I grew up with guns. Country guns. Shotguns. .45s and .38s and beer
cans on fence posts. That was back before public gun violence became a
daily routine. If somebody got shot, it
was a drug deal or domestic violence. There were guns all around me,
practically under my pillow, and nobody got hurt. No one I know ever
threatened another person with a gun. The few violent men I knew fought
with their fists. Pulling a gun to settle a score wouldn't be worth the
shame. Guns were for targets and critters. It seems like some kind of
mythical world now.
From
my experience traveling in northern Europe consistently the past few
years, I offer a theory that is beginning to take shape in my mind. I'm
in the UK now; their gun laws are famously rigid. The Olympic pistol
team had to leave the country to practice. Intentional homicide rate is
maybe a third to a quarter of the U.S., but I don't think the stringent
gun laws are entirely responsible.
More interesting to this
essay are other countries I've been to regularly: The Netherlands,
Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Canada is notably similar in that
there are a lot of guns, but not much gun violence compared to the U.S.
Almost every grown man in Switzerland has an assault rifle issued by the
military. They have gun festivals with shooting competitions for the
kids.
All these countries also take care of their citizens. You
can go to school, see a doctor, or take a year off work and have a baby
without worrying about losing your home or other financial catastrophes.
Taxes are high, of course. Gotta pay for that stuff. Canada is closer
on the scale to the U.S.: lower taxes and less social spending than most
of northern Europe, but more than the U.S.
In the U.S. you are
mostly on your own. If you have a strong family and/or community,
you're set. If you don't you're screwed. 50% of foster kids become
homeless when they turn 18. Three million U.S. citizens are homeless.
That's one percent of us, sleeping on the ground, going to jail to get a
decent night's sleep and breakfast. College? You know how that goes. I
have friends in their forties who are finally paying off their student
loans. Need mental health care? That's not covered. The ACA is not a
national health care plan. It's a way to force everyone to pay for the
same miserable shit that was available before. Very few people are
better off with it. I'm one of them and I can still see it's a bad deal
for the country. If you lose your job in the U.S., it can be
life-threatening. How would you react to a life-threatening situation?
When millions of people live close to the bone in a country that
doesn't seem to care about them, and the most effective weapons in the
world are widely available, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to
paint the resulting picture. It's not much harder to own a gun in
Germany than it is to own one here. We have laws that prohibit convicted
felons, the mentally ill, and non-citizens from owning guns. There are
loopholes, but that's also true elsewhere. For instance, self-defense is
not an acceptable reason to own a gun in the Netherlands, but being a
member of a shooting club is. If you want a gun for self defense, you
join a shooting club. Duh.
The availability of guns seems to be a
problem in our country, but not a problem in others. As always, extreme
viewpoints are suspect- "Guns are the problem" is just as extreme as "I
should be able to openly carry an assault rifle into a department
store." We do have laws. Colorado, one of the most gun-lovin',
property-rights-conservative states in the union, passed a great piece
of legislation after the school shooting in Columbine, legislation that
was successful largely because part of its focus was to protect the
rights of gun owners.
I appreciate everyone's passion on the
issue. Sharing links from far-left and far-right sources is not likely
to generate a productive discussion. Real people don't think that way.
Real conversations don't happen in platitudes and memes.
Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms. Elected officials
have a directive to ensure public safety. Humans have a responsibility
to take care of each other. We're not all keeping our end of the
bargain. I think socialism and the second amendment ought to meet and
work things out. Education, health care, and a living wage might make
guns fun again.
I'm not a political guy but it seems important
to talk about this national crisis- a spiritual crisis, really. Does
this sound foolish to anyone? Does it feel like a new way of looking at
it? Did anybody else have a time in their lives when guns were kind of
innocent and fun?
*************
Please no yelling,
name-calling, or other horseshit on my Facebook page. Imagine we're all
gathered around after a funeral. Because we kind of are. Just share and
let share. Thanks.
J B
This reportedly southern white man is saying the same things a more "woke" northeastern white man, Michael Moore, has said already if you take all of his documentaries combined.
Unlike Michael Moore, this white man doesn't appear to understand that you can remove
the guns from U.S. citizens a lot more easily than you can remove the
American-ness from U.S. citizens.
Guns
are THE PROBLEM until you somehow change the influence of 400 years of
history that shaped this individualistic, turn a blind eye to everything
that doesn't affect you-and-yours culture into what it is.
As
a white man he may think all this self-centeredness, spiritual
deficiency, unrelenting competitiveness, raging entitlement, and
aggression is recent in those that have plenty. But as a black woman I
can assure you that all of this has been present in since the first
European set foot on this land now called the United States.
A
friend of mine, a white woman from Scotland, thinks that the most aggressive of the
aggressive came to this land from Europe and Britain in the first place.
And may be that IS the difference between Europe and here.
Or
maybe predominantly white Europe has done so much killing of one another (England, France,
Germany, Spain wars over centuries) that they have a different cultural
maturity (for lack of a better phrase) regarding violence. And more
recently, experiencing white-on-white violence in the form of the Nazi's in person may have chilled most of them most
of the way out.
But
these cultural violence theories explain the difference between Europe/Britain
and the United States. But these theories do not explain the difference between Canada and here. Canada actually has more guns
and much fewer shooting deaths and mass shootings. I'd have to know
more than a thimble full of information about Canada to even be able to
guess. But this guy has not found the answer. He's taken his rose
colored glasses off about the present but not the past.
This exactly what happens when you only know history from a white perspective When the fact that that this country
was founded on genocide and slavery slips your mind (especially in the South - damn), you can think the world was wonderful just a short time ago.
We don't even have to talk about the current, fake drug war and the imprisonment of black people. When you white wash history you grow up thinking white people didn't find ways to extend slavery, almost exactly as it was, via prisons like Parchment Farm and convict leasing through 1970s. When you white wash history you erase the same desperation, poverty, hopelessness, and lawlessness that white people executed and experienced when they first landed here in 1600s, 1700s...1800s (There wasn't a bunch of kumbaya sentiment between the various groups white folks when they first got here. They fought, robbed, and murdered--- tried to do it to those that didn't look like them. But they weren't always successful. Furthermore, they counted people like the Irish as non-white until they couldn't separate them out as easily)
And if cannot see this country's history as it really was then you will refuse to see the culture that history built. And this culture combined with access to millions and millions of guns and bullets leads to high numbers of deaths by guns.
When gun deaths are seen as primarily among black people in poor neighborhoods, then white news outlets say black culture is defective instead of gun deaths being caused by the desperation and hopelessness that comes with extreme poverty. But when the shooting deaths are among white middle class who have enough, if not everything they need, you can't see that this predominantly white culture is defective -- not even knowing that this predominantly white culture was built, relatively recently, on genocide and slavery?
* * * * *
Let's make the gun problem smaller. Let's use smaller numbers to make the problem more accessible and the personal threat more real. When
there's only 1000 people for murderers, mass shooters, and the mentally
ill to pick from, you know that you or somebody you care about will
eventually be shot to death.
Example: If a fifth grader wanted to stop shooting deaths among a population of 1000 that she herself lived in --even after seeing ten other populations of 1000 people in them not-experience anywhere near the same number shooting deaths-- she would know to remove the easy access to guns and figure out why her 1000 people are different from the other groups of 1000 later.
A fifth grader should be able to figure out that cops and military need rapid access to guns. The rest of us can wait to be screened, registered, and insured. And there's no need for anybody, outside of the military and cops, to have access to more than x bullets outside of a shooting range.
