Guns (Kindle Single) (3 page)

I have nothing against gun owners, sport shooters, or
hunters (as long as it’s varmints they’re after, or, in the case of bigger
game, they eat what they kill), but the weapons noted above are not used to
shoot skeet or kill deer. If you used a Bushmaster on a deer in anything but
single-shot mode, you’d turn the poor thing into hair-covered meatloaf.
Semi-automatics have only two purposes. One is so owners can take them to the
shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire
and the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use —
their
only
other use — is to kill people.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, gun advocates have
to ask themselves if their zeal to protect even the outer limits of gun
ownership have anything to do with preserving the Second Amendment as a whole,
or if it’s just a stubborn desire to hold onto what they have, and to hell with
the collateral damage. If that’s the case, let me suggest that
fuck you,
Jack, I’m okay
is not a tenable position, morally speaking.

I read a jaw-dropping online defense of these weapons from a
California woman recently. Guns, she said, are just tools. Like spoons, she
said. Would you outlaw spoons simply because some people use them to eat too
much?

Lady, let’s see you try to kill twenty schoolkids with a
fucking
spoon
.

Guns are not tools — not unless you reverse a pistol and use
the butt to hammer in a nail. Guns are weapons. Autos and semi-autos are
weapons of mass destruction. When lunatics want to make war on the unarmed and
unprepared, these are the weapons they use. In most cases, they are bought
legally. These killing-machines are for sale on the Internet as I speak. The
real question is hackneyed, but I suppose it has to be asked: How many have to
die before we will give up these dangerous toys? Do the murders have to be in
the mall where you shop? In your own neighborhood? In your own family? One
hopes for a little more public spirit and citizenship than that, even in this
politically double-fucked country. A gun is not a bit like a spoon. A gun is
like a gun.

In January 2013, President Obama announced — to the
predictable howls of outrage from America’s right wing — twenty-three executive
orders and three major initiatives to help curb the spread of guns and stiffen
penalties for illegal use and possession. (The NRA’s response was a vile ad
suggesting that Obama’s daughters were receiving special treatment, as though a
terrorist attack on the Chief Executive’s family were not even a possibility …
don’t these guys watch shows like
Homeland
?) What it all boils down to
is a trio of reasonable measures to curb gun violence. I list them in ascending
order, from the one most likely to happen to the one least likely.

•
Comprehensive and universal background
checks
. This probably will happen, and not a moment too soon. For one
thing, it would entail a waiting period, and that alone might stop a number of
would-be mass killers. Remember that two school shooters, Dustin Pierce and
Michael Carneal, expressed incredulity at what they had done only moments
later. James Holmes, the movie theater shooter, was apprehended as he stood
beside his car, in a daze. Violent emotions (especially in teenagers like
Pierce, Carneal, and Loukaitis) are like spring tornadoes in the Midwest: their
departure is as sudden as their violent arrival. Given a chance to think, even
for 48 hours, would be enough to stop at least some of these guys. Not all —
Harris and Klebold planned for months, and only an act of God would have
stopped them — but some; the ones who look at what they’ve done and express disbelief
at how disastrously their lives have changed. As a corollary to these
background checks, there have to be stiff penalties for those who lie about
their pasts in order to obtain weapons, and the penalties have to be enforced. Not
just a slap on the wrist, either. We’re talking jail time here.

•
Ban the sale of clips and magazines
containing more than ten rounds
. I think that’s too many; to borrow the
title of an old sitcom, I believe eight is enough. But I’d happily accept ten.
It’s better than thirty. Or fifty. Or a hundred. I believe the NRA’s idea of
putting armed guards in schools is ridiculous — think of the last elderly,
truss-wearing crossing guard you saw — but suppose it happened? If I’m a
shooter with enough sanity left in my haunted brain to choose a high-capacity
weapon, I’m going to scope out the guards first, and they’re going to be the
first ones to go. But a shooter with only eight or ten rounds at his disposal
really might be taken down, if not by an elderly rent-a-cop, then by a brave teacher
or bystander. Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the Sandy Hook school, died
apparently in an effort to subdue Adam Lanza. If Lanza had been reloading after
shooting his way in, she might have succeeded. He was crazy, but he was also a
scrawny wisp of a kid. The Bushmaster was his equalizer, he had plenty of ammo
left, so he shot and killed Hochsprung before she could get to him. I wish with
all my heart that she had tackled him, beat the crazy little fuck’s head bloody
against the floor, and gotten a medal from the President on national TV. She
was too brave to die the way she did.

