PAUL BARROWS
OPINION
Children pay price
U
niversal shock and grief over a single cataclysm like the mass slaughter of tiny children and their teachers would have been enough for most of our history to move a stubborn government to fix an evident and growing danger to society. But no longer, and especially not when the object is guns. The circulation of the weapons of war among the general population has been going on for 30 years with a rising toll of innocent lives year after year, but the opposition to doing anything to curb it has not subsided but grown more virulent. That is why President Obama, who had promised in 2008 to take steps to curb gun violence, did nothing. Nothing that Obama conceivably could have proposed had the slightest chance of passing either house of Congress, but that was not the only reason for his silence. It was the realization that for a sizable population who saw gun regulation as the end game for America or civilization he had become the emblem of Armageddon. All you have to do is read the preachings of any of the many right-wing, paramilitary, white-supremacy or anti-Mus-
lim groups about Obama’s plan to take away people’s guns and install a dictatorship. For that matter, folERNEST low the National DUMAS Rifle Association. Wayne LaPierre, its executive vice president, told cheering delegates to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington (shortly before Mike Huckabee had them cheering more anti-Obama ravings) that Obama had to be stopped because if he were re-elected he would abolish the Second Amendment and confiscate everyone’s guns. Sales of guns and ammunition soared after the 2008 election and they must be spiking again this fall. Across the Arkansas countryside, people are stockpiling ammunition for Armageddon. It didn’t make the news down here, but the day before Adam Lanza killed his mother and 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook, Ct., police arrested a young man in Bartlesville, Okla., who had stockpiled ammunition and was plotting a mass killing at his high school, and the day after Sandy Hook
The guns we need
“O
ne of the worst days in the history of our country,” my friend Dan Kennedy wrote on Facebook. “The worst day since 9/11.” My sentiments exactly. If you’re like most people, they’re probably yours. Very likely, the rest of us will never know, much less comprehend the Newtown, Conn., school shooter’s motives. The word itself implies a coherence alien to a diseased mind. Twenty first-graders. Do his motives even matter? Having some knowledge of mental illness, when I first heard that the Newtown killer’s weapons — a Bushmaster .223 caliber assault rifle, a pair of 9mm semi-automatic handguns, and hundreds of bullets — were registered to his mother, I imagined I knew the story: a divorced, middle-aged suburban housewife, isolated, captive to her son’s madness, handicapped by weak laws and an inadequate mental health system, and frantically bargaining with his advancing psychosis to buy peace. Hoping that things would magically change. But it turns out that I was wrong. The guns that ended Nancy Lanza’s life in her own bed indeed belonged to her. Living alone in semi-isolation with a troubled teen-age son she kept at home because
the stresses of school were more than he could handle, she adopted the least sensible hobby imaginable. GENE She became a LYONS gun collector and avid target shooter, and she took her son along. Something of a mathematical whiz with a loner’s passion for computers and video games, he probably took to the mechanical precision of expensive, semiautomatic weapons. Alas, he took to the darker aspects of the American gun cult as well. Look, target shooting is one thing: a harmless, somewhat dorky pastime like bowling or showing thoroughbred dogs. I own a target pistol myself, and take it out sometimes to plink aluminum cans and the occasional cedar fence post. I also own shotguns, although I no longer hunt. Out in the Arkansas boondocks where I live, guns are a practical necessity for several reasons — self-defense among them. Most men and a fair proportion of the women are deer hunters. We hear gunshots all the time. Even the dogs and horses pretty much ignore them. There was even a killing at Christmas a couple of miles down the road three years
police found 47 guns and $100,000 worth of ammunition in the home of a 60-yearold Indiana man who threatened to kill his wife and exterminate children in a nearby school. This week there is new talk about standing up to the NRA, the Patriot groups and survivalists and enacting gun controls for the first time since Bill Clinton’s brief and ineffectually written ban in 1994 on the sale of assault weapons, which lasted 10 years. Opponents will argue, successfully, that prohibiting the sale of AR-15 type weapons and bullets won’t stop killings, although some history suggests that it could. When a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 23 others in Australia in 1996, the conservative government passed a law forbidding the sale of semi-automatic shotguns and rifles and bought back 600,000 guns. In the next 10 years, mass murders fell from 11 the previous decade to none, and homicides by guns fell by 59 percent and suicides by guns by 65 percent. But not even the image of a first-grader riddled by 11 bullets from an AR-15 can provoke the government so hated by the right to do anything so radical as disappointing gun collectors and makers. Too many prefer Mike Huckabee’s explanation for Sandy Hook: God let those children and teachers be killed because He
was mad they weren’t praying or else because America was tolerating homosexual lifestyles. The right-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court who said the Second Amendment gave people the right to own a gun also said the government was expected to regulate weapons for public safety, as the Second Amendment says and as the government set out to do from the very first, so the legal avenue is wide open when there is sufficient motive to act. The founding fathers enacted tough gun laws, barring them to slaves and free blacks and to white men who did not swear loyalty to the American revolution. Until fairly recently, the NRA was the country’s leading champion of gun regulation, though that was when the chief fear was radical blacks like the Black Panthers, who toted weapons openly and confronted the police and lawmakers in California with weapons at their sides. A worried Gov. Ronald Reagan demanded gun control. After the Civil War, Southern states adopted Black Codes, which, among other things, forbade blacks to own guns. Come to think of it, in the gun belt, a good black scare (where is Huey Newton when we need him?) could be the ticket to gun reform again.
ago. I knew the shooter somewhat, and had never heard anything bad about him. As told around the county, it was a deal where a meth addict vowed mayhem if his girlfriend took her child to see his father. He texted death threats. Call the sheriff and maybe they’ll send somebody within the hour. Alerted by dogs, my neighbor took down a deer rifle, and confronted his shotgun-toting assailant, who jumped into his truck and threw it into reverse. He died at the wheel. Prosecutors charged the shooter with murder, but the case never came to trial. There would have been no point. Everybody I talked to around here basically said the same thing: “What’s he supposed to do, wait for the crazy sumbitch to sneak up on him again?” My sentiments exactly. In short, a sorrowful tragedy. But even in telling the story as sparely as possible, it’s almost impossible to prevent a kind of tough-guy romanticism from sneaking in. The kind of false bravado that makes cartoonish revenge comedies like the “Dirty Harry,” “Die Hard” and “Lethal Weapon” series such characteristically American cultural artifacts. The same kind of false bravado that has persuaded Bushmaster Firearms to advertise its .223 caliber AR-15 rifle — slayer of 20 first graders, six teachers and one mother — with a stark black and white photo of the
weapon propped on an oversized ammunition magazine and the slogan: “Consider your man card reissued.” Seriously now, how pathetic is that? Prove your manhood by plunking down $1,200-$1,500 for a deadly toy. Was this Nancy Lanza’s hope for her cowardly son? We’ll never know. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that even in wealthy Newtown, there’s a political struggle between gun hobbyists and citizens seeking restrictions on shooting ranges. “These are not normal guns that people need” one member of the police commission said. “These are guns for an arsenal, and you get lunatics like this guy who goes into a school fully armed and protected to take return fire. We live in a town, not in a war.” If the phrase “well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment means anything, they’re surely not guns that Americans need. They’re military weapons with no legitimate civilian uses; they’re cult objects, fetishes. “What choice do we have?” President Obama asked at the memorial service to Newtown’s dead. “We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” Prayerfully, we are not. www.arktimes.com
DECEMBER 19, 2012
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