You know all about Nashville. I'm talking, of course, about the assassinations of three elementary school students, and three adults, one of whom was reportedly the father of seven children. And about the urging of three state legislators for tighter gun laws, and how two of the legislators (the 20-something African-American ones) were thrown out of the state legislature for urging action, but the 60-something Caucasian woman who made the same plea was not thrown out of the legislature, and suggested that the reason her two colleagues were thrown out, and she wasn't, had something to do with the color of their skin.
Today, I heard a radio story about some country singing woman whose name I didn't recognize and don't remember, who was asked to sing a song in the context of memorializing this unimaginable tragedy. She chose Bob Dylan's "Tears of Rage," and she said there were rules against her making this too political, for example. (That's right. It was just an unfortunate event, and it had nothing to do with politics.) As it turned out, this woman had children who were in school in the same neighborhood where this slaughter happened, but not at that school. All she knew at first was in what area this mass murder took place, and she was most certainly pissing her pants worrying about her children. She soon enough learned that the tragedy was not personally hers, but even so, she said she had to work hard to control her emotions singing the song she chose.
The mind-blowing thing, or among the mind-blowing things, was that this woman -- the one whose children were, luckily for her, not murdered at school -- said she'd grown up around guns, had one, and was not arguing that people shouldn't have guns. (I wonder to what extent her luck influenced her not to get too extreme about this.)
It was a few, or perhaps several, years ago that I heard another radio story about guns, and as I recall, that one, too, came from Tennessee. It was about a guy who had also grown up around guns, and had been comfortable with them, and using them, for target practice and shooting things like rabbits. But he later became a medical doctor, and he might have been an emergency room specialist. He started keeping statistics, and he calculated that for every gun-related ER visit that happened for a "good" reason (someone gets shot committing a crime, for example), there were 42 gun-related ER visits that happened for a "bad" reason (accidental discharge with injury, suicide attempt, crime of disturbed passion, young kid who finds, and discharges, gun that was supposed to have been locked up somewhere, etc). This doctor, unlike the lucky country singer, changed his mind about guns in civilian hands. (Well, somebody's got their head screwed on in the right direction.)
I recently talked about Michael Moore, who had been a decorated marksman in his younger days, and who made a documentary about the "Columbine" problem. He wound up frankly concluding that there's something very wrong with Americans, and it's evidenced by our frenzy to kill each other with guns. His ultimate thesis was that we're terrified. If you know a worse idea than giving someone who's practically paralyzed with fear, or possibly even paranoid, a loaded gun, I'd be curious to know what that even worse idea is.
At what point do we look back over how things have been going, and realize we made a mistake? And it's literally killing us. I know some people will mindlessly and reflexly talk about the "Second Amendment," but there is no "Second Amendment." We have functionally made it impotent, useless, and we've repealed it by making illegal all the "Arms" we would need to carry out the clearly and explicitly stated intention and meaning of the "Second Amendment."
Should we wait for more random groups of adults to be assassinated with guns in civilian hands? How about more children in school? It seems as if something ought to get us to recognize and correct our massively destructive mistake. How about if it was your kid, and not just someone else's? Would that do it?
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