Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It’s indicative
of how inured we’ve become to mass shootings that one of the most salient
comments on the one in Parkland, Florida February 14 was that after its death
toll of 17 people Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of the Columbine
High mass shooting in 1999, are no longer on the list of the top ten most
lethal school shooters in the U.S. It’s an issue that has totally paralyzed
American politics; so completely have we outsourced our whole public policy on
firearms to the National Rifle Association (NRA) that any restriction on the “right” of people to keep and
bear virtually any arms they wish, short of nuclear weapons or tank-mounted
cannons, has become politically unimaginable.
I’ll state right
up front: as a born-and-bred West Coaster, a lifelong Californian who’s lived
his entire life either in the San Francisco Bay Area or San Diego, I don’t get
“gun culture.” I have never in my life even held an actual gun (as opposed to the toy pistols and BB guns I remember
playing with as a kid), much less fired one. Indeed, I’m so prone to bouts of
depression that if I did own a
gun, quite frankly the person I’d be most likely to shoot with it is myself. I
don’t “get” guns. I don’t know why anyone would want to own one. Though I eat
meat, and therefore I’m complicit in the killing of animals for their food, I
fail to see the entertainment value in hunting, especially for people
sufficiently economically well situated that they don’t need to bring down game in the morning in order to have
dinner that evening.
But I’m also an
American, and therefore I have lived my entire life in a country that
ironically has internalized Mao Zedong’s famous observation that “political
power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our founding myths as a nation involve
guns: guns supposedly “tamed the West” and enabled a handful of white people
who had them to steal this country from a whole lot of Natives who didn’t.
Indeed, not long after I wrote the above I read an article, “Settler
Colonialism and the Second Amendment,” by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz in the January
2018 Monthly Review, which argued that
the whole reason American rebels wanted to be free of British domination in the
1770’s was not only was the British government setting limits on the colonists’
“right” to kill Natives and take their land, but they were imposing the Stamp
Act and other taxes on the colonists to pay the British soldiers who were
protecting the Natives against them.
Our
entertainment is full of stories in which the moral is he who has the gun, or
the biggest gun, or the most guns, wins. For years, “Westerns” — stories of
supposedly “heroic” acts of genocide white Americans committed against Native
populations — were the U.S.’s most popular form of mass entertainment. Westerns
have gradually faded in popularity but the whole idea that guns are the right
way for people to stand up for their rights and get rid of the other people in
their way is at the heart of much of our dramatic entertainment. The U.S. movie
ratings board is notoriously easier on violence and harder on sex than its
counterparts in Europe. As the late comedian Lenny Bruce put it, “Well, if the
kids want to watch killing, that’s fine, but if they want to watch schtupping [Yiddish for ‘screwing’], they may want to do it
some day.”
In
a commentary in the February 19 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lemieux-parkland-second-amendment-20180219-story.html), University of
Washington political science professor Scott Lemieux explains the factors that
make sensible gun regulation impossible in the U.S. “The
relatively recent radicalization of the National Rifle Association and its
capture of the Republican Party makes even modest gun control measures
impossible at the federal level and in most states,” he writes. “And while
public opinion supports most specific gun control measures, including bans on
assault-style weapons, opponents of gun control tend to be better mobilized and
organized. At the national level, there’s an additional structural
problem, which is that both houses of Congress over-represent rural
jurisdictions where support for gun control is relatively weak and opposition
is particularly intense.”
At
least part of that is built into the U.S. Constitution. The framers were openly
hostile to democracy and so they created a republican structure under which no
one in the general public would vote directly for any office higher than member
of the House of Representatives. The President would be chosen by an Electoral
College and the U.S. Senate by state legislators. What’s more, each state would
get two Senators, regardless of its population — an imbalance the framers may
have figured they could live with because when the U.S. Constitution was
adopted the most populous state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the
least populous, Rhode Island. Today the most populous state, California, has
250 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming.
