The grouch picked up his newspaper the other morning and was
treated to a picture of a fellow with a Glock .40 caliber pistol, proudly strapped to his belt, attending
a meeting at the state capital to discuss gun control within the capital
building itself. He was quoted as
saying, he felt safer with his own weapon. How it made the rest of the people attending the meeting
feel didn’t seem to concern him.
Unfortunately, the newspaper didn't elaborate on why this individual felt so unsafe that he got up that morning and strapped on his gun and headed to the Capital for a hearing. The newspaper choose to quote the fellow and let his words speak for themselves. The grouch feels it is his obligation to delve a little deeper into why some people choose to arm themselves when they leave the house in the morning.
Our modern day Marlboro Man would probably tell me to just
read the metro section of my newspaper to get a daily dose of mayhem. That would seem to lend his case for
packing some legitimacy if he lived in a handful of inner city neighborhoods
where violence is a fact of daily life.
Much of the violence is tied to gang activity and the drug business. Sometimes there is collateral damage
when innocents intercept bullets, randomly fired during a dispute that has
turned deadly. No one can argue
that the parade of dead young men is a too-long ignored social ill and there
needs to be a societal response of innovative and honest proportions to help
mitigate the bloodshed. But our
Marlboro Man doesn’t seem to be living in those neighborhoods and if he is not
hanging around at three in the morning looking to get into the drug business,
he probably is not going to be personally effected by the violence he is
reading about and seeing on his evening “news” broadcast.
In fact, if you ever do take a look at a map that plots out
violent crime in your city you will see the vast majority of violent crime
occurs in a handful of poor areas the Marlboro Man wouldn’t set foot in to save
his soul. If you live in, say for
example, Eden Prairie MN (a Twin Cities suburb), you can sleep on your driveway
with hundred dollar bills stuffed in your pockets, and it is likely you will
wake up the next morning with nothing more than a stiff back from sleeping on
concrete. The crime you need to be
worried about in most suburbs and many neighborhoods in the cities is your
neighbor, from the gated community, trying to get you to invest in a ponzi
scheme. You never see people
from the neighborhoods that are suffering from the violence, out advocating for
more guns and showing up at public meetings with their Glocks.
This is not to say that the level of violence in America is
acceptable. Shit Happens. There are no guarantees of a completely
safe life. The point I am making
is we have not reached the point where we would all be better off armed to the
teeth, nor is the solution to bring more guns to the fight. This is the position of the NRA
and what is behind it is, as in most things, money. The gun and ammo manufactures make a lot of money keeping
our citizenry frightened and looking for simple answers.
I know we are living in a post racist America. Five justices of the Supreme Court and
Fox “News” have proclaimed it so. But I can’t help but think there might be
just a tiny bit of racism and fear of others at work here. It would certainly be interesting if
Black and Hispanic guys started to apply for permits and started showing up in
the parks and downtown Minneapolis with their pistols showing. I suspect the permit application
process would get tweaked pretty darn quickly.
So crime is an issue and the 24-hour news cycle requires its
daily dose. Given the crime and
violence out there and its constant trumpeting it seems to be a miracle that millions
of Americans go about their daily lives without feeling so unsafe they won’t go
out in public without their shootin' iron.
If our shootist really wants to address the real danger in his life, he
will buy himself a tank and try to avoid the annual carnage on our roads and
highways.
This brings us to those individuals who want to pack heat
because they think the government is about to round them up, take their guns,
and throw them in concentration camps.
These are the folks who put the dumb in freedom.
For the sake of argument, let’s say their paranoid fantasies
are all coming true. Can any
rational person believe that a country that spends more annually on defense
than the next 13 largest militaries combined is going to have a hard time
prevailing against a relative handful of patriots with small arms? You might have your finger on the
trigger of your Bushmaster but it won’t help much when the drone strike turns
you into a fine mist.
Setting aside the fact that the only part of the Bill of
Rights these pistol packers are concerned about is the Second Amendment, these
defenders of democracy might want to look to Martin Luther King and Gandhi for
successful ways to change the world.
Of course, non-violence takes a mighty big set of cojones and we are talking
about people who feel the need to carry lethal weapons when they go to a church
picnic.
But grouch, what about the school, church, and theatre
massacres that happen far too often?
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have armed civilians taking down the shooter? If you ask the police, who train for
this sort of thing, the answer is a definite no. Intense training is provided to swat teams so that they can
overcome the very natural instinct to hide or flee when confronting a situation
like the theatre shootings in Colorado.
That training has to be continuous or your natural instincts will return
and prevail. The last thing those
situations require is someone in a panic firing away. The police have responded within minutes in these
situations. Of course, our
Marlboro Man, through the NRA, will fight to the death not to limit the sale of
semi-automatic weapons and large magazines, ensuring the shooter will be able
to deal out the maximum damage as quickly as possible.
A recent story posted on Slate relates how an Arkansas
Republican state senator, who advocates arming teachers in the classroom,
participated in ”active shooter” training, using a rubber bullet loaded pistol,
and mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a “bad guy.” Nuff said.
Our Marlboro Man was also quoted in the paper as saying,
“You have to be your own hero, on your own white horse.” I remember when I was about thirteen, I
would fantasize about taking on five or six dudes who had insulted the girl I
liked or in some way had humiliated me, and beating them all to a pulp. As I matured, just a tiny bit (I only
claim a tiny bit of maturity), those fantasies faded and I set them aside. I suspect our Marlboro Man hasn’t
matured enough to forgo these hero fantasies. That alone makes him dangerous.
Our Rambo has probably played too many video games and
watched too many movies where the hero takes on hordes of heavily armed thugs
and eventually guns them all down while surviving a hail of bullets. I’m waiting for that scenario to be
reported in real life. Unless you
have gone into the drug business, you probably can defend your family perfectly
well with a shotgun. The grouch
has no problem with someone who wants to have a shotgun or a revolver in his
home for protection. However, he should be aware the gun is just as likely to
be used in a suicide, domestic murder, or an accident where his seven year old
shoots his four year old, than it is to defend his home. Precautions need to be taken to avoid
unintentional disasters. Of
course, that takes a certain level of maturity that may or may not exist in
this frightened fellow.
I don’t feel the grouch is alone when he feels queasy seeing
an armed civilian walking around a Fourth of July celebration. In order for everyone to feel a certain
level of safety in these situations, the grouch is proposing a new permit
process that would better weed out unfit guachos.
Psychological
testing has advanced enough to allow us to better assess people’s
qualifications to carry guns to the Macy's flower show. I propose that a test be a part of the application process
that will identify the unreasonably frightened applicant and take that into
account when issuing permits. The
test should easily be able to tell if an applicant believes the UN black
helicopters are coming or that our Kenyan, socialist, communist, fascist, hater-of-white-people, President is about to throw them in a concentration camp and
disqualify these people and get them help for their paranoia. The test would identify individuals who
harbor vigilante or hero fantasies and keep concealed weapons out of their
hands. Those with racist
tendencies would be flagged in order to prevent the kind of confrontations that
lead to kids being shot to death on their way home from the neighborhood
store. Finally, the permit process
should automatically reject anyone who pays to listen to Glenn Beck’s podcast
as those people are obviously suffering from all the conditions described in
this paragraph. Once this test is
part of the permit process, I know that I, for one, will feel a whole lot
safer.
