Pattern Is Pointing Out America's Terror Problem

Sometimes in the quest for agreement, you have to recognize when your opposition has moved an inch back.

Such is the case for this horrific crisis that way too often ends in an argument over what is the right way to go about dealing with terror.  Some will tell you that we should be ready to shoot back instead of being at the total mercy of a deranged shooter, while others have concluded that nothing, and they repeat, nothing can be done about the issue of lunatics who kill people in mass.

So let me ask the question in another fashion to see if I am clear.  You mean there is nothing that we can do to stop these things, or there is nothing that we should do?  I'm not sure if we want to make Tim McVeigh the father of American terrorism or if we would share that crown between Dylann Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine killers.  What I do know is that the model is not incredibly new, nor is the problem.

Since we really didn't start to address the potential for these crimes until Columbine happened, I will give Klebold and Harris the nod. Since back when they disrupted the conscience of the state I was born and love, to date, the states that have passed comprehensive gun legislation have also benefited from the compromise. Thanks to the vast number of states that have refrained from change, America remains the most violent civilized nation on the planet.    

4.4% of the people on this planet live in the United States along with 42% of the worlds guns.  People occasionally buy guns for the sport of killing animals or for the memorabilia value that old guns often bring, however, those gun user's don't make up the bulk of that 42% of guns in America.  Hunting for sport can be very expensive if you aren't also a fairly good butcher who can process a carcass down to its functionally edible parts and not too many Americans can afford to make up that 42% of guns in America.

Those who hunt for sport typically find a couple of really good killing guns and they keep them until they upgrade to something better.  Unless you are an wealthy, avid collector of guns, there is no sense having 14 different "very expensive" animal killing guns with no way to carry or shoot them all unless you hunt so many variety of wild animals that you are probably some rich dentist who killed Cecil the Lion.

Stock piling weapons for that eventual day of doom that seems destined in a world so full of guns is somewhat normal behavior in America, yet few of my social media gun nuts share pictures of 14 guns. Doesn't this form of gun stock piling point to the mind of a person who is not intent on sport hunting, but on someone preparing to kill before they are killed themselves.

The point is, guns are made for killing.  Killing gang rivals- as so many black and brown boys do to each other during their violent 20's-  or for killing arrested gang members who get out of line, as well as an occasional innocent person who just so happens to resemble a gang member or God forbid, runs away from police.

Guns are also for killing combatants on the battlefield or innocent students and teachers in a classroom, and maybe even for killing yourself when times get tough or your killing spree at a school gets halted by law enforcement.

Gun free zones were familiar and expected follow ups to the drug free zones that schools adopted to add strong punishments for average Dick and Jane's that would dare think of threatening the health and safety of an area in which our school kids go to be safe and to learn.

Come to think of it, how come we never have had a female lunatic shoot up places that make us feel afraid and vulnerable?  We also rarely have adults over 30 years of age that go into psychotic rages of terror.  We have had a couple of teenage killers, but teens don't have easy access to the kind of weapons that killers typically need for these kind of rampages.

Minus a couple of exceptions to this rule, mostly we are dealing with twenty-something white young men with a love for guns and a mentally disturbed level of hate for society.  Even Black Lives Matters isn't fighting to resolve that black on black crime issue, so neither will I other than to say that their skin color doesn't invalidate the other aspects of this murderous pattern. Most of our killers are twenty something men.

We know that most of these young men acquired their weapons legally and lawfully, which is no solace to the families that lose loved ones.  It's not even sufficient enough for Ian Mercer the father of the Umpqua Community College killer.  Mercer was shocked and confused at how his son could get so many guns without impediment or red flag.

Determined to comfort the pain of all the victims, including himself, Ian Mercer has bonded his energy with that of Andy Parker the father of slain television journalist Alison Parker, who, alongside other gun restriction advocates, refuse to stop until something finally gives on this issue.

And as I mentioned in the lead, something finally gave a little. The opposition hasn't backed all of the way up, but they moved an inch- which is all that was needed for the clarifying questions to begin.

I will repeat.  

Saying that there is nothing we CAN do doesn't actually go to the extreme that Jeb Bush went when he said that there is nothing we SHOULD do about this, insinuating that doing something could make for more problems.

If you are among the Jeb crowd that says doing something will make things worse, then I won't try hard to persuade you of anything since you will probably be working hard to insure that nothing does get done, and your gun stays at your hip and not just hidden in your sock, back or glove box.

Those of you who've backed up an inch from Jeb and them, but still believe strongly that we SHOULD do nothing, are now more apt to say, there's nothing we CAN do to fix this problem, basically conceding that you are not personally hopeful for the potential of mankind to address its issues, or to collectively work together- or both.

Ye who are downtrodden, despondent and doubtful that anything CAN be done about this- even though statistics in other civilized countries contradicts this point- have taken a posture that demands I ask the really important question that I've been leading up to all along, and here it goes.

If you simply don't believe anything CAN be done, can you get the heck out of the way and allow the rest of us to deliberate and decide on a direction of hope that doesn't include sending our kids off to school complete with directions on how to play dead or pull off a head shot (domestic terrorist wear body armor) in the event of a mass shooting?

Stuff does happen Jeb, but when that stuff disrupts the sanctity of our schools and the kids that fill them, stuff grows to become more than just stuff.  This is a nasty case of  mold which grows like all mold- whenever and wherever there is darkness. Teaching our teachers and students to pull off a head shot under stress alongside Common Core math (I repeat, domestic terrorist wear body armor) is not exactly shining a light.

Do we only hear our athletes when they are explaining away
a crime or a misdeed?  Our answer is not as far as it seems.

