Left Turn In NoHo >> Gun (out of) Control

Before writing me off as a tree hugging liberal who wants to confiscate all guns, I have shot guns.  Three times, exactly.  The first time was before my husband and I attended a wedding at a banquet hall (the Canyon Club in Agoura) with a shooting range nearby.  I was scared at first, but then I got off on it.  It was a rush!  My second time was at the same range before our own wedding (in my wedding dress!)  That took care of all pre-wedding nervous jitters.  My husband and I went a third time soon after we got married and that was it.  The thrill was gone.  It wasn’t the same as the first two times and I never did it again, but I get why people like to shoot guns.  I spent twelve years living in the mountains of Colorado where people own guns for hunting and self protection.  I get why people have guns.

What I don’t get is the paranoid hoarding of weapons or any of the rhetoric propagated by the NRA claiming that the government is conspiring to disarm citizens and that the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  That’s absurd.

Becoming a mom changed me.  I don’t like guns.  They scare me.  Even though I don’t like them, I see the big picture and don’t want to see everybody’s guns taken away.  That’s not the answer.  Banning automatic war weapons is a good idea, though.  So is making stricter laws for background checks.  The laws are too lax now making it too easy for guns to move around.  These loose laws may make it hassle free for individual gun owners to sell their firearms, but it has made it much easier for anybody to buy anything they want at gun shows.  Too many people have taken advantage of this loophole and have sold guns right off of the convention hall floor without checking to see if the purchaser is deranged or a criminal.  That’s how high school kids Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris got their weapons.  And how about registering guns once they are purchased?  We have to register our vehicles.  We have to take a test to get a license to drive our registered vehicles.  But you can have as many kinds of guns that you want lying around your house, no problem.

My kid walking in to your house with all of those guns lying around?  That’s a problem.

After my son was born I became a NO GUN fanatic.  He was never allowed to play with toy guns, violent video games, or watch violent movies.  My belief was that kids who were exposed to all of this violent imagery became desensitized to the realities of gun violence. Prohibiting him from gun play was common sense to me.

After my husband became a dad, he expressed an interest in buying a gun to protect his family.  I fought him on that one and won.   Statistically speaking, a gun in the home is more apt to be used on someone living in the home instead of ever being used against an intruder.   Case in point:  After the Sandy Hook shootings I had a little chat with my ten year old daughter about guns.  She told me that one of our friends had a gun.  I acknowledged that I knew about that and that I trusted him with his gun because he is very careful and safety conscious.  Then I had the good sense to ask her if she had ever seen it.  She said that she hadn’t but that her friend, his daughter, had told her that she had looked for it.  There you go.  That’s the real danger of having a gun in the house.  A really good kid, raised by really great parents who are very careful about the gun that they own, is curious about that gun and has gone looking for it even though she knows she is not supposed to.  In her quest to sneak around to find that gun and look at it, she could inadvertently shoot herself or anybody else nearby.  That’s why we don’t own a gun.

I’ve noticed that some of the most defensive people in the gun debate are childless.  Many of us with kids understand the argument that violent video games and movies make kids more aggressive.  Why?  Because they play and pretend.  They act out everything surrounding them during their play.  That’s how they grow and develop within the culture they are born in to.  Kids playing house, doctor, school, etc, is an expression of what they are observing in their own little worlds, helping them form ideas and beliefs about that world.  When this role playing is incorporated with violent acting out from things that they have seen on TV or in video games, the lines between reality and fantasy get thinner and thinner.  But since violence is so common in movies, TV and video games, we have come to regard violent play as normal, when it is not.

Obsession with violent video games, mental illness and guns in the home are a very bad combination. It would be one thing if your position on “personal responsibility” and individual rights guaranteed me the same rights, but your individual rights may infringe on my individual rights if those rights threaten my safety.   The Libertarian view that the government should not be involved in whether or not someone wants to stockpile war weapons in their home would be fine if everybody could be trusted to be “responsible”.  But if you want to stand behind that argument, I want some sort of guarantee that anyone in your family who is mentally ill can’t walk out of your house with any of your weapons and use them against me.  Since there is no way to guarantee that any of your mentally ill relatives won’t hurt anybody outside of your own home, then I want laws protecting me and my family.  We need laws. A responsible society needs laws to protect its citizens.  Personal responsibility means more than looking out for number one.  It also means that in order for you to be personally responsible, you need to be responsible and respectful of the safety and rights of others as well.  It’s not all about you. That’s another piece of this very complex problem – too much concern about the self and not enough concern about public welfare or our country in general.  The obsession with self is a plague on this nation.

