Our Nation’s Culture Is Gun Culture

[billh58]

The day after their suspensions are handed down, Lee steals one of his father’s Glocks and brings it to school in his backpack. Loaded. Not to hurt anyone—he would never do that—for self-defense. It’s only smart—not everyone will like what he has done, not everyone appreciates those who do what’s right. Walking around with the Glock, having the ability to kill any bad guys who threaten him, or more so having the ability, the option, of killing anyone at all whenever he feels like it but choosing not to, allowing them to live, makes him feel much better about himself. I am good, he thinks. He finds he feels warmer toward people, is more forgiving, even feels affection toward them. He is more polite on crowded stairwells, gallantly allowing others to go ahead of him. A cop, he thinks. A cop in New York.

—From The Shooting by James Boice

In the weeks after Newtown, I was riding the subway back and forth through Manhattan every day and walking through Times Square, thinking about those kids and what their last moments were like and how anybody who wanted to could just board the subway or step out onto the street beside me and start shooting and there was nothing anyone could do. This did not reconcile with our supposed rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The easy access and sheer number of military-grade weaponry had created such a horrible place of our country. When guns were not killing our kids, they were turning the rest of us into anxiety-ridden paranoiacs. It felt like a kind of terrorism.

So I started reading about guns and gun politics and why such a horrible thing was able to happen and why nothing legislative happened in its aftermath to ensure it would never happen again. I read a lot of nonfiction, including Gunfight by Adam Winkler, Gun Guys by Dan Baum. Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist by Richard Feldman. These books, among others, helped give me an idea of the environment and history and politics behind gun violence.

I learned our entire culture is a gun culture. You have no choice but to have a relationship to guns in our country. There are 300 million guns out there and counting. More of us have been killed by guns than by all the terrorists and all our wars combined. Women are killed with guns by their domestic partners at horrifying rates. Mass shootings, accidental shootings, gang shootings, police shootings of black men—gun violence is a major, major piece of what it is like to live in America in the 21st century.

- Snip -

Gun culture provides such ripe material for literature. It’s darkly poetic: the difference between how we see ourselves—heroic—and how we actually are—tragic. People acting with one intention—self-defense, safety—but causing death, suffering. The Newtown killer’s mother, for example. Here was a tragic character right out of literature. Her child was mad, unreachable, but she saw him as simply unique, sensitive. She refused to get him help; instead, she indulged him. She liked guns, she bought the rhetoric the NRA had sold her about American values and self-defense, about an armed society being a polite society, about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns. When her son showed interest in guns as well, she was very happy. This was a wholesome thing they could finally bond over. She taught him how to shoot, seeing herself and him as good guys. She even bought him his own guns. She found meaning and connection in shooting guns with her son. It must have felt very good, to finally reach him, to be a part of something bigger with him, a culture of Americans exercising their sacrosanct constitutional rights—despite what she must have known deep down in her heart.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/10/our-nation-s-culture-is-gun-culture.html

The gun violence epidemic in this country is easily dismissed as "the price we must pay for freedom" by the gun culture in the United States -- the First World country with the highest (by far) rate of gun deaths and injuries in the world.

The total lack of meaningful federal regulation of lethal deadly weapons in our country is a public health menace, and defies all reason and logic. We must totally rid ourselves of the obscene right-wing gun lobby by electing responsible Democrats to all levels of government.

[flamin lib]

1. 12/14/2012. It starts all over again . . .

" every day and walking through Times Square, thinking about those kids and what their last moments were like "

I watched Sandy Hook unfold with my two year old grand daughter in my lap and my six and ten year old grand sons in school a block away.

The thoughts of what those 20 children experienced in the last five minutes of their lives still haunts me. The deafening sound of gunfire in an enclosed space, the screams and calls for mommy and daddy while hoping that Teacher will take care of them. Five hundred rounds fired in five minutes. The most surreal part of the day was the press conference with the coroner. So calm, so professional, taking questions and replying with voice like ordering coffee. Some one asked how he could be so composed. "There's time for that later, right now we have a job to do."

The screaming, the crying, the gunfire. Those precious children are still inside my head today. God help me I can't get them out.