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In Which I Advocate for More Gun Control
Dec. 15th, 2012 01:32 pmI'm going to say this: It's time for better, more stringent gun control in this country.
I was raised around guns, and I don't mean, "My dad owned a handgun." Multiple guns. I don't recall a time in my life when my father didn't own at least one pistol and then two or three rifles. As he got older, there were more. We had a gun safe and it had four rifles in it, plus dad always had a pistol in the glove compartment of his truck (it's legal in South Carolina to have one, though he always took it out if he knew he was picking me up from school as it's still illegal to have a gun on school grounds). That's not including the guns at the hunting club my father and his friends ran. And boxes upon boxes of amunition, like, those military cases full of them. My father even, once upon a time, reloaded his own shotgun shells and bullets meaning there was gun powder and caps on our property. He was a card-carrying lifetime member of the NRA, and he also had a conceal and carry permit valid in at least two states.
From an early age, I fired guns. I have been to a shooting range more than once in my life. I've shot rifles and pistols of varying calibres. I've been hunting (though I missed the deer I shot at). I've been shown how to clean a gun, how to site one in, where the safety usually is, and most of all, I was taught from as early as I can remember that guns are deadly weapons deserving of respect. For me and where I grew up, this is a normal experience. Guns are a way of life. In fact, I was weirded out the first time I dated someone who had never been exposed to guns as I had.
I have also grown up hearing every bit of second amendment rhetoric you can think of. I know what the NRA says about guns not killing people and all the nonsense about needing to defend yourself. For a time, I bought into it. I knew there were gun control laws in place from background checks to waiting periods, and at the gun and knife shows I went to with my father (well into my twenties), I watched him jump through the legal hoops to purchase a gun.
But I saw something else at those gun and knife shows. Men who, unlike my father, weren't buying guns for hunting. I saw men picking up pistols and other handguns, holding them improperly at an agle. Men who were imitating what they saw on television and in the movies. Men who didn't understand why the gun sellers and others flinched at the way they held the guns. "What? It's not loaded." But you never, ever pick up a gun and assume it's not loaded, even in a gun show where they've tied off the chamber so it can't close and there are bullets kept far away from the guns.
Those men passed the background checks and were allowed to purchase the guns, and maybe I can never be 100% certain, but I had an idea those guns weren't going out to shoot poisonous snakes on someone's property, or killing a deer that could feed a family for a month. They were for show, to prove someone's masculinity, someone's power. That power they showed was, "I can kill someone, several someones in the time it takes you to draw breath." That's it, nothing else, because a gun has no other purpose than to kill. None. And in our twisted world where masculinity is measured in someone's potential level of violence, guns are used as symbols of that potential violence.
The thing my father and his friends never seemed to understand was that for every one responsible gun owner who knew how to properly care for a gun, respected it as a weapon, and knew the laws, there were dozens more who weren't responsible, who didn't know how to make sure a gun never misfired, who treated it like a toy and not a deadly weapon. And there were those who no amount of mental health screening or prevention would keep them from using that gun as a weapon, guns they might not have had if we were just a little more strict as to who could own a gun, how many they could own, and were aware of someone non-military or non-law enforcement purchasing bullet proof vests and armor piercing rounds.
I used to believe guns could be used for protection, and they can (and should), but in the gun magazines he used to recieve, I read the monthly reports of people who had saved their lives (and sometimes others) by shooting home invaders or robbers. There were only a few paragraphs taking up a page each month, and maybe five or six at most. Add that up, that's only 60 or 72 people per year, and those are people we don't know would have died for a fact because they shot first and were lauded as heroes and held up as proof that guns are great. But yesterday, twenty children died, most of them no older than five years old. And last week in a mall people died. In Illinois, several people died, and those are just the mass shootings. We don't often hear about the individuals who are killed every day from gun violence. For all those sixty or seventy people I'd read about in a year, thousands more died because of guns. Thousands more would still be alive without guns.
Yesterday, in China, a man entered a school with a knife and stabbed 20 students and some adults. Violent, horrible, tragic, yes, but no one died. Yesterday, in Conneticut, a man entered a school and killed his mother before opening fire on her classroom full of kindergarten students. Twenty children died. Remove the gun from the equation and what might the story out of Conneticut be? Oregon? Illinois? Arizona? Would Gabriel Giffords still be in congress? Would Trayvon Martin be making regular trips to the 7-11 for soda?
I'm not here to advocate taking away every single gun in the hands of civilains. That's not necessary, but my father could have been all right with only a pistol and a rifle. Same for his friends. They'd be able to hunt, my father could have the pistol in case, while working on our rural heavily wooded property, he encountered a rattlesnake. (And more than once he had to kill snakes that came into our yard for our safety.) My father would have complained, but because he loved to hunt and like to shoot at a range, he would have sat through classes about gun safety. He would have helped teach basic gun safety and care, even. He'd complain about not being able to own as many guns as he'd like, but he'd still be able to protect his home if it came down to it. So would his friends and other gun owners.
It's not just guns, either. With free access to mental health care, education to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness, and giving families resources when they fear someone they love might be in trouble, we could help stop violence before it erupts. If we punished men who tried to control and abuse women and children, and we took threats of violence seriously when abused women reported it, we'd be able to prevent so many murders every year. If we portrayed guns as the deadly weapons they are rather than worshiping them, maybe our children would learn from an early age to respect the danger they pose.
It's time to have an adult discussion about guns in America. It's time we demanded compromises from the gun lobbyists, and if they won't come to the table, we make the laws without them. It's time we protected our children, our women, and our men. A nation in which kindergarteners can't go to school without being in danger of dying to gun violence should not be considered the greatest nation in the world, and it's time we fixed that.
