Gun Crazy

     Future generations will ask, ‘What kind of people were they? You could kill their children and they would not do anything about it.” And future generations will marvel that it was the children who finally rose up to save themselves from the collective madness of their elders.

    Fantasy passed off as sober judgment sustains the present gun situation.   

    “Mental illness causes mass shootings”, they say, even though mentally ill people can be found everywhere in the western world, but only the United States sees constant gun carnage.

     “Raise the age for buying assault weapons from 18 to 21”, they say, even though most mass shooters are over 21.

     “Do more background checks”, they say, even though these laws are notoriously porous.

     And in the wake of the latest school slaughter we have the craziest suggestion of all.

    “Arm teachers,” they tell us even as common sense and hard data say otherwise, an article in the International Journal of Police Science and Management indicating that expert police shooters are accurate less than 40% of the time at 21 feet. Yet a teacher in a chaotic situation, as students and colleagues flee for their lives, is supposed to shoot it out with an armed invader. It is a stupid, vulgar suggestion offered by fantasists, crazies, and craven political vampires bloated on NRA  money, insensitive to the fact that real lives are at stake.  

     Magical incantations and spectral warnings sustain periods of collective madness such as the Salem witch trials and today’s gun lunacy. “My Second Amendment rights are violated if I can’t have as many assault weapons as I want.”, the fantasist cries, perhaps ignorant of the fact that there is no Second Amendment right to own assault weapons, the relevant Supreme Court decisions, Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) affirming a right to have a gun for   self- protection but no right to have any kind of weapon, anywhere, for any reason.    

     “I need my arsenal to protect against a tyrannical federal government”, the fantasist cries, evoking images of star-spangled  freedom fighters taking to the hills, alluding Washington-ordered drone strikes. It is all the stuff of madness yet real people die because of feckless gun policies yielded by this madness.

    It is possible, I suppose, to live with the absurd so long that the absurd comes to seem normal. It is a virtue of the children that not having lived with this absurdity as long as their elders they can more easily see the situation for what it is. The problem is too many guns, too easily available. It is as simple as that, and perhaps the children can bring their elders to value their young lives as much as they value their guns.