Gun Control


Today I was thinking about the violence in Iraq and the violence in America. We have suicide bombers, too. The bombs are the same thing, a bunch of metal objects that explode outward to inflict random and maximum damage. The bombs in Iraq shoot all the bullets simultaneously while ours shoot off in succession but they don't stop coming. Their bombers are all climax. Our bombers like to take their time and build it up before they climax by blowing their own brains out. Kill the brain, kill the ghoul.

Around the country there are a lot of people being shot this week, and our's is the only modern nation state where that is the case. We're the ones who think its okay to own weapons that fire as fast as you can point at somebody else so that you can basically take out a family reunion in one sweep. But even before the blood dried at Virginia Tech, there was a proclamation of administration support for the right to bear arms.

Nobody I know is against the right to bear arms or even the right to arm bears, though that brings to mind a grizzly scene. Yesterday Jeff told me he bought a single action revolver based on the Colt 45 design, but one with interchangeable cylinders so you can use standard .22s or magnums. He paid about five hundred for it and was relating the chilly reception his wife had for the receipt when she saw it. I told him I wish he'd said something, because I've got the same pistol and I don't think it's been out shooting for ten years. I would've given it to him.

When I was at ASU it wasn't so crowded in the desert, and I would go out on the Indian Reservation south of town and find a wash to walk down. I held my revolver at my side and when I saw something I wanted to shoot I'd shoot from the hip. With practice I got pretty good at it. The last time my dad and I were shooting I said I was going to try shooting from the hip and he said, "You can't hit anything that way." When I did it visibly annoyed him. My personal association with guns is mostly positive, though I've had a couple of harrowing experiences on the wrong side of one. Once it was road rage and once it was being with the wrong woman at the wrong time.

I don't care about giving up my pistol, but I'd feel really bad for Jeff. On the other hand, if handguns were confined to shooting ranges somebody would open a range on a few hundred acres where I could get back to walking a dry wash and practicing again, this time with pop up targets of terrorists.

If I want something to protect the home it won't be a handgun, but a shotgun. Shooting at somebody you have to hit probably makes you adrenalin buzzed and it's a good idea to bet the spread. I also know that if I keep a loaded gun around the most likely scenario is that somebody I love will end up being shot in some bizarre accident, and it will ricochet into my heart forever. I know that scene in the head where some crazy bastard rushes me and I put one right between his eyes. So just in case that might happen everybody keeps a loaded gun.

That's understandable. We all want to avoid a powerless situation. If you've got all these people with guns, some of them are going to be aggressive and lawless, and either the police departments and courts and prisons deal with them or they have to be dealt with at the grass roots level. But mostly they are going to be friends and relatives who drink too much and get aggressive and lawless with each other, and things escalate into that tragic moment when the shooter comes back from his power inflation, and realizes what his shadow did while he was at the movies.

I suspect that most often what happens is that the projection leaves, like the image of beast left in Beauty and the Beast, and the spell breaks to reveal the next door neighbor. The killer's spell breaks simultaneously and he realizes he's got hair on the the bottoms of his feet .

The person standing over the body may not be the same person who pulled the trigger in anger.

It's funny how that works. You think you're just one thing, and then the circumstances shift and you shift with them. Like when you're feeling aggressive and angry with what you think is a fag in a red dress and your smarter brother whispers in your ear, "Watch out; that's The Bishop."

You suddenly discover your more genial nature. Power is always relative.

This is normal and acceptable at the dog park. Mostly the dogs like to play fetch the ball or have races and wrestle. Sometimes you get a mean dog and it kills somebody's pet terrier while the owner says, "He's never done anything like that before. It's not like him."

"But that's what he's bred for, so it's not unlike him, is it?"

What if we could develop special guns for dogs? That would skew the natural dynamic. A terrier could take out a pit bull from fifty yards out. "Come on, sweetheart." He watches the killing machine screaming toward him to rip his throat out but, but the pit is headed down laser lane. "Adios, tubby." The terrier squeezes one off as the laser points to the dog heart. The pit doesn't even notice because he's messed up on crystal, but he drops from blood loss ten feet in front of the shooter, who now has to take a dump.

"Why'd you do it, Rusty?"

"Cause I was tired of rolling over for that asshole."

The next thing you know the dog park is ruled by the terrierists but labs are buying arms on the black market.

The problem is that if we compare ourselves to civilized nations, we have to admit we'll never have a civilized country until we restrict gun ownership. If you are a delusional freak you can't have guns unless you go to the delusional freaks' specialty range and check the gun back in when you finish shooting at the targets in the effigies of your colleagues at the post office.

"Get it out of your system, son?"

"I'd as soon kill you as look at you."

"That's why I'm behind the bullet proof glass and the boys in the tower have you in the scopes, Billy."

I know that I'm not going to be standing up to the DEA, much less this military, with a .22 pistol or double barreled shotgun. The only effective weapon I have is my power as a citizen to get people out of power whom I have reason to fear. And I have to be bright enough to recognize that the government isn't doing me a favor by championing my right to have any guns I want. They are gaining my complicity in their own weapons game, which involves nuclear warheads and hellfire missiles that take out anybody they decide to take out.

The tactic is to insist that control of any weapon a man can lift without a block and lever will have a domino effect, like the fall of Vietnam turned the world over to communism, and so is a threat to ownership of hunting weapons. In this way, the NRA is supporting a culture of violence not just in America, but around the world.

Our Masters of War like those "shock and awe" fireworks displays on television, while they manipulate the public perception of the carnage on the ground with propaganda and PR. Reminds me of Bush flying over New Orleans and looking down at the refugees on the rooftops.

"Look there, Andy, they's waving at me."

"Yes sir."

"Who says the Negroes don't like Republicans?"

"African Americans, sir."

"Well, hell, who cares what foreigners are saying about us anyway?"

If the NRA is supporting the proliferation of weapons that are for "sport," and not for hunting, and always warning that there's some conspiracy on the left to take disarm the public, then what "sport" are they talking about?

Is it "sport" when a couple of guys in body armor threaten an entire police department because they have superior firepower? And is it "sport" when somebody gets so alienated that he gets some semi-automatic pistols and takes out 32 people on a university campus? That's the "sport" these weapons are made for. They're no good for birds or for elk or deer. Some of the hunters I know use rifles but some bow hunt because it's a sport, after all, not a massacre. I don't personally know anybody who machine guns the wildlife.

The NRA isn't protecting our right to own hunting rifles and shotguns, they're providing political protection for the weapons industry. And when the killing comes down, what will they say? In Bagdad they'll say, "Maybe two hundred people were killed today, but why focus on that? Most of the people went about their day without incident."

They won't say that in Virginia. The President won't get up there behind a microphone and say, "While it's true that 32 people were gunned down by a nut job today, let's not forget that there were forty thousand people in Blacksburg who were not even fired on."

On the home front he will give condolences out of one side of his mouth, while out of the other side he assures the NRA that this will in no way affect his support for the the mass distribution of high capacity semi automatic weapons.

A couple of hunters in the no spin zone nod their heads in approval.

"They'd like to take our guns."

"If they get mine they'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers."

"That arthritis bad again?"

Nobody is targeting ownership of hunting rifles or shotguns with limited capacity magazines. You can still randomly kill some of the neighbors but you have to make choices and they have to have a sporting chance to make it over the back fence.

The thing is that you don't get to kill everybody.

That's just greedy.

Posted: Thu - April 19, 2007 at 07:07 PM