Teach your children well
Paying with paperclips / pistols
Like an original sin, one strange, strangely worded sentence in our Constitution haunts us all. Some limit its meaning to permission to carry a flintlock rifle in a well-regulated militia. Other insist that people can show up at protests, churches, public streets, homes, Congress, birthday parties, and schools bearing military assault weapons draped like pageant sashes, or pistols nestling warm in a pocket, like a spare penis.
Young boys and their guns. Old men and their guns. Dudes and their guns. Americans and their long, lethal fascination with firearms. One nation under guns was born not only in democratic ideals, but in war, fear, genocide, and slaveholding.
We skirt around causes of the proliferation of guns and balk at hard reforms to halt their easy violence. Politicians offer shallow thoughts and prayers, propose background checks and waiting periods. In two recent cases, the legal system charged parents who armed their troubled boys with assault rifles then used in mass murder. But few call for total bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines … as a minimum starting point.
And almost no one says fuck what an antiquated document from a bygone era calls a right.
There have been 26 school shootings so far this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, 208 since 2018. For the last four years the US has averaged 600 mass shootings annually.
Terry, your metaphors are gripping: wearing assault weapons draped like pageant sashes, and the warm pistol reminiscent of Lennon and McCarthy “happiness is a warm gun.”. Thank you for the powerful comments.
No one wants to see violence of any kind but the constitution is hardly an antiquated or irrelevant document. It’s what gives us the right to say it is or not and the point of having included it had zero to do with hunting. That was a given. There was no 911 to call or supermarkets to shop for dinner. The framers knew that the ppl needed the right to have a means to fight back at tyranny. There remains a reason for that. Firearms are the great equalizer. I can no longer physically defend my home, family or self. I have had training and periodically practice shooting.
Our society continues to embrace ever more graphic violence in entertainment of every stripe. The devaluing of human life is a cancer that is devouring all manner of ethical standards. The wealthy have armed protections and many have fortress like retreats while those who are less fortunate have to live in the mess they profit from.
All people, even kids had access to firearms in days gone by. The murder rate was significantly less. Why? Because ppl also had a stronger sense of right and wrong.
The estimate of soldiers who actually fired at enemy combatants in WWII was roughly 25%. This is attributed to the natural aversion most ppl have to killing. By the time of the Vietnam war training methods changed from shooting targets to human shaped forms. The number of Vietnam soldiers who fired at the enemy rose to 90%. Since that time every aspect of our modern world has effectively reprogrammed normal ppl to be desensitized to murder and violence. Killing because an individual “feels” justified has become acceptable, even celebrated.
I hear what you are saying but there’s far more to the picture. Most of the school shooters were socially marginalized kids who were victims of excessive bullying.
School administrators continue to fail at identifying this. Not all kids who are picked on become murderous but this is a serious issue too. Mean parents raise mean kids. This isn’t a new problem by any means. There will always be bad ppl. Hopefully there will always be more decent ppl. Even in our own country the areas or states with the greatest restrictions on an individuals legal ability to posses firearms have the highest levels of gun violence. In the world at large the nations with the most severe restrictions on firearms (Mexico, Honduras, Columbia) have some of the highest rates of murder. The US isn’t even in the top ten. We could and must do better but criminals don’t care what your laws allow.
The best way to reduce violence is to change hearts, be more disciplined about glorifying violence in entertainment and return to emphasizing right from wrong.
Children, like monkeys, are more inclined to do what they see than what they hear...