My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freeman met on a shooting range in the 1940s. He, a tall, handsome, intelligent man and she, a drop-dead beauty of Norwegian descent. Damn those puns! They crop up everywhere, like shooters in malls and schoolyards. Violence even runs through our language--drop-dead gorgeous was my Aunt Ruth, and not only that:
Ruth (as I called her) was a dead-eye shot.
NRA members both, Freeman and Ruth married, settled down a few blocks from my parents' home, and got to work producing three handsome, strapping boys. The boys grew up as mini-sharpshooters, accompanying the folks to gun ranges and competitions, and taking part themselves.
Ruth, a crackshot, outshot all the women and quite a few of the men, often Freeman himself. In fact, she was so damned good she was Captain of the U.S. Women's Rifle Team. I will dig up a copy of her photo in the Washington Post, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
But Freeman and Ruth didn't just shoot guns. They loved to round dance--a sort of square dance--and Ruth's wide-skirted shimmering dresses and layers of petticoats billowed and swirled as my uncle twirled his Norwegian Annie Oakley around the room with others who shared their love for the dance. After she died, Ruth's son Don spoke at Arlington Cemetery where she was to be entombed, the space beside her reserved for her husband, who would receive his own ___-gun salute after his funeral in the little stone chapel in the midst of those green hills and endless white slabs of marble not too many years later. "My mother grew up in northern Michigan, the child of first-generation Norwegian Americans, and she loved to figure skate. As a boy, I'd watch her on the ice--" Don's voice cracked--"and I thought I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in my life."
Freeman had survived a stroke many years before, and they'd moved to Leisure World to make things easier for him. Ruth took care of him while he continued his passion since retiring from the United States General Accounting Office--genealogy. He'd traced my mother's line back to the 9th Century in some lines. The two of them traveled to Europe and Norway to scour court records and cemeteries for blood links to the past, and they learned that Ruth derived from early Norwegian nobility. Freeman typed complicated lines of family history on a manual typewriter with the two fingers still functional enough after the stroke to do so.
They traveled, they danced, they researched, they visited and entertained their family, they went on Caribbean cruises with my parents during which the fine dining and dancing never stopped--they were, in short, very well-rounded (not to pun their form of dancing) human beings who happened to enjoy guns but didn't make them the end-all and be-all of their existence.
Yes, Ruth and Freeman were passionate about their guns--even a bit zealous. Mom, the died-in-the-wool liberal, challenged her older brother about his NRA membership at a time when the association had far less influence on the everyday reality of every U.S. citizen, as it now does. Mom saw through the propaganda even back then.
If these two fine human beings still walked the earth, they would today weep with me as they witness the ever-increasing body count within the shores of the so-called land of the free. We are no longer free. We are prey. We are zoo animals locked up and plugged in to our "opium of the masses," our screens while the thugs unwilling to see how their desire for unfettered access to guns is killing innocent adults and children and terrorizing their fellow citizens in no less an abhorrent manner than any terrorist group anywhere. We dare not go outside for fear of the random shooter, currently supported by the "gutless bastards" who pass the laws and cash the checks paid to them by the NRA and other lobbies working to, too ironic for gun nuts to understand, take over this land with their tyrannical views.
Today I read some of the drivel that tried to pass as intelligent discussion on sites hosting the wrenching video of the tortured father of Chris Martinez, who was gunned down in a convenience store by another young man pissed off because he couldn't get laid. Okay, that's what he said, but we understand the problems went far deeper. So, who can stop a mentally unstable kid from slaughtering a bunch of other people? Or anyone mentally unstable, which is a given anytime a human being pulls out a weapon and begins shooting unless he or she happens to be in a war or, I'll even say, defending their own homes and families from invaders.
