WHEN IS ENOUGH, ENOUGH?

NOVEMBER 23, 2022 – Okay, okay,  okay! What will it take our country—what will it take US—to address gun violence effectively? When will the bloodshed, the tragedy, the irrationality of gun violence in America drive us to say “Enough!” and demand of ourselves and our leaders (social, business, political, cultural) an end this public health crisis?

After 9-11, decades after all the Reds where chased away from “under every bed,” Americans feared a new enemy: Islamic terrorists. I remember my wife commenting that if terrorists really wanted to scare the bejesus out of us, they’d hit us in our bars, in our schools, in our shopping malls—everyday places in Anytown, USA. As it turns out, she was exactly right—about the terror in everyday places.

For my wife and me—and our neighbors—those “everyday places” now include our backyards, as well as our front yards. Just two weeks ago, at 6:00 p.m., while I was unloading my car in the driveway, I heard gunshots close by. Five in quick succession—pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. They sounded as though they’d been fired in our alley, right around the corner of our driveway. Neighbors heard them, as well, and called the police—who could do little but collect the casings. Another neighbor reported having seen the shots being fired from a white SUV that blew the stop sign at an intersection 60 feet from the end of our alley. No arrests have been made, and none is expected.

All of us now face a moral and civic imperative. Our very lives are quite randomly on the line.

I fear that gun control as proposed (even around the margins)—and rejected—is a train that left the station about 200 million firearms ago. If in decades past we stood a chance of clamping down on the proliferation of guns and ammunition, we’re now faced with a problem so horrendous, so complicated, so ubiquitous, so out of control that we face few practicable ways to bring it under control without a massive, costly, “all hands on deck” effort. Yet, isn’t this ‘Mrca, the land where we pride ourselves in achieving the improbable and the impossible?

Sure, a finger connected to a brain is what pulls a trigger that fires a gun or empties the magazine of an assault rifle. Of course, we must adopt a multi-pronged approach to gun violence; an approach that takes into account and addresses crime, poverty, dark corners of social media, mental illness and disorders, domestic abuse, prevention, and gun safety, but why, after each shooting, do those opposed to gun control argue that “It’s not about the guns”? To dismiss the elephant in the room is no more rational than to assert that motor vehicle fatalities “aren’t about motor vehicles.” Of course they are, which is why we have speed limits, seatbelt laws, rules of the road, mandatory vehicle safety features, and licensing requirements. Until we take steering wheels out of human hands, none of these restrictions will eliminate fatalities, but little imagination is required to understand where we’d be with no or limited controls.

It’s high time for Second Amendment champions to hang up their cowboy hats and put on their big-boy pants. Until they do, we’ll all be roaming the Wild West—dangerously exposed.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson