Today's Gun Battle: The Reality Versus The Rhetoric

The reality of guns is simply not matching the rhetoric anymore.

The reality is that responsible users use guns responsibly, but fear ignites gun purchasing for purchasing sake and doesn't insure responsible ownership as an absolute necessity of ownership.

The reality is that gun lovers mostly blame the stupid gun owners and the criminals who use them (for obvious reasons) so as to misdirect the blame that was never pointed at them in the first place.

The reality is that 85% of gun owners actually agree with doing something reasonably different about gun ownership and background checks, but the rhetoric doesn't allow.

The rhetoric says that more guns out there is the best way to deal with the potential danger of the guns we already have out there.

The rhetoric says that only law abiding citizens will follow new restrictive laws and not the criminals.  I shake my head at the very notion of that idea since Webster's dictionary calls a criminal "one who disobeys the laws", which I would assume to include laws regarding gun ownership. By that reasoning, no law applies to the criminal element of society.

Can we at least get most of the criminal guns off of the street with some level of success that reduces street deaths by gunfire?  The Australian plan of offering a "hefty" buy back price to street criminals for those weapons would take some guns off of the street, but the means by which they got there in the first place has to be addressed as well.

Is The Gun Industry Supposed To 
Be Self Sustaining Like Farming?

Weapons in Mexico are almost exclusively created and purchased in the USA, and almost never under legal means.  So unlike weed-  which can be grown almost anywhere in the course of 100 days- weapons don't just grow out of the earth.  They are engineered, serial labeled, packaged and shipped under strict tracking for an end destination that isn't currently tracked very firmly at all.

Way too many liberal gun laws (Texas) allow firearms to be purchased under the darkness of night and lost into the growing world of firearms in America and South America. We know who created them and when, but can't always pinpoint who has them now.  And our laws currently say, that's okay.

If this one broken reality could be the only change that we make, we would have taken a major step forward. Unfortunately, the rhetoric works to maintain laws that say any person who owns a gun should have the right to sale that gun without hoop or hurdle, to whomever and whenever they please....because this is America. Most laws expect the purchaser to register that weapon under their name (like you do with a sale of a car), but nothing insures the step, allowing guns to get lost in the shuffle.

Suddenly, what seems like a reasonable idea gets lost in the swirl of fear and anger laced comebacks that are rooted in things that force you to peel back the onion skin even further to make sense of it all.

If you mention restricting mentally ill from the danger of themselves, the company line against that is a recognition that very few confirmed  (diagnosed) mentally ill folks have committed these crimes and the confirmed crazy but dealing with it folks don't want to be made a target of  our displaced frustration with senseless killings at the hands of just a few of their demented young brethren.

If you then switch the target of the argument onto assault weapons and weapons typically catered for environments of war, the crux of the true debate might finally reach the surface.

Most gun lovers have been convinced by the rhetoric that they need to uphold a Constitutional concern of the government moving to overtake the individual by taking away their guns first.  They are not focused on the reality that an entire block of neighbors who all have multiple AR-15's, wouldn't be able to hold back the military force that exists in today's America versus the single shot musket world that wrote the damn Constitution.

Words (rhetoric) are clearly powerful. Much more powerful than guns, yet they crumble in the face of reality.  Gun lobbyists are keeping their harvest  and production of guns ripe and fervent from season to season with distorted perceptions created by powerful rhetoric of fear.

Most gun owners who come to the end of the line with the reality of the 85% concession on background checks, will reticently draw the line back, but only a little bit with their well trained 'agree to disagree' rhetoric that goes: "if you don't want guns in your home, that's fine....just keep your hands off of mine".

Does that also include your bullets?  In California, a measure is moving forward to require background checks on the actual deadly parts of guns (bullets) instead of fighting the war with gun owners over the encasement of the bullets. California is not only chasing to deal with the access to ammunition, they are doing it using the same ballot initiative approach that brought medical marijuana to California. With technology available to uniquely assign bullets to the owner of a gun (microstamping), limiting access to death pellets is a reasonable next step towards addressing the reality of gun growth, the challenge of tracking gun deaths in America in the ongoing effort to solve crime and reduce gun deaths.

Direct Democracy?

Whilealso admitting to some drawbacks, California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom called laws that permit state ballot initiatives, Direct Democracy.  I personally call it the way in which America stops fearing its own government and finally recognizes our capacity to govern ourselves while modernizing our sacred Constitution for times like these.

Our voice is way too loud in this digital era for Congress to hold the will of the people hostage to the power of  rhetoric, generated by the gun lobby. Yes, over reach is always a risk during government intervention efforts. But not more risky than continuing to insist that doing nothing can possibly make something change.

 

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.




 

Katrina Reminds Us That Rising Tides Also Kill People

The recovery of New Orleans is clearly proving that rising tides do raise all boats- so long as you had a reliable one when those levies broke.

I've never been fond of celebrating or commemorating death and loss, but I understand that it's important to look back and determine where you've come from to understand where you are going.

Yes, republicans! Once again, the nation is engaging in another conversation about the lack of your concern for disadvantaged people in moments of crisis. Even before the smoke of the WDBJ7 killing had cleared, gun restriction proponents screamed foul... .......again, and cried for a fix.  

Was Valvano talking about a good day or
the essence of mental health?

The fix? 
We all should be crying for this FIX because its right before our eyes.

Coach Jim Valvano was really on to something when he declared that a full day means to think, to laugh and to cry.   The more I think about those words, they make me laugh and cry regularly.  I laugh at the struggle we endure to uncover solutions that lie at the tip of our nose, while I cry at the pain we experience from enduring life without solutions.  Whether you agree with what represents the fullness of a day, it is certainly mentally  healthy to think (rationally) to laugh (heartily) and to cry (from empathetic tears preferably) as often as you can.

MORE GUNS CAN FIX THIS PROBLEM?
(IS THAT A PROVEN THEORY?)

I'm not sure if anyone is giving the news a fair view or review, but the most recent story of vigilantism against terrorism is the fabulous story of those American boys in France.

If you didn't set out to be heroes then polo shirts and khaki's
are exactly the correct attire for being awarded.  Suits or uniforms
would make everyday folks forget their role in keeping us all safe from terror.
(read Robin Givhan's article on this subject)

Not one of these men had a gun in hand when they accomplished their victory over the man with all of the weapons.  The NRA and those who insist we must arm ourselves for the challenge before us have to recognize that George Zimmerman remains the poster child for this failed approach, and until someone- not in law enforcement or hired for security duties- pulls the trigger on terror, this peculiar theory remains just that, a theory.



The brutal, live recorded murder of the television journalist Alison Parker and her cameraman  Adam Ward has, once again, stretched the theoretical potential of terrors reach, adding to the imagination of the kind of people who mimic these types of behaviors.

If Dylann Roof indirectly pulled down that Confederate flag,  seeing Parker and Ward die this way should somehow begin the process of some reasonable gun restrictions.

Shouldn't it?

I will go down this road once again with my strong opinion on gun restrictions only because I can't let Andy Parker (Alison Parker's father) fight this fight alone.  He understands that each of US who really decides to get serious about this fight might need to arm ourselves and add to the gun industry in the short term just to prepare for the risk of fighting guns with words.

The fact that gun sales rise every time opponents fight too hard to limit them is a distorted behavior all by itself. The very inclination to reach for a gun with so little evidence of vigilantism's success is a sign of our own mental illness or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), probably caused by the unsettling violence of the world in which we now live.

 Regardless of which end of the lens you are viewing from, the story of mental illness offers enough  context clues for us to follow the pattern and at least lay down the first few blocks on the trail we should follow. How we ultimately fix this will be solved by collective resolve, stubborn resilience and powered by an agreement that we must do something to dig our way out of this mess, and it probably should begin where the soil is softest. 

How we impose restrictions on free American citizens just because they've shown signs of mental illness is a complex question with no easy answer, but so is democracy; so is the challenge of breaking down the powerful obstacle that political lobbyist have become towards fixing problems.


Nothing seems tougher than getting people to act for the greater good before a crisis hits, but ten years later, New Orleans used a corp of engineers and a brand new billion dollar levy system to finally repair the failed one.

Given the televised death of two local news figures and the impact its having on the media fraternity, can we now encourage one of those engineers and a few other really smart people to sit down with the research and the data and uncover the question:

Are more guns really the answer?
_____________________________________________________________________________

       Gun Deaths        Total deaths Homicide   Suicide Accident  Undetermined

    per 100,00 people   (combined)

United Kingdom	0.26 (2010)	0.05 (2010)	0.17 (2010)	0.01 (2010)	0.02 (2010)	Guns in the United Kingdom[67]
United States	10.64 (2013)	3.55 (2013)	6.70 (2013)	0.16 (2013)	0.09 (2013)	Guns in United States[68]

____________________________________________________________________________

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/2/214.full.pdf

What's more expensive than buying that gun is spending the money it will take to learn how to properly shoot it since a short little course will only do so much for you.  Eventually you have to pay to master the art of shooting, especially under stressful conditions, or you yourself become an accident waiting to happen and not the weapon of defense you intended.

