Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“So many
guns, and so few brains behind ’em.”
—
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
On Saturday,
October 27, 11 members of the ironically named Tree of Life Synagogue in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania became the latest victims of the U.S. government’s
failure at all levels — federal, state and local — to protect its citizens
against nuts with guns. A 46-year-old man named Robert Bowers with a history of
making anti-Semitic comments on a social media Web site called Gab decided to
translate his words into action and randomly kill 11 people whose only “crime”
was being Jewish.
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
According to the
charges federal authorities have filed against him, Bowers entered the
synagogue about 10 a.m. Eastern time (7 a.m. Pacific time) armed with an AR-15
military-grade assault rifle and three handguns, and started shooting people.
When police arrived, according to media reports, Bowers came out of the
synagogue and engaged fire. By the time it was over, 11 people were dead and
six others — two Tree of Life congregants and four police officers — were
wounded.
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
Politicians,
community leaders, media commentators and the people left to pick up the pieces
after mass shootings are fond of saying we can’t “normalize” these events. The
truth is we already have. The rabbi at Tree of Life has said he considered
putting his congregation through a drill to practice what they should do if a
mass shooter attacked their building. Other congregations in other religions
already have. We’ve already locked down schools, airports, concerts and even
political rallies because of the omnipresent threats of mass violence and
terrorism. Now we’re being told that the price of the New Order will be armed
guards at our churches — and no doubt metal detectors and other “security”
devices as we enter the doors of a house of faith to worship whatever God we
believe in.
We’ve become
unwilling combatants in an ongoing war. In Pittsburgh, the police had to adopt
military-style tactics — “going to ground” and crawling their way to the
shooter to try to stay out of his line of fire — and the doctor who supervises
the emergency ward at the hospital where the six wounded victims were taken
said on TV he was using tactics he
learned in the military to try to save their lives. We all live in a permanent
war zone because we’ve subcontracted our entire national policy on firearms to
the National Rifle Association (NRA) and even crazier gun nuts like Gun Owners
of America, who’ve held the political system hostage to a few well-mobilized
voters who think there’s some sacred “right” under the Second Amendment for
which so many real, living, innocent Americans have to sacrifice their lives.
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
This particular
nut was driven by anti-Semitism. Another one shot up an African-American church
in Charleston, South Carolina because he hated Blacks. The two kids who
committed mass murder at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado were
doing it to express all too typical adolescent alienation. A shooter in Santa
Barbara went on a killing spree because he couldn’t get laid. A man in Colorado
shot up a movie theater that was showing a Batman film and dressed up as the
Joker, a villain in the Batman mythos. A
Pakistani-American couple in San Bernardino shot up a social-service office
because they thought that would make them part of a jihad sponsored by ISIS. The U.S.-born son of
Afghan-American parents shot up a Gay disco in Orlando, Florida. Another
shooter in Sandy Hook, Connecticut shot up an elementary school and killed kids
just after he’d killed his mother, and since he died in the incident we’ll
never know what his motive was.
It doesn’t matter why these awful people do what they do. What
matters is how easy the U.S. makes it for them to do it. We need to get rid of
the goddamned guns.
President Trump,
predictably, emerged from his well-sheltered, well-secured White House on his
way to a campaign rally in Indianapolis (where he spoke before an audience
whose every member had to be searched by Secret Service agents on their way in)
to say that gun laws would have done “little” to stop the Pittsburgh shooting.
He said that the Tree of Life Synagogue should have hired an “armed guard” — as
some synagogues and other religious institutions already have — and that would have stopped the rampage.
Never mind that
a lot of these “armed guards” have about the level of training and experience
of Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Never mind that a sufficiently powerful and
sophisticated shooter — especially one who’d been in the military and did have training — could easily overpower the kind of
security-service rent-a-cops who usually take jobs like this. Never mind that
the more “security” we put on people every time they go somewhere to learn, to
worship, to hear live music or participate in a political rally makes them
wonder if the trouble of being searched at the door — and potentially hassled
over a letter opener or a can of hair spray — makes attending the event no
longer worth it.
What President
Trump is saying, in essence, is that the government is not going to protect
you against mass shooters. You need to protect you against mass shooters. If you
run a church — especially a synagogue, an African-American church, a U.S.
mosque or any other sort of religious enterprise that triggers prejudice and
hatred among a fair number of Americans — you have to hire an “armed guard” to
protect your members against attack. You have to pay for their security. If your perimeter is actually breached
— if someone shows up and starts shooting you — then law enforcement will involve themselves and
intervene to kill or capture the shooter. But until then, you’re on your own.