Of course I fear we're still going to be having this conversation by the time the next mass shooting happens, and it will happen because so far it hasn't stopped.
I was raised around guns, and I don't mean, "My dad owned a handgun." Multiple guns. I don't recall a time in my life when my father didn't own at least one pistol and then two or three rifles. As he got older, there were more. We had a gun safe and it had four rifles in it, plus dad always had a pistol in the glove compartment of his truck (it's legal in South Carolina to have one, though he always took it out if he knew he was picking me up from school as it's still illegal to have a gun on school grounds). That's not including the guns at the hunting club my father and his friends ran. And boxes upon boxes of amunition, like, those military cases full of them. My father even, once upon a time, reloaded his own shotgun shells and bullets meaning there was gun powder and caps on our property. He was a card-carrying lifetime member of the NRA, and he also had a conceal and carry permit valid in at least two states.
From an early age, I fired guns. I have been to a shooting range more than once in my life. I've shot rifles and pistols of varying calibres. I've been hunting (though I missed the deer I shot at). I've been shown how to clean a gun, how to site one in, where the safety usually is, and most of all, I was taught from as early as I can remember that guns are deadly weapons deserving of respect. For me and where I grew up, this is a normal experience. Guns are a way of life. In fact, I was weirded out the first time I dated someone who had never been exposed to guns as I had.
I have also grown up hearing every bit of second amendment rhetoric you can think of. I know what the NRA says about guns not killing people and all the nonsense about needing to defend yourself. For a time, I bought into it. I knew there were gun control laws in place from background checks to waiting periods, and at the gun and knife shows I went to with my father (well into my twenties), I watched him jump through the legal hoops to purchase a gun.
But I saw something else at those gun and knife shows. Men who, unlike my father, weren't buying guns for hunting. I saw men picking up pistols and other handguns, holding them improperly at an agle. Men who were imitating what they saw on television and in the movies. Men who didn't understand why the gun sellers and others flinched at the way they held the guns. "What? It's not loaded." But you never, ever pick up a gun and assume it's not loaded, even in a gun show where they've tied off the chamber so it can't close and there are bullets kept far away from the guns.
Those men passed the background checks and were allowed to purchase the guns, and maybe I can never be 100% certain, but I had an idea those guns weren't going out to shoot poisonous snakes on someone's property, or killing a deer that could feed a family for a month. They were for show, to prove someone's masculinity, someone's power. That power they showed was, "I can kill someone, several someones in the time it takes you to draw breath." That's it, nothing else, because a gun has no other purpose than to kill. None. And in our twisted world where masculinity is measured in someone's potential level of violence, guns are used as symbols of that potential violence.
The thing my father and his friends never seemed to understand was that for every one responsible gun owner who knew how to properly care for a gun, respected it as a weapon, and knew the laws, there were dozens more who weren't responsible, who didn't know how to make sure a gun never misfired, who treated it like a toy and not a deadly weapon. And there were those who no amount of mental health screening or prevention would keep them from using that gun as a weapon, guns they might not have had if we were just a little more strict as to who could own a gun, how many they could own, and were aware of someone non-military or non-law enforcement purchasing bullet proof vests and armor piercing rounds.
I used to believe guns could be used for protection, and they can (and should), but in the gun magazines he used to recieve, I read the monthly reports of people who had saved their lives (and sometimes others) by shooting home invaders or robbers. There were only a few paragraphs taking up a page each month, and maybe five or six at most. Add that up, that's only 60 or 72 people per year, and those are people we don't know would have died for a fact because they shot first and were lauded as heroes and held up as proof that guns are great. But yesterday, twenty children died, most of them no older than five years old. And last week in a mall people died. In Illinois, several people died, and those are just the mass shootings. We don't often hear about the individuals who are killed every day from gun violence. For all those sixty or seventy people I'd read about in a year, thousands more died because of guns. Thousands more would still be alive without guns.
Yesterday, in China, a man entered a school with a knife and stabbed 20 students and some adults. Violent, horrible, tragic, yes, but no one died. Yesterday, in Conneticut, a man entered a school and killed his mother before opening fire on her classroom full of kindergarten students. Twenty children died. Remove the gun from the equation and what might the story out of Conneticut be? Oregon? Illinois? Arizona? Would Gabriel Giffords still be in congress? Would Trayvon Martin be making regular trips to the 7-11 for soda?
I'm not here to advocate taking away every single gun in the hands of civilains. That's not necessary, but my father could have been all right with only a pistol and a rifle. Same for his friends. They'd be able to hunt, my father could have the pistol in case, while working on our rural heavily wooded property, he encountered a rattlesnake. (And more than once he had to kill snakes that came into our yard for our safety.) My father would have complained, but because he loved to hunt and like to shoot at a range, he would have sat through classes about gun safety. He would have helped teach basic gun safety and care, even. He'd complain about not being able to own as many guns as he'd like, but he'd still be able to protect his home if it came down to it. So would his friends and other gun owners.
It's not just guns, either. With free access to mental health care, education to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness, and giving families resources when they fear someone they love might be in trouble, we could help stop violence before it erupts. If we punished men who tried to control and abuse women and children, and we took threats of violence seriously when abused women reported it, we'd be able to prevent so many murders every year. If we portrayed guns as the deadly weapons they are rather than worshiping them, maybe our children would learn from an early age to respect the danger they pose.
It's time to have an adult discussion about guns in America. It's time we demanded compromises from the gun lobbyists, and if they won't come to the table, we make the laws without them. It's time we protected our children, our women, and our men. A nation in which kindergarteners can't go to school without being in danger of dying to gun violence should not be considered the greatest nation in the world, and it's time we fixed that.
Of course I fear we're still going to be having this conversation by the time the next mass shooting happens, and it will happen because so far it hasn't stopped.
