Giving Up The Gun, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

December 5, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment

Stop it.  Just stop it.

I don’t know if I can stand to hear about one more act of terrorism.  They happen around the world, all too often.

I can understand that they occur in war-zones (although those are awful).  What I can’t understand is why they happen so often in the United States.   We like to say we’re the greatest country in the world.  I think that’s a pretty difficult statement to defend when we seem determined to randomly wipe each other out.

If I ruled the galaxy and all physics was dependent on my whim, and didn’t have to deal with any of those pesky laws and democratic processes, there wouldn’t be any guns.  Bombs wouldn’t exist either.  There would only be knives because sometimes, we have to cut things like meat and bread and rope.  Bows and arrows can stay for people who use them to hunt, but only for food, not sport or crime.  Rocks, sticks, lasers and other things that can be used to harm other humans would be strictly limited, and the penalties for using them in violent ways would be prohibitive.

That isn’t going to happen.  I get it.  There’s a Constitution, and there are other people with opinions, and they exist in the world.

Even so, we have to do something.  We have to get together to stop this entirely random violence that happens just about every day in the United States.  We should end the ban on gun violence research.  We should stop demonizing the people who commit these hideous crimes (They’re fanatical Muslims!  They’re right-wing pro-lifers!  They’re mentally ill!) because that just lets us off the hook.  It’s easier to assign a mass shooter a slot than to find out what spurs him/her on and working together to stop it.

Certainly, the easiest thing to do is to improve our ability to do effective background checks.  It’s easier to buy a gun in this country than it is to register to vote.  Both rights are protected by the Constitution, but only one has a well-financed lobbying interest protecting it, bribing elected officials on its behalf, and demonizing anyone who questions even a little bit.

It should be more difficult to get a gun license than a drivers license.  You can do a lot of damage with a car, but a car was made to be transportation, not destruction.  The only purpose of a gun is to shoot bullets.

After we deal with the availability of guns, we can perhaps address the emotions behind their misuse.  Too many of us would rather shoot than argue.  Too many of us think that we each know the One True Answer, and therefore everybody else is wrong wrong wrong.  It isn’t much of a leap to go from thinking someone is wrong to thinking that person deserves to die.  From there, it’s easy enough to simply think that killing is fun.

I think this next generation is going to have a lot of problems with people who don’t think the lives of others are worth much.  I see so many parents and babysitters who don’t even look at their kids, who spend playtime in the park absorbed in their cellphones instead of pushing a swing.  Family meals are silent, text-driven affairs.  Maybe those kids get a trophy for participating (and, personally, I don’t think that’s so horrible), but they don’t get to bask in the attention of their parents.  They don’t get to feel like their lives matter.

Really, it would be so much easier if I could run things.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, can barely keep her refrigerator stocked with seltzer, much less run a universe.