I suspect virtually every aspect of the gun control issue has been voiced many times over but there are a couple of things worth pointing out that are important.
This week the Senate will vote (perhaps) on some measures but it seems likely that nothing of note will pass. While public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favor of mandatory background checks and limited magazine size, it seems problematic that even this will pass.
I have read that even the majority of NRA members do not support the reactionary position of Wayne LaPierre and his minions. The problem is vastly complex and entirely too much attention has been focused on details. The citizenry want something done; the opposition insists that any restrictive measures will not address the fundamental issue. Both sides are right.
The issue goes far beyond guns; it has to do with our culture of violence. We obviously love it. The next time you look at a best seller list, see how many books are centered on a violent theme. In your next visit to the multiplex theater while enduring the six previews “Suitable for All Audiences” count the number of bullets fired, cars crashed, explosions generated, and threats of mayhem or mass destruction. If we didn’t love that sort of thing there would be no profit motive to continue to produce them.
Violence takes a quantum leap to reality when it strikes close to home. Who doesn’t still gasp in horror at the destruction of the World Trade Center? We are speechless with sadness at the Virginia Tech massacre, the Aurora, CO movie killings, and the Newtown children’s murders. Since that day in just last December, there have been more than 2000 gun deaths in this country, yet the outcry to change the laws (recognizing that it may be little more than a window dressing) has fallen largely silent in the legislative halls.
To their immense credit that has not been true in Colorado or Connecticut. For people in the communities where the violence took place there is still the empty place at the dinner table, the playground with 20 idle swings. Laws are being written in those states that recognize reality cannot be ignored. It is at least a start.
If you have a quarrel with the power of violence in our culture, consider that there are more black men in prison today than there were black men in slavery in 1860. We incarcerate more men and women than any other country and the great majority of them are black, poor, or in most cases, both.
We still sanction capital punishment, the only major nation in the Western Hemisphere that does so. Sadly, Texas and Virginia lead the list in the number of executions, many of which have been shown to be erroneous in judgment after the fact. What ever happened to the Constitutional provision about “cruel and unusual punishment?”
In my experience in teaching in prison the vast majority of inmates are there because of drug problems, sometimes associated with violence. Extreme sentences are handed down for relatively minor drug offenses. Crimes should be punished but if punitive measures were corrective, the prison population would be shrinking, not exploding. The cost of maintaining a prisoner is estimated to be $45,000 a year. What if just half that money could be directed toward the root causes of violent crime, against poverty and all the problems attendant to the hopelessness it breeds? It is at that point that everyone throws in the towel. It’s too complicated a problem so let’s just go make the movies, produce the TV shows and write the violent books where everyone knows it’s not real.
The problem is that it can become real in the blink of an eye and then another life becomes a statistic.
Sociologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and law enforcement can identify the problems but unless the mass of citizens get behind a multidisciplinary approach that hopes to change things in the next 100 years, we are going to self-destruct. The only victor will be our love of violence that defeated common sense.
Let’s hope that the President’s words, “If we don’t approach this problem, then shame on us!” will embolden other lawmakers to follow those in Connecticut and Colorado. If it doesn’t then we should remember that the ballot is more powerful than the bullet. The NRA leadership may have more bullets and we have more ballots.
– Hayden Hollingsworth