I’m just going to riff on this for a bit and see if I reach any conclusions. Let’s start, as my friend Brian suggests, with more than one legally owned firearm for every man woman and child in the US. In other words, we can’t make something immediately illegal tomorrow that was legal yesterday.
The big news this week is that kids are now leading the fight for common-sense gun laws and (as heard on the BBC yesterday) companies are now starting to dissociate themselves from the National Rifle Association. Firms that formerly gave discounts to NRA members are no longer doing so. That’s a huge step in the right direction – the NRA brand has never been this toxic. For decades, Wayne LaPierre and his cold-dead-hands predecessors have fought for money to buy off legislators so that it’s always easy to get guns, no matter what your criminal background. Of course, state by state, your mileage may vary. And once you commit a crime with a gun, in many states including Florida, these stand-your-ground laws have made it more possible to get off if you happen to be white or white-ish. I’m looking at you, George Zimmerman. (NRA-written statutes enacted in Florida in 2005 and in two dozen other states made it impossible to arrest Zimmerman because he claimed self-defense. In addition, jury instructions made it impossible for them to convict even though Zimmerman stalked Martin and was told by the cops to back down and not confront the teenager.)
Martin had just turned 17 at the time and was killed six years ago this week (26 February, 2012).
Of course, there are racist aspects to how the various laws regarding gun ownership and use are treated. Note the cold-blooded murder of Philando Castile, a black Minneapolis school employee who noted to the officer at a traffic stop that he had a concealed carry permit. Within twenty seconds of reaching for his ID had five bullets fired into him. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, despite dashcam footage from the cop car and Castile’s death livestreamed by his girlfriend just after the shots were fired. Arming school employees is all well and good, I suppose, but I can’t (as others who have pointed to the Castile case in the wake of the Florida massacre two weeks ago) see such things working out equally for all concerned. I tried to read the Wikipedia article on Castile’s murder and couldn’t stomach the heartlessness of the cop, of the jury, of the system.
And lets not lose sight of the domestic terror aspect of this latest case. Who trained N.C. (let’s stop naming the animals who do this stuff, please) to carry out his massacre? Had it been a Black or Muslim organization, they would have been hounded out of the woodwork so quickly heads would be spinning. As it stands, he was raised by a member of Republic of Florida, a white supremacist group. The ROF leader who claimed Cruz trained with them has since walked that back.
There’s also the speech by Florida AG Pam Bondi in the direct aftermath of the shooting. I recognize that there was a certain pressure to say something, but for crying out loud, couldn’t she have talked about something other than what the state of Florida was going to pay for? When someone carelessly breaks something precious and irreplaceable, the last thing you want to hear is that person saying they’ll pay for it. (Are Florida Governor Rick Scott and Bondi shills for the NRA in the same way Florida Senator Ted Cruz is ($77,000 in the 2012 election cycle alone)? I’m not sure. Yes, linking to a tangentially related article like that is shitty and shoddy journalism.) But what we’re not hearing from any of these people in so-called leadership positions is how to prevent these things.
The same Brian I quote at the top shared the following response to calls the current arguments:
Things a Constitutional amendment banning firearms will not fix:
An absence of compassion for fellow citizens.
An absence of value of lives of fellow citizens.
An absence of value in the success of others.
An absence of value in the health of others.
An absence of value in the welfare of others.
An absence of value in the education of others.
The patriarchy.
Toxic masculinity.
Radical conservationism.
Selfishness.
Dangerous nationalism.
Xenophobia.
Homophobia (not a phobia, you’re just an asshole).
Institutionalized racism.
General racism.
Intentional incarceration of minorities to deny their communities of viable male role models, at a critical mass, to actively prevent the establishment of viable successful family models.
Redlining.
Predatory lending.
Criminalization of poverty.
Criminalization of homelessness.
Criminalization of addiction.
And and infinite list of other things.
Our culture is diseased, broken, and rotting, but by all means, keep overlooking that, and keep focusing on the end-result.
There are a lot of one-liners out there in response to these latest deaths – If teachers should be armed, presidents should be required to read is one. Another compares the gun rights supporter (and presumed Republican) suggesting that those who don’t know the difference between certain kinds of firearms shouldn’t legislate from a position of ignorance, to which the gun rights opponent (and presumed liberal) responds: Please draw and explain the female reproductive system.
However, this evinces the kind of whataboutism that makes political discussion today such a bloody fraught proposition. The gist is that occasionally white people are refreshed in the fears for themselves and their children that POCs live under all the expletivedeleted time. This is something that happened in Florida this month – nice suburban white high school terrorized by a young man with a gun irrationally marching through what should have been a safe space to learn and grow. Black Americans going about their daily business should expect and experience not being harassed or killed without probable cause, right? And I’m engaging in a variation of the same whataboutism, I suppose. A recent parallel is the Netflix dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Again, not an original though on my part, but in Atwoods’ vision of the future, white women are treated the same way black women have been treated in America for centuries. I’m sure I’m not the only one to draw this comparison between Atwood’s fiction and the news treatment of our various tragedies. This situation is wrapped up in a lot of other American situations including the school to prison pipeline, Riker’s Island, and the stop-and-frisk policies all over the country.
As noted, I’m riffing. There are no conclusions here, just frustration.
Joe Jots 