I'm not an absolutist. In fact, one of my former honeys is probably one of those wanting to strap on his bandolier and brandish his AK-47 (actually, it was a newer model, but I don't remember which one) while strolling into his local 7-11 to buy OREOs. I can't believe I stayed with the guy when, on our second date, he pulled out a pistol and shot a feral cat on his doorstep. I mean, I'm a serious animal lover, and that sickened me--but I was madly in lust and willing to close my eyes to the man's faults until almost four years later when I couldn't bear it any longer. (Another damned pun.)
Thinking of Aunt Ruth, I enjoyed target practice with Steve's arsenal, from a little .22 pistol and rifle, a stairway of ever increasing calibers, all that way to said automatic weapon. I even shot that thing toward a target, and we were way the heck out in the woods and the target lay against an embankment. Still--shooting AK47s out a porch window not far from a road and woods that might harbor hikers at any moment probably wasn't the safest idea in the world.
Steve talked me into buying a Makharov 380 after he'd purchased one at the two or three local gun stores we frequented. Shooting was fun. I was a good shot. I went hunting with Steve once, loving the quiet and the woods and the peace and praying the whole time we wouldn't see a deer, and thankfully we didn't. But I cooked plenty of the various carcasses he'd bring home. Probably the best turkey I ever ate was one he'd shot from his window, one breast removed because it was full of shot but the rest more succulent than a market bird, despite common assertions that the opposite is the norm. (I did NOT condone that illegal behavior, but when presented with a dead turkey I didn't want its sacrifice to be totally in vain.)
Steve and his buddies spent many a weekend shooting clay pigeons, and I came along and left with a big-ass bruise on my shoulder to prove I'd fired the shotgun. Pretty darned good at it, too--though I can't claim this was due to a blood affinity with my Aunt Ruth; it was Freeman whose blood and mine came from the same Scottish, Irish, Welsh, English, and a sprinkling of French progenitors.
Freeman's and my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and every war since. Freeman spent December 9, 1945, dodging Japanese bombs raining down on Pearl Harbor, and two of my three cousins, their kids, and their grandkids owe their lives to Freeman's survival that day in infamy.
My surname, the legacy of my father and all those who came before him, is one that came to America in the 1600s with Calvert Catholics who settled in St. Mary's County, Maryland. We owned land and slaves--if humans can truly be owned, and I don't think they can--they can be detained, tortured, humiliated, and subjected to horrors few, if any, of the persons reading these words can even imagine, but no human owns another. Thankfully, our holdings were relatively small, and we had very few of these involuntarily detained workers, and I hope my ancestors treated them with as much kindness as is possible in such abhorrent circumstances.
But no matter how early my blood spilled on this continent, every U.S. citizen is equal to me no matter how recently introduced to this "sweet land of liberty."
Where's the liberty when we can no longer walk out of our homes without fear of being mowed down by zealots more attached to a machine originally and continually designed and manufactured with the express purpose of killing? Aren't these in-your-face gun toters the same fellow citizens who protested abortion based on the sanctity of life?
Where's the sanctity of life in the United States? It's not in our schools, not even the Amish ones. It's not in our neighborhoods, whether they are blighted ghettoes or gated communities, as Trevon Martin learned before his young life was stolen by a man more interested in playing cop like a kindergartner with a bad attitude than in the right of another human being to breathe and walk our so-called "free" streets.
Where's the sanctity of life in stand your ground? Obviously, proponents of this Wild, Wild West policy take the view that their own lives matter more than does that of another human being. They undoubtedly also call themselves Christian, in direct opposition to what their Son of God taught?
Oh, sure, these nuts can kill without guns. They can use knives, or fists, or baseball bats, or poison, or strangulation, or vehicular homicide--you name it; there's a way to die from it at the hands of others.
And, yes, of course, Pandora has opened the box, the genie is out of the bottle--we will never remove the guns, bullets, and paranoia flooding this once proud, progressive nation. The age of innocence is over. Our lives mean nothing, not one mean dime, to those who treasure their obsessive, narcissistic views of their personal magnificence and the power they feel with their fingers on a trigger. "Happiness is a warm gun," John Lennon famously sang--was it irony or fate or merely the petty need of a disaffected, angry, self-absorbed man to get his face in the media that led to John's lying dead of a gunshot wound from someone who should never have had legal access to guns?