I was criticized by gun owners for publicly declaring that my home was a gun-free zone.  They laughed at me and said I might as well put a sign out on my lawn saying, “Robbers:  Come on in!  We’re unarmed!”  How paranoid is that? You know who didn’t criticize me?  Mothers. The moms who dropped their children off to play at my house during the winter break after the Sandy Hook shooting.  They were all so sad and frazzled.  Knowing that I didn’t have a gun in my home made them feel safer.

If more mothers were elected into public office we would be safer.

Gun nuts on the far right who cling to the second amendment argument are as naive as the hippies on the far left who believe we can have world peace if we would all just meditate together.  The many solutions to this large, shameful, and polarizing problem are all going to be found in the middle, in between the two extremes of the NRA and its gun nuts, and the tree hugging peaceniks.

Like it or not, we need more laws restricting gun usage in this country.

The gun nuts, like the Tea Party, have become the duped soldiers of the NRA and the GOP, carrying forth their message of “liberty”, “individual freedom” and the second amendment.  They have controlled the gun debate for the past thirty years.  Liberals shrink and quiver whenever the gun nuts start hollering that the liberals are coming for their guns.  Moderates just shake their heads in disgust for it is all so stupid. All of this has been going on while the public has been baited with the same old wedge issues on abortion, gay rights, and good old American Christianity.

A coincidence?

Democrats have been put on the defensive since Reagan.  They haven’t taken a pro-active stand  against gun violence because they have been too busy proving that they’re not anti-gun.  Republicans and the NRA have maintained control with this strategy.  Lawmakers (Democrats as much as Republicans) have cowered when the subject of gun control has come up because they have cared more about their own political careers than they have about doing the right thing. The country in general has been somewhat apathetic (until now) about this whole problem of violence in America because the problem is so big.  It has all seemed so hopeless.

Hopeless and insane. Extremists proclaiming that kids getting shot in school is because God was removed from the school, that “evil” has infiltrated our schools, that we need to stockpile weapons to arm ourselves against the government (and all of the bad guys roaming the streets), or that single parents are to blame only make the problem harder to logically solve.  Then there are the lunatics calling for teachers and principals to arm themselves, the media running in every direction and reporting anything and everything, whether what they report can be verified or not, or interviewing CHILDREN who have just witnessed mass murder! And then of course, there is the usual ranting on Fox News and conservative talk radio.   All of this leads to mass paranoia which leads to more gun sales which leads to more deaths.  This should be part of the mental health debate.   Mentally ill individuals who commit heinous crimes come out of a mentally ill society.  Our society being so numb to violence and our paranoid need to keep buying more guns because we’re afraid of everything is not normal.

Our culture glorifying and accepting violence as common place is mass mental illness. People believing they need to stock pile weapons of war in their homes because that will make them safe from intruders or the government is sick. Trivializing the Sandy Hook tragedy by going straight to the NRA talking points is also sick.  People on social media callously posting obscene photos and messages about the NRA, Ted Nugent, kids with guns, and worse, “Hot for Teacher” photos of half naked women holding assault weapons is revolting. Yet we, as a society, turn a blind eye to such expression, which contributes to the multi-faceted, bigger issue.

Enough.

Will legislating assault weapons, closing loopholes on gun sales, conducting better background checks, and registering firearms stop crazy people from killing other people?  OF COURSE NOT.  But it will cut down on the carnage!  That’s the best we can do and it must be done! When the gangsters in the twenties were massacring people with machine guns, the cops couldn’t just take their machine guns away from them. Instead, laws were passed to restrict their use so that when the gangsters got picked up for other crimes they would be put in jail for an additional five years because they failed to comply with the new gun laws.  That  resulted in an extra five years. The new laws didn’t stop all murders, but it sure did help cut down on them. New laws now won’t stop all murders, but they will cut down on them.  Common sense!

Guns kill people.  One hundred thousand people are shot in this country every year.  Thirty thousand of them die. Many more children have been shot since Sandy Hook but the media didn’t report those stories. One case in point: Over sixty school aged children were shot and killed in Chicago in 2012.  High school graduations in the city start off with tributes to dead teenagers.  Nobody ever hears about them because children of color killed in big cities is old news. That’s sick.

Easy access to guns should be the number one issue the new congress addresses. We have more gun shops in this country than we do McDonald’s. We can't buy multiple boxes of Sudafed but we can go to a gun show and buy as many killing machines as we want, no questions asked. The days of the Hollywood Wild West need to end.  It’s time for common sense legislation.  That’s all most of us are calling for.  The right to bear arms and gun control are not mutually exclusive.  We have always had gun control laws.  Always.  Gun control laws have only gotten weaker since the NRA became one of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington.