As we start to get ahead of this problem, we might discover a value for both mental health care and free gun education for all of the mentally ill being bred in our violent society. instead of absorbing the cost of restoring those lives when environmental hazards move and clarify social divisions.

In reality, it was always going to cost too much and take too much time to fix the future of the poor families in New Orleans.  What I inspire in my children today might finally take root in my grandchildren or in their children because, before we become parents ourselves, most of us endure parenting rather than embrace it.

Stop Blaming Katrina

Katrina washed over one of America's greatest cities and uncovered what the folks in Louisiana wish we'd stop blaming on Katrina.

Stop blaming the revelation of a problem on the water that revealed it.  Children who live in areas with lots of death and violence grow to suffer mentally, creating a barrier between the good choices they would love to make and the hopelessness that makes it hard to remember why choices matter.

Katrina victims NEVER needed Governor Bobby Jindal to be a proponent of the frivolous lock up of  drug addicts and mentally ill people who only became more ill after the trauma they experienced; they needed mental health care to combine with that gumbo of resilience they brewed out of the remaining bits and pieces of  their storm tattered lives.

 Residents of New Orleans had seen plenty of storms and never failed to fix up and move on. In reality, the worst of Katrina mostly missed and should have left New Orleans in water up to their ankles.

If only those levies did not break.

This was and always will be a failure of infrastructure, one that we will likely repeat if congress continues to block the jobs bill that would fix bridges and roads and other weak areas of infrastructure that will also falter sooner or later, as will the excuses for why we waited to respond to this well known potential crisis.

New Orleans is a microcosm of an upcoming crisis.  Like our tattered roads and bridges, we have mistook standing for sturdy. The people of New Orleans are the reason for the success of this story, and with no great thanks to their resilience.  In fact, some residence feel that the appearance of sturdy resilience is often the excuse we use to avoid fixing the problems of roads and bridges or social disparity in New Orleans and across America.

Had the folks in New Orleans rolled over and coward themselves, would WE have been more aggressive with help?

Resilience is certainly the excuse we keep using for how WE the People are to endure another terror shooting, seeking to drown our lack of wisdom in a double dose of resilience.

Doesn't resilience mean I am enduring something abnormal?  When do WE stop applauding the resilience of New Orleans and start applauding our commitment to remove their need for it.

Fixing levies and economies is the easy part.  Mostly these take a lot of money and a little math.  Fixing disparity and terror caused by mental illness is tough because "How" is typically the start and end point of this conversation.

Republicans believe that no gun law would have stopped Vester Lee Flanagan from losing his mind and murdering Parker and Ward on camera that day. Its right to wonder how we can easily limit law abiding crazed people from getting and using guns; or how can we finally end this hurricane and remake New Orleans with both the flavor and spice from pre-Katrina?

These are real challenges, yet not tougher than the promise of democracy which could not have started before women had the right to vote (1920), and may never begin if voting restrictions persist and strong lobbyist keep controlling our power over reasonable change. 

Mental Illness Is a Sign Of The Times

Ironically, mental health care will provide the answers to fixing New Orleans as well since so many disadvantaged people also have histories littered with drugs and violence within the home and in their neighborhoods.  Violence begot violence, thus the only cure for the PTSD and mental instability that produces generations of bad decision makers is recognizing the signs of the time.  

5 years ago, the folks rescued on that train in France might have all died because none of us readily recognized this new revelation of mental illness and its schizophrenic effect on society as a whole.  Today we are more comfortably paranoid, yet no better at seeing the signs and symptoms of psychosis that produce terror, or social disparities teetering a broken levy away from disaster. 

New Orleans will always be uniquely hot, though it might not ever get back it's old spicy flavor.  Some folks are pleased with this change of recipe feeling that downtrodden places like the 9th Ward had been too bad a blemish on the community anyway, and fixing them too costly in more ways than one. 

Pain & Providence

Maybe we will laugh when we realize how crazy
we were before our mental health care initiative.

Ferguson was but a straw to the back of an old weary camel 

The founder of Black Lives Matter actually credits the Katrina crisis for inspiring this new camel currently carrying the burden of change. As we reminisce on the good, bad and ugly of Katrina, some have theorized that without Katrina, there would have probably been no Barack Obama who was a major beneficiary of post-Katrina anger that found its voice in the ballot box. 

Will the empathetic tears we are crying from the deaths of Parker and Ward be enough inspiration to get us thinking of a fix?  Some of us are hoping beyond hope that this is that moment for gun control and mental health care to converge and change America for the better.

No laughter.