So what? the gun nuts say. You can get a gun anywhere in this country. You don't need to register and wait if that's the law--you can find a criminal and buy a gun or twelve.
Spurious argument, that. If it's so easy, why are they so freaked out that they're buying out ammo from WalMart? Why are they so paranoid the government and those of us who reasonably expect gun regulation want to make it harder, not easier, to get a gun in America if it's so damned easy in the first place? Yes, they can get a gun, but we don't have to hand it to them, to make their malevolent actions any easier for them, to say to the world that we, as a society, care more for guns than the lives of innocents.
So, schoolchildren, we'd rather see you mowed down than expect a person purchasing a lethal weapon to go through an application process and a short waiting period while his or her background is examined. Invasion of privacy? No, it's not. No one's doing anything except what is reasonable given your desire for said lethal weapon, Gun Buyer. I'm not even against guns; I bought one myself years ago (and eventually gave it away) and am a damned good shot--at targets and clay pigeons, though never at anything with breath and blood.
We force each other to take written and practical tests in driving a car before we permit ourselves out on the roads where we become a flying missile. Does that mean every person who gets behind the wheel of a car has gone through that process? Of course not. So let's just stop requiring anyone to do it, since a few get away with it. A car is a lethal weapon and will kill just as dead as a gun, right? So what's the difference? The one difference is that cars became tools not because they killed others but because they got us from point A to point B. It's tragic that humans must die for us to have that utility--but each one of us tacitly acknowledges that risk when we get into a car, whether driving or not (other than our minor children or others who cannot decide for themselves due to lack of maturity or mental ability to make a sound choice).
The same can't be said of guns, of course. Target shooting is great fun, and I'm proud of my aunt's uncanny eye--but the sport only exists because of the manufacture of guns as powerful weapons. Yet we're fine with learner's permits and driving tests because it makes simple sense, even though the number of deaths in road accidents trails far behind those from gun violence in this nation since _____. [cite]
So moved, so wrenched was I today by the emotion and rational argument made by Richard Martinez that I finally realize I must stand my ground on this issue.
Will gun regulation solve the problem of paranoia, narcissism, blood lust, and violence in this land of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty and--over the past twenty-five years--the deepening red stain of our own children's blood?
Of course not. The gun nuts think only in black and white.
Nothing can solve this problem now, but we can address it.
If gun regulation saves one child's life, one mother's life, one life that had no reason to end except for the madness of another human being with a societally condoned lethal weapon in his or her power, then let it be. If it saves one human being, one man, woman, teen, child, or infant from another human being with a mind so weak, so stripped of the slightest regard for the sanctity of any life other than his or her own (despite what can only be deep self-hatred fueling these bullets), let it be.
How do I know this person wielding a gun in a public square both hates and worships him or herself? How do I know this person has lost touch with the consensual reality that allows a society to survive? And how do I know there's an element of self-hate in every gun nut in this country, compounded by a layer of self-aggrandizement and a toddler-like demand for everything to be his or her way?
Because you'd have to be a soulless bastard to prefer the cold, hard steel of a gun against your skin over the recognition of our common humanity and the sanctity of life. You'd have to be a soulless bastard to condone carrying weapons in public places knowing these terrify others sharing that public space. And you'd have to be paranoid and irrational to believe, somehow, that by bullying and terrorizing others no less than any terrorist anywhere, you are upholding our once-great nation's ideals.
You are not.
You are helping the NRA and its mega-rich supporters destroy this nation, gun by gun, bullet by bullet, because they long ago lost any iota of respect for the sanctity of life or our nation's so-called democracy. You cry out like the paranoids you are. You cry out like the selfish toddlers you are. We can't build a strong nation with your voices being the ones our legislators kowtow to. Good-bye, Great Experiment. You're now in the hands of whiny little babes in arms.