•
Ban the sale of assault weapons such as
the Bushmaster and the AR-15
. This is the one that probably won’t happen,
partly because of the NRA’s influence on a great many congressmen and senators,
but also because plenty of gun advocates cling to their semi-automatics the way
Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson clung to the shit that was killing them.
There are rationalizations but very little actual discourse on the subject of
banning assault weapons. What we get mostly are incoherent screams of outrage
and furious references to “the liberal agenda.” When I listen to gun advocates
and NRA brass on this subject, I get an image of a little kid doing a tantrum
in the dirt, rolling around with his hands plastered over his ears.
No! No!
No! No!
Also,
La-la-la-la, I can’t HEAR you, can’t HEAR you, can’t HEAR
you
!

What they can’t hear — because they don’t want to — is that
the restriction of heavy weaponry works, possibly because most of these yo-yos
are so dismally screwed up they probably need a map to put their pants on in
the morning. James Holmes may have
thought
he was the Joker, but he
really wasn’t; he was a dope with a few very large screws loose in his thinking
machinery. Most of them are.

Here’s a dope for you: Martin Bryant, of Port Arthur, in
Tasmania. On April 28, 1996, he went on a spree with an AR-15 he purchased
through a newspaper ad — easy-peasy. This happy asshole mowed down over a dozen
in a crowded café, moved on to a gift shop where he killed some more, then
moseyed to a parking garage where he killed yet more. The final tally was
thirty-five dead and twenty-three wounded. He called his spree “lots of fun,”
and in court laughed wildly when the judge read out the charges and intoned the
names of the dead. He is now serving 1,035 years in Ridson Prison, and that
should probably be enough. For him, at least. Maybe still not quite enough for
the grieving relatives of the dead and the maimed.

For Australia, though, it
was
enough. The government
either banned or restricted automatic weapons (as well as pump shotguns of the
sort Eric Harris used at Columbine). As for those autos already out there, the
government authorized a huge buyback that eventually netted 600,000 weapons. It
amounted to about twenty percent of the country’s private firepower. Since the
Bryant killings and the resulting tough gun laws, homicides by firearm have
declined almost 60 percent in Australia. The guns-for-everyone advocates hate
that statistic, and dispute it, but as Bill Clinton likes to say, it’s not
opinion. It’s arithmetic, honey.

In the end, this sort of ban can only be accomplished in one
way, and that’s if gun advocates get behind it. I can hear people laughing and
saying pigs will whistle and horses will fly before that happens, but hey, I’m
an optimist. If enough American gun-owners urge Congress to do the right thing,
and insist the NRA climb aboard, the results might surprise you. Gun owners
aren’t dragons, and they don’t have to practice Gerald Ford two-mindedness,
simultaneously mourning the victims and denying the role speed-shooters play in
these tragedies, forever.

I didn’t pull
Rage
from publication because the law
demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law
couldn’t
demand it. I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and
that made it the responsible thing to do. Assault weapons will remain readily
available to crazy people until the powerful pro-gun forces in this country
decide to do a similar turnaround. They must accept responsibility, recognizing
that responsibility is not the same as
culpability
. They need to say,
“We support these measures not because the law demands we support them, but
because it’s the sensible thing.”

Until that happens, shooting sprees will continue. We will
see the BREAKING NEWS chyrons, the blurry cellphone videos of running people,
the tearful relatives, the rolling hearses. We will also see, time and time and
time again, how easy it is for the crazies among us to get their hands on
portable and efficient weapons of mass destruction.

Because, boys and girls, that’s how it shakes out.

Shortly after I finished this piece, a New Mexico teenager
gunned down his parents and three younger siblings. He intended to take the
AR-15 he found in his parents’ closet to a nearby Walmart and shoot people
until “eventually killed while exchanging gunfire with law enforcement.” (His
statement.) A friend talked him out of that part.

About eighty people die of gunshot wounds in America every
day.