America’s
smaller states tend to be more rural, living as farmers or ranchers along large
stretches of land, and therefore more accustomed to the idea of needing guns
for “protection” whether they ever have occasion to use them or not. Indeed,
I’ve met people from even relatively cosmopolitan Western or Midwestern states
like Washington and Ohio who’ve described growing up with guns as a rite of
passage: one way you knew you were finally accepted as an adult was your dad
took you to the back yards and taught you to shoot. The idea that any government should tell
you that you can’t own a gun, or that you have to submit to a “background
check” and thereby ask the government’s permission to buy one, is anathema to
many Americans who don’t live on the East or West Coast and believe that
citizens have a right to “protect” themselves instead of relying on police or
other government agencies to do it for them.
Lemieux’
observation that those opposing gun regulation “tend to be better mobilized and
organized” is pretty obvious when you look at the war chest of the NRA versus
that of any gun-regulation organization. But it also hints at a deeper reason
why the Right has consistently defeating the Left in American politics over the
last 40 years or so even though polls show large reservoirs of public support
for “liberal” policy agendas like sensible gun legislation, women’s right to
reproductive choice and equal rights for Queer people. The American Right’s
coalition consists largely of single-issue constituencies: groups of voters who
will base their entire decision whom to vote for on their position on one issue.
The
Republican Party has come to dominate American politics not only by
successfully exploiting the anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution
but by assembling a coalition of voters who won’t support anyone who isn’t an
absolutist on the Second Amendment, voters who won’t support anyone who doesn’t
want to ban all (or almost all) abortion, voters who won’t support anyone who
doesn’t take a hard line against immigration (especially immigration, “legal”
or not, by people of color), voters who won’t support anyone who endorses
same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination laws protecting Queers, and voters who
won’t support anyone who backs regulations to protect workers, consumers and
the environment.
By
contrast, Left-wing voters tend to have a wider range of issues and are less
likely to ignore the rest of what a candidate stands for to focus on one issue and base their
voting decision on that. Too often, progressive Americans won’t vote for a
candidate unless he or she supports gun regulation and reproductive choice and liberal immigration
policies and
Queer rights and
reduction in U.S. military spending and intervention in other countries and criminal justice reform
and
replacing private health insurance with single-payer and an end to the “War on
Drugs” and making
rich people pay more in taxes and aggressively addressing the human causes of
climate change. Miss one of those checkpoints on the Left’s all too common litmus
tests and you’ve lost the votes of a lot of so-called progressives
(“alt-Leftists,” I call them) who in practice help the Republicans by voting
against Democrats they see as wanting on one issue on the alt-Left’s
laundry lists.
So
it doesn’t matter how many outraged moms march in the streets demanding that
their government do something to protect their kids from being massacred by
deranged or thrill-seeking misfits armed with lethal assault weapons. It
doesn’t matter how hard it gets for the NRA to continue arguing that this or
that particular mass killing wouldn’t have been prevented by this or that
proposed gun control bill. The virtually absolute freedom of Americans under
the Second Amendment to own as many guns as they like, of virtually whatever
type they like (aside from a few categories, like fully automatic machine guns,
that were made illegal decades ago before the issue became so polarized and the
NRA so absolutist) is as settled a political issue in this country as anything
ever gets.
Indeed,
one could argue that it was definitively settled back in 2000, when Al Gore won
the popular vote for President but lost in the Electoral College to George W.
Bush. Gore was not
defeated by the partisan Republican Secretary of State in Florida, nor by the
U.S. Supreme Court, nor by Ralph Nader splitting the progressive vote. He was
defeated by the NRA, which launched independent campaigns against him in the
swing states of Tennessee and West Virginia and thus swung those states to
Bush. In an election that was otherwise razor-close, Gore became the first
major-party Presidential nominee to lose his home state, Tennessee. Had Gore
carried Tennessee, he would have won the Electoral College and Florida wouldn’t
have mattered a bit. Instead he lost his home state, he lost the Presidency,
and Democrats throughout the U.S. got the message loud and clear: “Don’t fuck
with the NRA.”