Ruth (as I called her) was a dead-eye shot.
NRA members both, Freeman and Ruth married, settled down a few blocks from my parents' home, and got to work producing three handsome, strapping boys. The boys grew up as mini-sharpshooters, accompanying the folks to gun ranges and competitions, and taking part themselves.
Ruth, a crackshot, outshot all the women and quite a few of the men, often Freeman himself. In fact, she was so damned good she was Captain of the U.S. Women's Rifle Team. I will dig up a copy of her photo in the Washington Post, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
But Freeman and Ruth didn't just shoot guns. They loved to round dance--a sort of square dance--and Ruth's wide-skirted shimmering dresses and layers of petticoats billowed and swirled as my uncle twirled his Norwegian Annie Oakley around the room with others who shared their love for the dance. After she died, Ruth's son Don spoke at Arlington Cemetery where she was to be entombed, the space beside her reserved for her husband, who would receive his own ___-gun salute after his funeral in the little stone chapel in the midst of those green hills and endless white slabs of marble not too many years later. "My mother grew up in northern Michigan, the child of first-generation Norwegian Americans, and she loved to figure skate. As a boy, I'd watch her on the ice--" Don's voice cracked--"and I thought I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in my life."
Freeman had survived a stroke many years before, and they'd moved to Leisure World to make things easier for him. Ruth took care of him while he continued his passion since retiring from the United States General Accounting Office--genealogy. He'd traced my mother's line back to the 9th Century in some lines. The two of them traveled to Europe and Norway to scour court records and cemeteries for blood links to the past, and they learned that Ruth derived from early Norwegian nobility. Freeman typed complicated lines of family history on a manual typewriter with the two fingers still functional enough after the stroke to do so.
They traveled, they danced, they researched, they visited and entertained their family, they went on Caribbean cruises with my parents during which the fine dining and dancing never stopped--they were, in short, very well-rounded (not to pun their form of dancing) human beings who happened to enjoy guns but didn't make them the end-all and be-all of their existence.
Yes, Ruth and Freeman were passionate about their guns--even a bit zealous. Mom, the died-in-the-wool liberal, challenged her older brother about his NRA membership at a time when the association had far less influence on the everyday reality of every U.S. citizen, as it now does. Mom saw through the propaganda even back then.
If these two fine human beings still walked the earth, they would today weep with me as they witness the ever-increasing body count within the shores of the so-called land of the free. We are no longer free. We are prey. We are zoo animals locked up and plugged in to our "opium of the masses," our screens while the thugs unwilling to see how their desire for unfettered access to guns is killing innocent adults and children and terrorizing their fellow citizens in no less an abhorrent manner than any terrorist group anywhere. We dare not go outside for fear of the random shooter, currently supported by the "gutless bastards" who pass the laws and cash the checks paid to them by the NRA and other lobbies working to, too ironic for gun nuts to understand, take over this land with their tyrannical views.
Today I read some of the drivel that tried to pass as intelligent discussion on sites hosting the wrenching video of the tortured father of Chris Martinez, who was gunned down in a convenience store by another young man pissed off because he couldn't get laid. Okay, that's what he said, but we understand the problems went far deeper. So, who can stop a mentally unstable kid from slaughtering a bunch of other people? Or anyone mentally unstable, which is a given anytime a human being pulls out a weapon and begins shooting unless he or she happens to be in a war or, I'll even say, defending their own homes and families from invaders.
 |
| Richard Martinez, father of gun victim Chris Martinez |
I'm not an absolutist. In fact, one of my former honeys is probably one of those wanting to strap on his bandolier and brandish his AK-47 (actually, it was a newer model, but I don't remember which one) while strolling into his local 7-11 to buy OREOs. I can't believe I stayed with the guy when, on our second date, he pulled out a pistol and shot a feral cat on his doorstep. I mean, I'm a serious animal lover, and that sickened me--but I was madly in lust and willing to close my eyes to the man's faults until almost four years later when I couldn't bear it any longer. (Another damned pun.)
