I tried hard to keep politics out of these writings, and least this time, it’s only tangential. I hope my readers aren’t offended, but here goes.
Failure to connect the dots, to make connections where they appear. Failure to exercise judgement. Those are the messages from the news this past month. On the front page of the newspaper in early September, a headline jumped out at me: “Gun control foes push to repeal restrictions.” (Eagle-Tribune, 9/9). According to the article, the leader of the effort to put a repeal of the recently expanded gun regulations in Massachusetts on a referendum ballot is the owner of what we can assume is a weapons dealer, Cape Cod Gun Works. Juxtaposed are twin articles on page four. One documents the mother’s concerns about the latest school shooter, a fourteen-year-old in Winder, Georgia, who killed two teachers and two students in a shooting rampage. And right below that, police in Kentucky were looking for a sniper that shot, apparently at random, motorists from a bluff overlooking a highway there. Nine vehicles were hit and five people injured, thankfully nobody fatally. Both shootings involved AR-15, semiautomatic weapons of the sort that Massachusetts’ new regulations aim to restrict or remove.
Says the gun business owner and advocate Toby Leary, “A lot of businesses and jobs are at stake.” Further, he states, “The effects of this law on businesses will be catastrophic. Jobs will be lost. Businesses and livelihoods will be lost.” Perhaps that is true, because, as Mr. Leary estimates, the banning of the regulated weapons will affect up to half of his sales. Yes, that is regrettable. So, too, however are the deaths of innocent people when those same weapons fall into the hands of unstable people, people with emotional, mental health issues. Like a 14-year-old receiving an AR-15 as a Christmas present from his father, when the family from his grandparents on down knew he was experiencing distress. Or a 20-year-old climbs onto a rooftop and starts shooting at a presidential candidate. No doubt, as the investigation into the Kentucky shooting unfolds, and the shooter is caught, the revelations of mental health issues – of anger, frustration, perhaps depression will emerge. Communications will be found – either on social media, on connections to extreme and dangerous websites, on texts or emails. All pointing to and leading up to the event.
There will, of course, be lots of finger-pointing and accusations. Somebody should have noticed. Somebody should have seen the signs and stepped in. It will include the families, but as well school personnel, law enforcement, somebody should have stopped them. But that nagging question always pops up. Can anything really be done until the shooting actually happens? Can we as society really stop this sort of thing from happening? Former President Donald Trump, recently a target of gun violence, remarked to a National Rifle Association rally in 2023 that this “isn’t a gun problem.” His perspective may have changed of late, although his running mate, J. D. Vance stated at the time, right after the Georgia shooting that shootings like the one in Georgia are “an unfortunate “fact of life.” He suggested that schools are, in his words, “soft targets”, and the solution is beefed up security. What exactly would that mean, and worse, what would it look like? Vice President Kamala Harris offered a different view. She paused in her campaign remarks to say that, in visiting schools of late, she asked how many students had experienced or been involved in shooter preparation drills, and was stunned to see every student hand in the room go up. I’ve been retired for eight years now, but when I was teaching, we had regular meetings about safety and drilled appropriate responses. Shooter response drills have replaced fire drills as the top safety priority in schools. Said the Vice President, in contrast to Mr. Vance, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” No, it doesn’t, or it shouldn’t.
As I’ve said before, we do have some freedoms written into the Constitution, among them the right to bear arms. OK. We also have the right to free speech, but that has legislative and court-sanctioned restrictions. One has the right to drive a car, but that has restrictions and regulations built in. We have to understand that much of what was included in the Constitution in the 18th century has been modified, restricted, or removed as it becomes outdated or no longer applies. Like the right to own slaves, who counts as 3/5 of a person, or who can vote.
This may come as a surprise to no one, but I reject the suggestions of the former president that this “isn’t a gun problem.” It most assuredly is. The availability and access to highly dangerous, high-speed weaponry is a crucial part of the problem, and we can no longer pretend it isn’t. Whether it is adults with histories of mental illness acquiring them, or misguided parents providing them as Christmas gifts, we can no longer rely on the discretion of family members or manufacturers and vendors to do the screening that will provide some measure of security in our social environment of schools, shopping malls, movie theatres, and bowling alleys. We literally have to stop making many of these weapons available to anyone but the military. Yes, they can be made for the military, for specialized law enforcement, or, as the Constitution clarifies, “in militia.” For the rest of us, no. And if, as Mr. Leary alleges, some businesses will suffer and some jobs lost, well, that will be, to quote Senator Vance, “an unfortunate fact of life.” To keep going as we have is like saying that the police need to stop arresting thieves and burglars, or jobs will be lost in the crime sector economy.
Gun ownership does not need to be banned altogether, as gun advocates tell us will be the “slippery slope” of restriction and regulation. I grew up in a rural area of southwestern New Hampshire, where hunting was a way of life, and that doesn’t need to be sacrificed. But gun safety was an essential part of that. As the Vice President mentioned, she is a gun owner, and as former prosecutor, is trained to use appropriate firearms. So too is her running mate, former military and a hunter. That’s not the problem. The problem is access to certain types of weapons designed for military that are now available to the public. And further, to an autistic teenager in Newtown, Connecticut, living in a houseful of unsecured, high-powered weapons. Or, in some states, the ability for anyone 18 years old to purchase weapons and carry them about as they would a cellphone, without checks, precautions, or restrictions. We are well past the time that we can say that all types of modern weapons can remain unfettered in the market place without context and free of regulation because of what Mr. Leary and his organization consider “lost business”. Massachusetts, with one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country, could well offer its new regulations as a model, and the United States can join the rest of the industrialized world in effectively preventing rampant gun violence.
I'm Thinking...No! 