The NRA started framing the gun debate using the second amendment in the 1960s, creating mass panic with gun owners (even though most state constitutions protect the individual’s right to bear arms, the NRA has gotten a lot of mileage out of the second amendment – playing on paranoia and fear).  The second amendment moved to self defense, then it moved to individual rights (conservative buzz words – individual rights are part of the neo-con, tea party movement.  If you can link your issue to individual rights you can sell it to the conservatives pretty easily) a little over a decade ago.  The NRA funded research to back up “individual rights.” George W. Bush helped the NRA make that switch after the NRA helped him get elected.  The NRA was one of the biggest backers of the Bush campaign.  One out of three dollars spent by special interest groups to get Bush elected was spent by the NRA.  Once elected, Bush had to return the favor by helping the NRA reframe the gun debate so that the NRA could help gun manufacturers sell more guns while they continued to buy more politicians.

It wasn’t always like this.  The NRA was once a very honorable organization that did, in fact, support common sense gun legislation.  But since it’s been an entire generation since the NRA’s primary mission was to promote gun safety and recreation, most people do not know this.  Many people don’t have any personal memory of that NRA, nor have they done any research on their own to learn about its history.

The NRA was started in 1871 by two guys who served in the Civil War.  Since they witnessed first hand how much damage could be done by people who weren’t properly trained to use guns (many makeshift soldiers who grabbed their guns to go fight in the war were lousy shots), they decided to start an organization that would train people to use guns properly.  Their original mission was to promote safety training and sport.  In the 1930’s, the NRA supported two major pieces of gun control legislation; the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938.  These laws taxed certain firearms heavily, required some gun owners to register their weapons, and insured that all gun dealers be licensed to send guns across state lines.   None of this would be supported today by the existing NRA.

Today’s NRA is against all gun legislation.  When the NRA finally called a press conference after the Sandy Hook shooting, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed everybody but the NRA for the tragedy.  His comments not only inflamed the gun faithful to take up their arms, but his comments also further enraged the majority who want to see common sense gun legislation.  His solution?  Provide armed guards in every school and the NRA will help pay for it.

Most gun enthusiasts refer back to the founding fathers and the second amendment when talking about our history with guns.  That part of our history has been romanticized and revised to fit modern gun owners’ claims that we have always been a pro-gun nation. You will hear people argue about the interpretation of the militia part of the second amendment, but you never hear people talk about old laws that prohibited slaves from owning guns (white people were afraid that if slaves had access to guns that they would revolt just like they did against England).  You couldn’t sell your guns to natives lest they form their own militia against the white settlers.  Early gun owners had to take a political test to prove their loyalty to the union and the government could take your gun away if you deemed yourself untrustworthy. Gun owners were required to store their guns separate from their gun powder (not so children would be safer in their own homes but to insure that slaves couldn’t get to the guns and to also cut down on fires caused by sloppy storage).  If you were a stranger riding into a new western town, you had to surrender your gun to the sheriff.  New towns wanted to attract decent citizens and new businesses.  It wasn’t like in the western movies where everybody carried a gun on their hip. Economic growth depended on the town being an attractive, safe place to live.

Just like in the past, gun control laws must continue to respond to the public safety needs of each new era.  The time has come for assault weapons to be banned.  There is no good reason for anybody to have such a weapon.

After the FBI was first created, J. Edgar Hoover went after machine guns because there was no good reason why anybody should have one.   The machine gun, the automobile and paved roads created a need for new laws to protect the public from gangsters who were killing in mass numbers and then getting away really fast in cars, across state lines.  The federal government was called upon to do what it could to stop such crimes and it did.  Right now, the immediate threat to the public is easy access to any kind of weapon.  That’s got to change.

We can start by legislating automatic assault weapons. Next, the Obama administration can re-open the doors to mental health care that the Reagan administration had closed.  The media can stop scaring people.  Politicians can start leading with a conscience, even if that means they lose their jobs.  And we, as citizens, need to look at our own lives and re-examine what we have come to accept as normal.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, our president asked us to be at our best for the parents of the murdered children.  Common sense and compassion must prevail.   We must care for our neighbors instead of fearing them.  We should participate in our government instead of ignoring and then condemning it.  We need to take a stand on changing our culture of violence instead of giving in to it.

Freaking out and keeping ourselves in a perpetual state of agitation and fear, alert and ready to go up against the government or a bad guy is no way to live.  At the rate we’re going, we will soon have more to fear from the boy next door.  Let go of the paranoia about the government coming to take all guns away.  More guns aren’t going to keep us safer from what really ails our nation.  The most serious threat to us now is smoldering from within, for they are our lost boys, prone to violence by a pro-gun culture that neglects its children.

Suggested Links:

Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. -http://www.bradycampaign.org/

We Are Better than This www.wearebetterthanthis.org

Sign Senator Dianne Feinstein’s online petition to ban assault weapons - http://www.diannefeinstein2012.com/petition/w1212wbe/

One Million Moms 4 Gun Control -http://onemillionmomsforguncontrol.org/