And
that history repeated itself in 2016, when another Republican Presidential
candidate, Donald Trump, enthusiastically embraced the NRA’s pro-gun agenda,
got an early endorsement from them, and won the Electoral College despite
losing the popular vote largely because his opponent was widely seen as
“anti-gun.” A number of voters interviewed during the 2016 campaign told
reporters that they were aware of all Trump’s negatives but were going to vote
for him anyway because “if Hillary gets in, she’s going to take my guns away.”
Americans
— not all Americans, not even a majority, but enough highly dedicated and
committed people to decide the issue — have decided that mass shootings are a
small price to pay for the “freedom” to bear arms. They have decided to remain
the most heavily armed country in the world, both in terms of their official
military and weapons in private hands, because they believe it gives them
“security” and “protection.” They vote according to the NRA’s wishes and repeat
the mantra,
“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”
Trump’s Feints Toward Reason
President
Trump’s typical spew of often contradictory words and ideas about guns in the
13 days (as I’m writing this section of my article) since the Parkland shooting
is all too accurate a reflection of the confusion and gridlock that has kept
America’s lax gun policies in place throughout my lifetime and even before. If
you don’t believe that, seek out the book The Real Bonnie and Clyde, published in 1967 by an
author who thought the then-current film had glamorized them, and read the
editorials from newspapers in 1934 that questioned just how the real Bonnie
Parker and Clyde Barrow had acquired the huge arsenal they were found with when
they were killed by Louisiana police, and dared suggest that maybe the
government should do something to make it harder for outlaws to get guns.
As
Los Angeles Times
reporter David Lauter wrote on February 23 (http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-essential-politics-20180223-story.html), in the aftermath of
Parkland President Trump offered four different policies aimed at preventing
future mass murders at schools. “The first three of
those ideas could put him in conflict with gun rights supporters,” Lauter
wrote. “The fourth is the only one Trump has talked about at any length.”
The first three Lauter referred to are raising the legal age for
buying assault weapons from 18 to 21, improving the background check system to
make sure people with mental illnesses have a harder time buying guns, and
banning the so-called “bump stocks” that turn legal semi-automatic assault
rifles like the AR-15 used at Parkland into fully automatic machine-gun style
weapons. Alleged Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz didn’t use bump stocks, but
Stephen Paddock, identified by Las Vegas police as the gunman who opened fire
at a country-music festival there October 1, 2017 and killed 58 people by
shooting down on them from a hotel window, did.
Lauter and fellow Los Angeles Times reporter
Christi Parsons, noted that any attempts to regulate who can buy
firearms and under what conditions is going to crash into the usual wall of
opposition from gun owners who regard any restrictions on gun ownership as the
beginning of a slippery slope that will lead to repeal of the Second Amendment.
(Frankly, repealing the Second Amendment is looking like a better and better
idea every day. Without that troublesome and obsolete part of the Constitution
defining gun ownership as a “right,” we could at least regulate firearms the
way we do cars: you can own one, but first you have to pass a
government-administered test to show you know how to use it properly and
safely.)
In an article (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-school-shootings-20180226-story.html)
whose headline, at least in the Los Angeles Times’ print edition, used an odd gun metaphor and called
Trump’s gun policy “scattershot,” Parsons and co-author Cathleen Decker quoted
Michael Hammond, executive director of Gun Owners of America — a gun rights
group founded in 1975 by people who thought the NRA was too willing to
compromise on gun regulations — as saying proposals to end background check
loopholes, outlaw bump stocks or expand the use of protective orders to take
guns from mentally ill civilians would be tantamount to “the 2nd Amendment
Repeal Act.”
It’s not surprising that in later statements, Trump has backed
away from at least one of the sensible gun regulations he sorta-kinda endorsed
earlier: raising the age for buying an assault weapon from 18 to 21. (If you
ask me, it should be zero; there is utterly no justification for private
individuals, even “sportsmen” who like to go out in the woods and shoot
animals, to own military-grade firearms.) Instead, he’s offered a preposterous
claim that if he’d been on the scene in Parkland he’d have been
willing to go in there to stop the shooting, “even if I didn’t have a weapon.” And he’s
doubled down on the fourth proposal Lauter referred to, the one that’s long
been on the NRA’s wish list: “solving” the problem of gun violence at schools
by arming teachers.
