More
mass
shooting in America followed by more empty
words by politicians.
What can we
do? Even if we cut the number of guns in
America in half, there’d still be 200
million guns on our soil. OK, let’s ban
assault rifles. But there’s already more
than 20 million AR-15-type rifles in
circulation. Well then, how about more “good
guys with guns” to catch the bad guys? If
more guns and more police worked, why do
mass shootings in America keep increasing?
We need to
change our culture of violence while
strengthening communal and family bonds. And
we need to talk a lot less about “gun
rights,” as if guns are people instead of
tools that kill people, and much more about
personal responsibility.
I’ve owned
guns and I hope I acted responsibly as a
gun-owner. Most gun-owners do. We know the
rules of gun ownership. Always assume a gun
is loaded. Never point a gun near anyone
(unless you’re truly in a life-or-death
situation). Don’t have a gun unless you’re
trained on how to shoot it safely.
But our
culture sends very different messages about
guns. I can’t count the commercials I’ve
seen for cop and military shows where the
gun on the TV screen is pointed at me, the
viewer (and you too, if you’re watching). I
can’t count the shows that feature SWAT
teams and lengthy shootouts. Far too often,
guns and the violence they enable are
depicted as cool, as sexy, as manly, as
good.
With
six-shooters we had the Wild West mystique
of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and the like;
then in the 1970s came Clint Eastwood’s
Dirty Harry and similar vigilante-cops. Only
in the last three decades or so has
military-style action exploded on our TV and
Cable screens, featuring machine guns, .50
caliber sniper rifles, and a seemingly
endless assortment of assault rifles in
highly-stylized gun fights, usually depicted
on Main Street USA.
Add all
that on-screen violence to military-style
shooter video games and you get a culture
increasingly immersed in both virtual and
actual gunplay. Meanwhile, our wider
political culture is increasingly fractured,
people are increasingly desperate as prices
rise and jobs go away, and politicians,
instead of doing something to help us,
instead seek to divide us further by blaming
the other party.
Politicians
talk about red and blue America, but when we
talk gun violence, we’re all red because we
all bleed red. Guns don’t care about our
petty partisan squabbles and our inability
to change ourselves and our culture. Someone
squeezes the trigger, some angry, some
hateful, some violent, guy (it’s almost
always a guy), and lots of people end up
dead.
That nearly
all mass shootings are done by men, often
young men, should tell us something. That so
many often favor “military-style” assault
rifles should tell us something else.
America is like one vast gated community,
armed to the teeth against enemies from
without even as the most dangerous enemies
are those living within the gates, those who
are locked, loaded, and ready to kill.
Young men
need role models. They need a culture that
teaches them killing isn’t cool. And the
rest of us deserve communities where words
and phrases like “lockdown,” “shelter in
place,” and “active shooter” make no sense
because there’s no need for them.
