I haven't blogged about Newtown because what do you say?
No, this shouldn't have happened. This should never happen. It feels wrong to minimize what this community has gone through by discussing the communities that go through this every day. A 7 year old child sitting in their classroom on a bright winter morning should not be murdered. Neither should a chid peacefully sleeping in her home. Or sitting in a car. Or walking down the street. Or playing on the swings. Thousands of our children have been senselessly murdered in the name of our second amendment rights. These rights are themselves a fictional construct of powerful special interest groups on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Every year, every moment, we place a fairytale above a child's life. I want to believe Newtown is a tipping point. I don't want to be disrespectful by asking why it would be. Is it because the children are mostly white? Is it because they are mostly wealthy? Is it because they were killed together? The last time I thought a child's death was going to be a tipping point was when 7 year old Aiyana Jones was murdered for sleeping on her sofa. I don't know why I thought Aiyana would change us. She wasn't different from all the other children needlessly killed by the culture of violence we celebrate. In fact, she wasn't killed by a random criminal at all, Aiyana was shot to death in her Disney Princess sheets by a police officer. A few months before that I thought it was going to be the death of 6 year old Makayla Sitton. She was murdered in her bed by a cousin brought to her home for a holiday. By 2011 when Christina Taylor-Green was assassinated for attending a speech by someone she admired I'd given up on America and mass violence.
These are three children out of hundreds and thousands. Children have been killed since Sandy Hook. Newtown was not an aberration in any fashion unless you consider being forced to face the deaths of our children is an aberration. It doesn't hit home. What does hitting home even mean? We want to see the faces of the children, we want to hear their stories. By this we mean pictures of them happy and healthy and whole. Stories of the love their family shared and the shock they leave behind. We want to whistle past the graveyard they lie in. Long after we've moved on, long after we've turned to the next mass shooting and ignored the bodies piling up in single or double or triple numbers around us, the first responders will still see the faces of those children when they close their eyes. Their images won't be happy or healthy and they certainly won't be whole. The damage done by the weapons used at Sandy Hook is the sort that stays with you for a lifetime. These men and women will be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, just as the families of the children will.
America, I think we will deal with this for about five minutes. Then we will turn away, as we always do. There is a fairy tale in our country that video games kill people. Movies kill people. Films kill people. Mental illness kills people. Anything but guns. It's never guns. It's never our easy access to weapons of war, weapons designed to kill each other as quickly as possible. This morning in a good neighborhood where this sort of thing doesn't happen (and what does that mean, really, except that lives are not equally important) a woman went for a bike ride. A man she knew stopped her. They had an exchange of words. He shot her to death and escaped. What if he'd punched her? Knifed her? What if he'd not had the power of the gun in his pocket, the secret knowledge that her life belonged to him just on the basis of his own whim. Would she be alive? Would Jordan Davis? Would Trayvon Martin?
I don't know whose cold dead hands will finally make America drop their weapons. For my kids, for your kids, for all the kids, let's go ahead and drop them now. We can't stop evil but we can disarm it. That's what fairytales are supposed to teach us. To want more. To expect better. To turn away from evil and embrace good. Let's open a different book. Please.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Yes, Virginia, this is about guns.
Some person somewhere, who is claimed by many of our species to be a member of our species, genuinely argued today that we should
train children to tackle gunmen, and that that would solve everything.
Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns. Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do. Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up. Just don't mention that all bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.
But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense. Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two. Oh and also they're taller than in real life. Maybe an inch or two. Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug. Good. Now. Everyone neat and pretty?
When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school. Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well. I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too. He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own. Then. Well. Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.
For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects. A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose). I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one.
As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure. There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken. Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things. Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill. Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees. Why am I reminded of all this?
First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics. Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
We all know there is a problem with the system. The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system. We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school? Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom? Dirty bombs in every class? What about buses? Grocery stores? The movie theater? Restaurants? Build-A-Bear? Gymboree? Is Chuck E. Cheese packing? Is Ronald? Guns everywhere? Every waking moment? In every hand?
The heart of the matter:
26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head. There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter.
The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns.
What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered. Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end.
I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.
Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns. Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do. Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up. Just don't mention that all bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.
But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense. Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two. Oh and also they're taller than in real life. Maybe an inch or two. Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug. Good. Now. Everyone neat and pretty?
When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school. Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well. I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too. He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own. Then. Well. Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.
For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects. A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose). I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one.
As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure. There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken. Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things. Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill. Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees. Why am I reminded of all this?
First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics. Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
We all know there is a problem with the system. The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system. We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school? Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom? Dirty bombs in every class? What about buses? Grocery stores? The movie theater? Restaurants? Build-A-Bear? Gymboree? Is Chuck E. Cheese packing? Is Ronald? Guns everywhere? Every waking moment? In every hand?
The heart of the matter:
26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head. There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter.
The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns.
What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered. Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end.
I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.
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