“Last Thursday
(February 22), when Donald Trump proposed arming teachers as a response to the
Parkland gun massacre, his suggestion was met with widespread horror and
ridicule,” New Yorker reporter Jay
Cassidy wrote on the magazine’s Web site February 27. “Teachers dismissed it.
Lawmakers shied away from it. And critics pointed out that the idea had
originally been proposed by the N.R.A. in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook
shooting, in 2012.
“Yet
Trump is nothing if not stubborn. During a meeting at the White House with a
number of governors on Monday (February 26), he defended his proposal even in
the face of strong opposition from one of his guests, Jay Inslee, the
Democratic governor of Washington state. In initial news reports, the exchanges
between Trump, Inslee, and several other governors were overshadowed by the
President’s laughable claim that even unarmed, he would have tackled the
Parkland school shooter. But the discussion of the merits and demerits of
arming teachers is well worth revisiting.”
Inslee, a
long-time advocate of gun regulation serving his second term, told Trump, “I
have listened to the biology teachers, and they don’t want to do that in any
percentage. I have listened to the first-grade teachers that don’t want to be
pistol-packing first-grade teachers. I have listened to law enforcement who
have said they don’t want to have to train teachers as law-enforcement agents,
which takes about six months. Now, I just think this is a circumstance where we
need to listen — that educators should be educators and shouldn’t have foisted
onto them the responsibility of packing heat in first-grade classes. I just
suggest we need a little less tweeting and little more listening, and let’s
just take that off the table and move forward.”
Trump didn’t
respond to Inslee — instead he called on several other governors from more
gun-friendly states who said they liked the idea of arming teachers — but, as
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz argued in the Monthly Review piece I cited earlier, and at greater length in a recently published
book called Loaded: A Disarming Look at the Second Amendment, the NRA’s dream of a totally armed citizenry of
good guys with guns at the ready to blow away bad guys with guns has deep roots
in American history. She points out that those “well-regulated militias”
referenced in the Second Amendment had at least two important functions in
pre-Revolutionary America that carried over after independence and well into
the 19th Century. One was to keep Native Americans from retaking the
land white settlers had driven them off of, and the other was to enforce
slavery by capturing and, if necessary, killing fugitive slaves.
At the time the
Second Amendment was ratified as part of the Bill of Rights, Dunbar Ortiz
states, not only did most states have similar guarantees of the right to bear
arms, some states had laws requiring all
able-bodied males to own guns and to carry them whenever they left home. A few
states even offered financial assistance so people who otherwise couldn’t
afford weapons could buy them. The end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 and the
effective end of Native American resistance to white occupation, which Dunbar
Ortiz dates to the killing of chief Crazy Horse in 1877, meant that these two
purposes for a well-armed citizenry no longer applied — but the whole “pioneer
spirit” and the idea that a responsible citizen is one who owns a gun, knows
how to use it and is willing to do so lingers to this day among many Americans.
So is the idea
that only “certain” — i.e., white — people should own guns. In D. W. Griffith’s
1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a piece
of racist propaganda glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and also artistically one of
the finest movies ever made, the climax occurs when the Klan successfully not
only drives Southern Blacks from the political power they’d achieved during
Reconstruction but, even more importantly for the forces of white supremacy,
takes away their guns. In a much less well-known film, Tim McCoy’s 1932
pro-Native Western End of the Trail,
McCoy plays an U.S. Army officer who’s dishonorably discharged from the service
for allegedly selling guns to the Natives; he denies the charges but says that
since the U.S. has broken every treaty it has ever made with Native Americans,
he can understand and sympathize with their armed resistance.