Even the smallest bit of light that we occasionally shine on this thing has all but isolated 20 something white males into a corner that finds them  uncomfortable and highly agitated as a particular subset of American society. Whether angry white men who don't believe in mental health assistance are breeding angry white boys who kill us is somewhat of a simplistic question. But maybe the answer to most thing sits so simply close to our faces that WE often miss it.

http://thebrandonmarshall.com/landscape.html

The problem with Women's Liberation is women didn't have the problem in the first place.

Maybe the real need for the Women's Movement was the presence of mentally ill macho men who should have been a key part of the focus of women's equality all along?

Men don't talk about mental illness and are not naturally pre-disposed to share their pain  and weakness.  The unfortunate aspect of any person who lives too long without being able to properly vent themselves is that they are always on the edge of screaming out loud, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.

Some men scream through misogyny or date rape drugs even though you are Bill Cosby and shouldn't need drugs to get sex, while others play video games and troll people a lot.

These murderous acts of terror are a different kind of scream from young men in pain, yet we keep hearing them yell through the mouths of the other victims that they include in their deadly acts.

The killers, like it or not, are our kids too, and thus our problem too.  Much like the Women's Movement might have created more angry women than it did sensitive men, there is a potential to do too much of what feels like the right thing and not exactly fix the problem.

Sure we can address the data that says 4.4% of the world should never possess close to half of the world's guns. But at the end of the day, if we spend more time on the guns that need people to make, want and use them instead of the broken people who keep wanting and eventually using guns, then the gun folks will win an argument that they won't even be a part of anymore (since I just dismissed them all), as more deranged, 20 something, probably white boys, kill a bunch of people with a few bombs (no guns) in the middle of a marathon in Boston.

Too late?

Sounds like the gun people already get to say they told US so.




 

Another Theater Shooting But With Only One Death

29 year old Vincente David Montano.

paranoid schizophrenia

29 year old Vincente David Montano

I was wiping my tears from the tragedy of the Emmanuel 9 including a few that I find myself shedding for the families that breed these menaces to our society when I heard that arraigning judge in South Carolina ask for sympathy and prayers for all of the families in this tragedy, including Roof's. I came eerily close to blogging the same sentiment of that insensitive judge who needed to understand that it was simply too soon, but I got saved by the outrage he had to endure all by himself.

While living with the pain of losing a loved one from a horrific murder is difficult, I often imagine to myself what it must be like to be the parents of the Columbine killers, Klebold and Harris, or Cho, the Virginia Tech terrorist.  These young men died along with those they killed leaving all of the questions of why to be cast at the people we expect to have those answers.

Their parents.

As a parent, I imagine myself in that position so that I might never find myself in that position, but what can a parent really do in the end.  If I think my young adult child needs to get some therapy for the same reason that we all need a little therapy- our parents- they are likely to blame me for the need and potentially move further from help because of my suggestion.  On both counts they would be correct because most of our adult problems stem from childhood issues that "good parents" are supposed to be able to curtail and us bad parents should be ashamed for even pointing out.

With the massive energy that I placed into the hopes and future of my children, I also invested a fair amount of time in the lives of other peoples children, and still do. At some point in the process of parenting I came to recognize that all children were limited by the weak links in their midst, so for both altruistic and selfish reasons, I work on the links too.  Will that be a catalyst for anger and resentment in my adult children that grows into displaced reactions when they are feeling unstable?  I remain prayerful for the best outcomes that a parent can dream of with each of my offspring, but I am also more and more cognizant of the immense necessity for prayer and the utter futility in hoping to track or navigate the lives of adult people.  Good or bad, most of our work really is completed by age 5 exactly like they say.

If my kids became unstable and wished to hurt themselves or (God forbid)others, I am hopeful that I would see the signs in time enough to do something about it.  On that issue I am glad that my kids are black women who lead the list of least likely to do domestic terrorism, yet I don't move to the seat of judgement when I think about the parents of  the kind of young adults who fit the likely profile for this kind of crime.

 In fact, my heart truly goes out to them all.  Fortunately, the  family of the most recent domestic theater terrorist only have to mourn the loss of their own family member and not the added guilt of the others who often get killed as well during these incidents.  Fortunately for this family, we can actually find sympathy or empathy right away for them instead of sticking a thermometer into public opinion to find that right moment to finally go there.

Of course, the low head count in this tragedy will make it even less of a story than the others are becoming since domestic terror is now a normal part of our life expectancy formulas, kind of like catching a virus that you don't take seriously and dying as a result.  Actually, domestic terror is exactly that virus that we don't take seriously until it kills us or someone dear to us.  Even then we tend to spend most of our energy on mourning the victims instead of delecately uncovering the root of the disease and offering support, understanding and maybe an antibiotic if you will. These families are victims of the crime along with the rest of humanity, but they are also sources for answers that need more love and tender interrogation than they ever tend to get.


The Gun Was Fake?!

With all of the accidental killing of black men, I can only
use this gun in my back yard...during the day time.  Did
they need to make it look so real?

Montano pursued his terror with a machete knife, pepper spray and an airsoft pellet pistol.
 Maybe he was one of the disturbed individuals who wasn't raised to be comfortable around guns and only got the nerve to buy a fake one (kind of like me) and we can actually credit these parents for his not having a real gun.  I've gotten really good at using my fake gun, unfortunately for the neighborhood squirrels, but I often wonder why it had to be so real looking for it to work well.  As a black man, I often think about painting the darn thing orange for my own safety, while I also wonder if we are so gun crazed that we even want our fake guns to appear real and our crazed folks to have the same access to real guns as the rest of us?

Lots of questions, so few answers. God bless the victims that were injured and terrorized and to the family of Montano.  At least this time we get to actually think about them and can avoid the  important conversation of reasonable gun restrictions for people who are unstable. That conversation never goes anywhere anyway.