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
We know how this
happened. Every American does. It began with the Second Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a
free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.” Actually it began earlier than that, when the first white settlers
came to the New World in the 1500’s and 1600’s. They had firearms and the
Native American populations didn’t. As feminist and Native American historian
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has argued, those “well-regulated militias” were formed to
mobilize the entire white American population to fight back just in case the
dispossessed Natives tried to conquer back the land that was rightfully theirs.
They were also used to suppress any attempts by Black American slaves to revolt
and win their freedom.
However
problematic the Second Amendment’s application to “well-regulated militias” may
have been, at least historically it wasn’t interpreted to grant every
individual American a right to “keep and bear” whatever sort of weapon s/he
wanted. That changed in 2007, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ghastly
decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which threw out a Washington, D.C. law regulating
gun ownership and for the first time established that the Second Amendment did grant an individual right to own guns.
This decision
was largely the result of the NRA’s slow, steady takeover of the American
political system, and specifically the outcome of the 2000 Presidential
election. Ignore most of what you’ve heard about why, despite losing the
popular vote, George W. Bush became President and Al Gore didn’t. Gore didn’t
lose because of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Secretary of State, or
Ralph Nader. He lost because the NRA mounted independent campaigns against him
in the key states of Tennessee and West Virginia, which mobilized enough
gun-rights supporters to carry those states for Bush.
This is
significant because, in what was otherwise a razor-close election, Gore became
the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to
lose his home state, Tennessee. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won
the Electoral College and Florida wouldn’t have mattered. And every politician
in America — Democrat as well as Republican, blue-state as well as red-state —
got the message loud and clear. Don’t talk about regulating guns. Even when the body count mounts from mass shooting
after mass shooting, offer only “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their
families.
It shouldn’t be
surprising that a country that entertains itself almost exclusively with
violence should be so prone to outbursts of real violence. A huge proportion of American movies, including virtually all the
biggest blockbuster hits, are celebrations of violence by “good guys” against
“bad guys,” and the plots of major films are getting more and more beside the
point. All most movie writers have to do today is figure out how to get the
story from one big action scene to the next, to “give the people what they
really want” — the vicarious thrill of seeing people kill each other. It
shouldn’t be surprising that a country that entertains itself that way produces
more than a few people demented enough not to be satisfied with vicarious
violence, but to seek out the real thing.
The result is
that we have a government that has willfully ignored its most basic duty: to keep its citizens alive and safe.
Thanks to our failure to do anything
to prevent the crazies who commit mass shootings from acquiring the weapons to
do so means that the U.S. government at all levels — federal, state, local — is
abrogating its responsibility, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, to
secure the people’s “unalienable Right” to “Life.” Every victim of every mass
shooting in America, especially each one where the shooter uses a
military-grade weapon whose only
function is to kill a large number of humans in a short time, is a silent
witness to our government’s failure to secure us this most basic right to
survive. And as the Declaration goes on to say:
[W[henever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It is time for
the ordinary people who aren’t part of the gun lobby or ideologically enthralled
to it to rise up and take back our right to life. It is time for us to become a
more powerful voting bloc than the NRA and its cronies. It is time to insist,
by any legal means necessary — including, if necessary, a Constitutional
amendment clarifying the issue — that the Second Amendment does not confer an absolute right of individuals to bear
high-powered firearms, especially ones whose only purpose is mass killing of humans. It is time for us
to rise up and end the tyranny of the National Rifle Association and the mass
shooters enabled by the policies they have foisted on government — including
President Trump’s executive order, signed shortly after he took office, that
made it easier for mentally ill
people to get guns — and instead put sane restrictions on gun ownership that
are necessary to protect our people’s lives.
Yes, NRA
members, we are coming for your guns.
Our nation cannot survive if we continue to allow it to be held hostage by a
few gun nuts and the politicians they have bought and paid for. We need to be
as single-minded in our voting as the NRA’s members and supporters are. We need
to withhold our votes from any
politician, no matter how much we may agree with them on other issues, if they
don’t or won’t vote for sane laws on guns. If we want the bloodbath in America
to stop, we must use our political power to vote, organize and mobilize to stop
it.
We need to
get rid of the goddamned guns.