The Parkland
shooting laid bare the contradictions within Donald Trump — and within a lot of
Americans, including the minority who, because of where they were distributed
within the country, were able to make him President. Trump is a coward who
hates the sight of blood — on his February 26 MS-NBC program, Lawrence
O’Donnell recounted an incident from 2008 in which Trump was confronted by an
80-year-old man who collapsed and nearly died at an event at Mar-a-Lago, and
Trump’s main concern was this man was shedding all that disgusting red blood
all over his resort’s marble floors — who styles himself a superhero. Not only
did he say he would have personally intervened to stop the mass shooting at
Parkland if he’d been there, but on New Year’s Day 2018 he triumphantly
proclaimed that because of his leadership, there had been no fatal plane
crashes in the U.S. in 2017.
When he’s not
fantasizing himself so literally as Superman — intervening in active shootings
because bullets will bounce off him, and magically keeping planes from killing
their passengers — Trump is enthralled by the NRA’s vision of returning to the
frontier days in which people trusted themselves, not law enforcement, to
protect them and the public peace. The idea of a dog-eat-dog culture in which
people at least figuratively, if not literally, have to kill each other in
order to survive is very much a part of
Donald Trump’s psyche. It’s how he ran his businesses; he was the sort of boss
who hired people without giving them a clear idea of what he wanted them to do,
then had them fight each other for his favor so he could reward the ones who
flattered him the most and made him the most money.
This was also
the role he played on the TV series The Apprentice, which was all-important to his success as a
politician because it convinced millions of Americans that Trump — in real life
a mediocre businessman with as many losses as wins in his track record — was a
financial and business authority of perfect intelligence and sagacity. And it’s
the way he’s run his White House as well, with shifting lines of authority and
a clear preference for those who will flatter him instead of those who will
actually tell him what he needs to know and get the job done.
Trump wants a
country whose citizens are always at the ready, fingers on triggers, to fight
each other for what they want — and the fact that he’s a physical coward who’s
been protected from that sort of existence by his family’s money and has
seriously compared risking getting STD’s from all the women he slept with to
facing combat in Viet Nam makes his whole pretension that he would do well in the Hunger Games-style arena he’d like the rest of us to live in all
the more bizarre. Of course, in his scattershot comments on post-Parkland
policy he’s thrown out some of the Right’s usual targets — it’s all the fault
of Hollywood and the media, all those violent movies and video games (which, as
I argued at the start of this piece, really reflect America’s love affairs with guns and a dog-eat-dog
view of the world) — but Parkland has really given us a Rorschach-like view of
Donald Trump … and of ourselves.
The Left’s Sacred Cow
The Parkland
shootings hooked one of the Right’s sacred cows — the belief that despite the
thin veneer of civilization, and the military and law-enforcement institutions
we’ve set up in the belief that they can protect us, ultimately it’s the
individual’s responsibility to protect himself, and to arm himself so he can do
so. But it’s also hooked one of the Left’s
sacred cows: the long-established principle of the American judicial system
that people can only be punished for the crimes they’ve actually committed, not those they might commit in the future; and the related idea that even
when charged with a crime and put on trial, accused people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
President Trump
tweeted at 8:08 p.m. February 17, “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many
signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They
are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump
campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all
proud!” This statement was widely interpreted as an attack on the FBI and
Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller for continuing to
investigate whether Russian agents tried to influence the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election and Trump’s campaign helped them. But it was more than
that: in its plea that the FBI should have responded to “all of the many
signals sent out by the Florida school shooter” by incarcerating or otherwise
punishing him in advance is a direct assault on the whole idea that people are
presumed innocent and can only be punished for crimes they have actually done, not simply those they might do.
The presumption
of innocence and the idea of punishing people only for their actual crimes have
worn down in practice over the last few decades. Virtually everyone in prison
today didn’t get there by a jury conviction; instead, they accepted a plea bargain
with prosecutors and took a shorter sentence rather than running the risk of a
longer one at trial. Indeed, many of the “tough-on-crime” laws of the 1970’s
and 1980’s were designed to add more offenses with which an alleged criminal
could be charged from the same set of facts, to give prosecutors more leverage
in plea deals. And at the height of the early-1990’s mania over sexual abuse of
children by adults — some of it real, some way overblown and some existing only in the minds of prosecutors and so-called
“therapists” who asked kids leading questions in settings reminiscent of the
Salem witch trials — Washington state passed a pioneering law, which other
states later copied.
