gun? Anyway, people just didn't do things like that. When it did happen, I remember wondering: did Columbine open Pandora's Box?
Which raises the mental health aspect. As seductive as the notion of "making things right", with a gun, was to a teenage "faggot" in the suburbs, how much more seductive must it be to someone truly mentally ill. A person who truly believes they are being profoundly persecuted, wronged. This damaged soul is being bombarded with two powerful American ideas: that an individual should take care of things themselves, and that if they are too weak to do that, a gun can help.
It is in this environment that we must deal with both our broken mental health care system and our gun control laws. My friend asked why the murderer wasn't being treated for his mental illness. I immediately wanted to ask him, "What is more frightening? A government that can take away everyone's guns, or a government that can force someone it deems 'mentally ill' to accept treatment: drugs, therapy, even hospitalization?" The latter, to me, is a much more frightening prospect.
My first thought was that we should ban only guns that are primarily designed to kill people. Never mind making that definition more precise. Even then, should we ignore the fact that people feel that owning a gun will make them safer in a world with "bigger" people, both literally and figuratively? This is a profound question, certainly for Americans. It is definitely not good that the least secure people are the most likely to want guns, which seems to be implicit in this. Yet, I can't help sympathizing with my brother's comment: why should the weak be at the mercy of the strong?
I don't have answers to these questions, but this is the context in which the debate must take place, and it is much more complicated than it at first seems.
Finally, I would be remiss, if I did not acknowledge that some of the ideas about guns, and the American psyche came from the book Gunfighter Nation which I read many years ago. I highly recommend this book, as well as the other two parts of Slotkin's unique history of America. I read them many years ago, but they had a profound effect on my thinking about our nation. (I really must read them again.)