Thinking of Aunt Ruth, I enjoyed target practice with Steve's arsenal, from a little .22 pistol and rifle, a stairway of ever increasing calibers, all that way to said automatic weapon. I even shot that thing toward a target, and we were way the heck out in the woods and the target lay against an embankment. Still--shooting AK47s out a porch window not far from a road and woods that might harbor hikers at any moment probably wasn't the safest idea in the world.
Steve talked me into buying a Makharov 380 after he'd purchased one at the two or three local gun stores we frequented. Shooting was fun. I was a good shot. I went hunting with Steve once, loving the quiet and the woods and the peace and praying the whole time we wouldn't see a deer, and thankfully we didn't. But I cooked plenty of the various carcasses he'd bring home. Probably the best turkey I ever ate was one he'd shot from his window, one breast removed because it was full of shot but the rest more succulent than a market bird, despite common assertions that the opposite is the norm. (I did NOT condone that illegal behavior, but when presented with a dead turkey I didn't want its sacrifice to be totally in vain.)
Steve and his buddies spent many a weekend shooting clay pigeons, and I came along and left with a big-ass bruise on my shoulder to prove I'd fired the shotgun. Pretty darned good at it, too--though I can't claim this was due to a blood affinity with my Aunt Ruth; it was Freeman whose blood and mine came from the same Scottish, Irish, Welsh, English, and a sprinkling of French progenitors.
Freeman's and my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and every war since. Freeman spent December 9, 1945, dodging Japanese bombs raining down on Pearl Harbor, and two of my three cousins, their kids, and their grandkids owe their lives to Freeman's survival that day in infamy.
My surname, the legacy of my father and all those who came before him, is one that came to America in the 1600s with Calvert Catholics who settled in St. Mary's County, Maryland. We owned land and slaves--if humans can truly be owned, and I don't think they can--they can be detained, tortured, humiliated, and subjected to horrors few, if any, of the persons reading these words can even imagine, but no human owns another. Thankfully, our holdings were relatively small, and we had very few of these involuntarily detained workers, and I hope my ancestors treated them with as much kindness as is possible in such abhorrent circumstances.
But no matter how early my blood spilled on this continent, every U.S. citizen is equal to me no matter how recently introduced to this "sweet land of liberty."
Where's the liberty when we can no longer walk out of our homes without fear of being mowed down by zealots more attached to a machine originally and continually designed and manufactured with the express purpose of killing? Aren't these in-your-face gun toters the same fellow citizens who protested abortion based on the sanctity of life?
Where's the sanctity of life in the United States? It's not in our schools, not even the Amish ones. It's not in our neighborhoods, whether they are blighted ghettoes or gated communities, as Trevon Martin learned before his young life was stolen by a man more interested in playing cop like a kindergartner with a bad attitude than in the right of another human being to breathe and walk our so-called "free" streets.
Where's the sanctity of life in stand your ground? Obviously, proponents of this Wild, Wild West policy take the view that their own lives matter more than does that of another human being. They undoubtedly also call themselves Christian, in direct opposition to what their Son of God taught?
Oh, sure, these nuts can kill without guns. They can use knives, or fists, or baseball bats, or poison, or strangulation, or vehicular homicide--you name it; there's a way to die from it at the hands of others.
And, yes, of course, Pandora has opened the box, the genie is out of the bottle--we will never remove the guns, bullets, and paranoia flooding this once proud, progressive nation. The age of innocence is over. Our lives mean nothing, not one mean dime, to those who treasure their obsessive, narcissistic views of their personal magnificence and the power they feel with their fingers on a trigger. "Happiness is a warm gun," John Lennon famously sang--was it irony or fate or merely the petty need of a disaffected, angry, self-absorbed man to get his face in the media that led to John's lying dead of a gunshot wound from someone who should never have had legal access to guns?