This allowed
adults convicted of sex crimes against children to be kept in prison longer than their original sentences, until
psychotherapists decided that they were “no longer in danger” of re-offending.
The idea that people who committed crimes and served out their sentences could
be kept behind bars, either in prisons or mental institutions, for crimes they might commit in the future flat-out contradicted the whole
idea that Americans can only be punished for crimes they’ve actually done. But
because of the heinous nature of the offenses, a lot of people — even those
ordinarily supportive of due process and the presumption of innocence —
supported such laws.
What Trump is
suggesting is that people who merely fit the “profile” of someone
law-enforcement and mental-health officials think may commit a crime in the future should be intercepted
and incarcerated before they can do so. It’s an idea that has a lot of support
in this country, not only from the Right but the Left as well. Indeed, many
people who back this concept don’t even realize they’re doing so; they look at
the pre-murder background of an alleged mass killer and ask, “Why didn’t we do
something to stop it?,” when in fact there’s precious little we can do without violating the civil liberties not only of
people who would go on to commit mass murders but also of a lot of people who
won’t.
Certainly the
profile of alleged Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz by Los Angeles Times reporters Matt Pearce and Jenny Jarvie (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-school-shootings-20180226-story.html)
seems so totally to fit the checklist of what, in the popular imagination, a
nascent school shooter looks like one can imagine producers at Lifetime giving
it to their writers as a guide for creating a fictional mass-killer character.
Product of a broken home? Check. Adoptee who never really fit in? Check. “Pale
and slight”? Check. Torture of animals? Check: “Cruz killed squirrels [and]
poked sticks down rabbit holes,” Pearce and Jarvie reported. “Cruz would take
his dog across the street to attack their neighbors’ pot-bellied pigs.”
Perpetrator of minor acts of violence against neighbors and other kids? Check:
Pale and
slight, Cruz caused alarm among neighbors not long after he moved in. A
neighbor complained that he bit their young son’s ear, said Shelby Speno, a
48-year-old videographer who lives two doors down from the family’s former
home. When Cruz was a little older, a neighbor accused him of stealing a check
from a mailbox. In middle school, she said, he threw eggs at her husband’s car.
Other neighbors complained that Cruz … picked fights with other children. One
day, Speno said, she provided a statement to police after her daughter spotted
him shooting their backyard neighbors’ chickens with a BB gun.
The problem with these categories is that a lot of children
are adopted, have adjustment problems, hurt animals and pick fights with other
kids without growing up to be mass
murderers. Some even make bravado posts
on social media, the way Cruz did, announcing that they’re “going to be a
professional school shooter” and shooting selfies of themselves holding guns
without ever planning to use them to mow down their former classmates and
teachers. Too often, the call to “do something” about kids like Nikolas Cruz
turns into treating alienation and being “different” as crimes — and as a kid
who was bullied through much of my school career (though, interestingly, less so in high school than I’d been earlier because high
school was bigger and there were enough people like me I could make friends and
we essentially assembled our own Island of Misfit Toys), I’m especially
sensitive to that.
If we want to stop school shootings before they happen,
don’t pick on the kids who are “different” and make them feel even worse about
who we are. (If any psychological
intervention could have helped
Nikolas Cruz, I suspect it would have to have happened long before high school,
while his age was still in single digits.) Get rid of the Goddamned guns! Get this country over its long love affair with its
“pioneer” past of genocide against Native Americans and enslaving
African-Americans, which according to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is why we have a
Second Amendment in the first place.
I didn’t grow up to be a school shooter partly because I
had a certain basic level of decency that made me express my differences from
others in journalism and political activism rather than violence, but also
because I didn’t grow up around guns, I didn’t know anyone who had guns, I
never owned a gun and I’ve never wanted
to own a gun. Only when we stop idolizing guns, and tell the National Rifle
Association and Gun Owners of America that it’s time to put them alongside the
advocates for slavery in America’s Hall of Shame, will we stop having people
who think they can solve the brokenness inside them by shooting a whole lot of
other people.
