‘Back in the day’ are unreliable memories
Amazingly, as we get older we seem to find ourselves surrounded by more and more old people. Where did they all come from? And how did we all get so cranky? And while it’s a cliché, many of us old folks do start too many sentences with, “When I was your age ...” or “Back in the day we ...” That’s when the whippersnappers roll their eyes, sip their kombucha and go back to social media.
Because the last thing anybody wants to hear is how things were better back in the day, and that of course, things should never have to change. Take child car seats, for example. Sure, “back in the day” you may not have ridden in a car seat. Yet here you are, alive and ready to report that you survived childhood just fine without one. So there big government, get off our backs!
Cool story, bro. But in fact, thousands of children over the years did die without car restraints and just because you didn’t doesn’t prove that car seats are unnecessary. For good reason seat belts are now standard and kids car seats are required. In fact, there are a lot of things we did back in the day that we just don’t do anymore. Why? Because we grew up, realized it was actually dangerous or just wasn’t a good idea, and we moved on.
We stopped putting asbestos into homes after we realized how sick it made us. Suntans? Once we learned that deep dark tans were an indicator of cancer, millions of people decided that it simply made more sense to use sunscreen. Remember the antiseptic Mercurochrome? Your mom put it on every scrape and cut ... right until people discovered the dangers of mercury poisoning.
See, “back in the day” is littered with things that might have made sense then, but upon further study and analysis, we just don’t do anymore. Rose-tinted memories of the good old days make us want to believe that the world should always be fixed in amber from generation to generation. But far more often we look into the mirror and realize, it’s time to put away childish things and recognize that what was OK before, no longer is. And guns in America should be the next thing we recognize as over.
Sure, back in the day daddy took you out to hunt squirrels and blast tin cans in the woods like his daddy did before him. Today’s collective fetish for guns however, has metastasized into a crisis that represents a real danger to society, and it’s time for us to grow up and recognize that. Sorry, but your family firearms fantasy and deliberate misrepresentation of the Second Amendment doesn’t mean we have to accept that it’s a god-given right for any American at any time to have complete and unfettered access to any gun. Two weeks ago I wrote that nearly as many Americans were murdered in school shootings the last three years as American servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That one statistic alone should shock and appall, but horrifyingly it doesn’t. According to the Small Arms Survey, there are 393 million guns in the United States, more than one for every living American. And these privately owned guns are used to indiscriminately kill their owners and random innocents far more than they are used for self-defense.
So why are we OK with this? Is it because we continue to accept that unfettered gun ownership is an “American way of life,” or somehow indicative of “our heritage.” Unfortunately yes, we do, and that’s what has to change, because we do have the capacity for outrage when we want to.
Like car deaths. Nobody complains about car seats or seat belts anymore. Or disease. We are appalled by a totally preventable outbreak of measles, and most sensible people consider the antivaxers to be narcissistic pariahs, not American heroes. As a nation we are demanding action over a killer opioid crisis that atomizes families both wealthy and poor. But staggeringly still, we romanticize guns even when it’s a growing bane on society that results in more dead American children than nearly all other recorded causes combined. It’s time to be over guns.