Impotent Rage

The Knotted Gun

April 20, 1999 dawned bright and sunny in Denver, Colorado -- a typically bucolic spring morning in the foothills of the Rockies. The air was crisp, the sky was clear, and traffic was light at that early hour as I drove to the paper.

The euphoric mood I was in would end abruptly at a little past 11:00 AM as word began to filter in that there was a shooting rampage at Columbine High School.

Dead: 13. Wounded: 21.

Since that spring day 13 years ago, I've had more than one occasion to look back and shed tears -- 29 times to be exact. 

-- 30 mass shootings total

-- 256 killed 

-- 242 wounded

One-third of these slaughters -- 10 of them -- have occurred during this past year alone. Total murdered in 2012: 73.*

I will readily confess to burying myself in the unspeakable horror that is the Sandy Hook massacre. Maybe I didn't cry enough after Columbine, or Virginia Tech or Fort Hood -- or after all the other massacres in Any Town, U.S.A. Take your pick. Somewhere along the way -- I don't know when or where exactly -- tears of sorrow turned into tears of rage, impotent though they may be..

The acerbic Canadian journalist Neil Macdonald would be correct if he found me among the Americans who are "wallowing" -- part of the "giant emotional sponge" -- except I don't think I'm living under any kind of delusion. On the contrary, I believe very firmly that this country is screwed and the serial rapist is and has been the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Yet another "national discussion" about guns is under way here, and it's so anti-rational, so politically cowardly, so …unbearably stupid that you have to wonder how a nation that has enlightened the world in so many other ways could wallow in this kind of delusion.

Twenty children are dead, and journalists and politicians have assumed those breathy, semi-hushed tones that have become so much the norm in covering tragedies.

Macdonald bashes pundits, politicians, the media, the "child-killing lobby" and the "new normal" -- lunacy -- with biting precision. Take Utah Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz who proclaimed that mental health issues are the cause of these kinds of incidents: "I am a concealed carry permit holder. I own a Glock 23, I've got a shotgun, I'm not the person you need to worry about."

Well, sorry, congressman, but you are certainly one of them, at least in my (admittedly Canadian) book.

If I understand properly, you live in an urban area, and carry around a .40-calibre pistol with up to 17 bullets in the magazine, capable of firing up to five a second, just like one of the pistols the Connecticut shooter toted.

In other words, you pack the means to kill more than a dozen people in moments if you choose, and we just have to trust you to be sensible and hold your temper.

Chaffetz's position is, basically, the core of the pro-gun message in this country: The destructive power of the weapon is not the issue. It is all about personal responsibility. And personal freedom.

The logic is terrifying. You could extend it to hand grenades or flame-throwers. Some people here do. (Though grenades are actually illegal here).

Flame-throwers don’t incinerate people, people incinerate people, to paraphrase a favorite gun-lobby aphorism.

Macdonald had more prescience than he might have realized when he wrote his article.

But just watch. Soon enough will come the talk about how the Newtown school shooting just underlines the need for even more ordinary Americans to arm themselves in self-defence.

And the weird, horrible reality here is that there is some truth to that. The NRA has helped ensure it.

There are currently about 300 million guns in this country, and gun laws are looser every year. The high courts have slapped down states that have tried to restrict gun use.

It is now quite normal to see people carrying pistols on their hips in shops and restaurants. Plenty more carry concealed weapons.

And many of these are criminals. Police are overwhelmed.

Macdonald describes several incidences when he was growing up on a farm where his father's bolt-action rifle came in handy, including shooting a rabid dog and threatening some hoodlums in the middle of the night who were in their lane. And then there was that neighbor on a nearby farm who was murdered and the closest police station was an hour's drive from their road.

But my father never owned a Bushmaster. Or an Uzi. Or a sniper rifle. Or a flame-thrower.

What's taken hold here in America is lunacy.

And no where was that lunacy more evident than when Public Enemy Number One went before the cameras on Friday, December 21, 2012 to hold a press conference that wasn't. The NRA's Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre declared before all the world -- at least the part which hadn't ended, which was all of it -- that what was needed was a national database of the mentally ill.

Well, glory be, I have a suggestion for who should have top billing on that list -- just in case some of the sane among us temporarily lose their sanity.

. . . . The rest has been deleted. One should never write anything when they're spittin' angry, or so I've been told.

---------
*Statistics compiled from Think Progress and includes the latest deaths from a shooting that occurred while LaPierre was giving his press conference. My 2012 figures differ from those in Macdonald's article. He doesn't provide a link and I relied on a timeline which, under the best of circumstances, aren't always 100 percent accurate.