So what? the gun nuts say. You can get a gun anywhere in this country. You don't need to register and wait if that's the law--you can find a criminal and buy a gun or twelve.
Spurious argument, that. If it's so easy, why are they so freaked out that they're buying out ammo from WalMart? Why are they so paranoid the government and those of us who reasonably expect gun regulation want to make it harder, not easier, to get a gun in America if it's so damned easy in the first place? Yes, they can get a gun, but we don't have to hand it to them, to make their malevolent actions any easier for them, to say to the world that we, as a society, care more for guns than the lives of innocents.
So, schoolchildren, we'd rather see you mowed down than expect a person purchasing a lethal weapon to go through an application process and a short waiting period while his or her background is examined. Invasion of privacy? No, it's not. No one's doing anything except what is reasonable given your desire for said lethal weapon, Gun Buyer. I'm not even against guns; I bought one myself years ago (and eventually gave it away) and am a damned good shot--at targets and clay pigeons, though never at anything with breath and blood.
We force each other to take written and practical tests in driving a car before we permit ourselves out on the roads where we become a flying missile. Does that mean every person who gets behind the wheel of a car has gone through that process? Of course not. So let's just stop requiring anyone to do it, since a few get away with it. A car is a lethal weapon and will kill just as dead as a gun, right? So what's the difference? The one difference is that cars became tools not because they killed others but because they got us from point A to point B. It's tragic that humans must die for us to have that utility--but each one of us tacitly acknowledges that risk when we get into a car, whether driving or not (other than our minor children or others who cannot decide for themselves due to lack of maturity or mental ability to make a sound choice).
The same can't be said of guns, of course. Target shooting is great fun, and I'm proud of my aunt's uncanny eye--but the sport only exists because of the manufacture of guns as powerful weapons. Yet we're fine with learner's permits and driving tests because it makes simple sense, even though the number of deaths in road accidents trails far behind those from gun violence in this nation since _____. [cite]
So moved, so wrenched was I today by the emotion and rational argument made by Richard Martinez that I finally realize I must stand my ground on this issue.
Will gun regulation solve the problem of paranoia, narcissism, blood lust, and violence in this land of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty and--over the past twenty-five years--the deepening red stain of our own children's blood?
Of course not. The gun nuts think only in black and white.
Nothing can solve this problem now, but we can address it.
If gun regulation saves one child's life, one mother's life, one life that had no reason to end except for the madness of another human being with a societally condoned lethal weapon in his or her power, then let it be. If it saves one human being, one man, woman, teen, child, or infant from another human being with a mind so weak, so stripped of the slightest regard for the sanctity of any life other than his or her own (despite what can only be deep self-hatred fueling these bullets), let it be.
How do I know this person wielding a gun in a public square both hates and worships him or herself? How do I know this person has lost touch with the consensual reality that allows a society to survive? And how do I know there's an element of self-hate in every gun nut in this country, compounded by a layer of self-aggrandizement and a toddler-like demand for everything to be his or her way?
Because you'd have to be a soulless bastard to prefer the cold, hard steel of a gun against your skin over the recognition of our common humanity and the sanctity of life. You'd have to be a soulless bastard to condone carrying weapons in public places knowing these terrify others sharing that public space. And you'd have to be paranoid and irrational to believe, somehow, that by bullying and terrorizing others no less than any terrorist anywhere, you are upholding our once-great nation's ideals.
You are not.
You are helping the NRA and its mega-rich supporters destroy this nation, gun by gun, bullet by bullet, because they long ago lost any iota of respect for the sanctity of life or our nation's so-called democracy. You cry out like the paranoids you are. You cry out like the selfish toddlers you are. We can't build a strong nation with your voices being the ones our legislators kowtow to. Good-bye, Great Experiment. You're now in the hands of whiny little babes in arms.
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